Over the years General Motors dealers have been able to count on GMAC, the lending company owned in part by GM, to provide loans to car buyers at their dealerships.

Before the economy started its nosedive, GMAC-originated loans provided financing for almost half of GM car buyers. But now that the company is concerned about stability, GMAC is cutting back on who it will give loans to. In a letter dated Oct. 13, it announced to all GM dealers that it would no longer make vehicle loans for anyone with a credit score below 700, this coming on the heels of previous cuts which have already cost GM 10,000 buyers a month.

Any move to tighten up credit restrictions by a major corporation will affect parties in different ways; we are going to look at how it will affect the major players below.

• GMAC
• Consumers
• Dealers
• Banks and Credit Unions

If you've been reading WalletPop for any amount of time, you'll have picked up on my desire to purchase a house. To the luck of many, our local real estate market hasn't had quite the downward correction that many markets have experienced, leaving many homes outside our price range. This has led my wife and I to consider picking up a foreclosed home, of which there is no shortage despite the otherwise healthy market. As I looked closer at buying foreclosures it became evident that it isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially for first time home buyers.

Tom Barlow a fellow WalletPop blogger recently called out Flipping foreclosures as overrated and backed up his claim with some daunting information about foreclosures. Well it appears Tom was ahead of the curve, and now Eric Tyson, the real estate expert behind "Home Buying for Dummies" met up with CNN to deliver more advice on just what it means to buy a foreclosure. Perhaps the most important information I got was to be prepared to walk away from a house if the bidding heats up. Unfortunately the buyer's remorse for an overpriced foreclosure is greater than what you felt after dropping 2 grand on a vacuum sealed hotdog from the 2006 Super Bowl!

Browsing through the "automotive" section of my local newspaper the other day, I saw a big ad for a dealership offering "0% Financing!" on all new cars -- with an asterisk. Of course, there was an asterisk with the usual boilerplate about "credit approval required" but there was also something more interesting: a disclosure that the 0% financing deal was "in lieu of manufacturer's rebate."

Now hold on. If you have to forgo a $4 thousand rebate in order to get "0% financing", that's not 0% financing! That's $4 thousand dollar financing.

And then of course, there's the whole issue of buying a new car and the myth of 0% financing in general. As Dave Ramsey wrote in Total Money Makeover:

Myth: You can get a good deal on a new car at 0 percent interest.

Truth: A new car loses 60% of its value in the first four year; that isn't 0%.

Be extremely wary of bold-faced gimmicks in size-64 fonts followed by 5 exclamation points. For more tips on how to avoid getting taken to the cleaners next time you buy a car, check out this video.