I am at a crossroads in my life, I am receiving a huge buyout from my former employer, after tax around 64k, I have a horrible 25% interest rate loan thru Drive Financial on a Jeep, the loan is over a year old now never paid late, and the balance is about 19K.....what should I do? buy the car? refinance? trade down? all of which I am open to....PLEASE CHIME IN

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I'd definitely pay off the loan immediately. There's no reason to pay another day's interest at 25%. Now you can keep the Jeep or if you want to "trade down", try to make a private sale and get more money than you would trading it in. Then buy the lesser car for cash.

Keep "full" insurance on all your cars even though you don't have to because there's no loan on them.

how much shy of two years reporting to file is this loan?

I took out the loan in June 07 so were looking at another 8 months til two years

Depending on how the rest of your file looks... you might want to triple up on pmts for a while to age that acct nicely. Chances are your file is not too pretty based on that interest rate. I would be tempted to say get rid of that monster, but it could help you also.

What are your goals? Do you want to get out of debt or do you want to build up your file?

And your overall goal that you wish to accomplish?