Michael Aufmuth is the author behind Dealer Reinsurance. He has worked in automotive retail since 1997, spent most of a decade and a half building and running dealership finance departments, and now works on F&I products, training, and dealer participation programs as co-founder of Elite FI Partners. The articles and tools here come from that day-to-day work.
Michael Aufmuth started in automotive retail in 1997, in his family’s dealerships in Tucson. Over the years that followed he worked across the store: sales, sales management, finance, and general management. That range matters here, because dealer reinsurance sits at the intersection of the F&I office and the broader economics of the store, and it is hard to explain one without having worked in the other.
He spent roughly thirteen years focused primarily on building and running dealership finance departments. Day to day, that meant product menus, lender and provider relationships, compliance, and the numbers behind F&I performance. It is that hands-on finance-office work, rather than a theoretical view, that informs how the structures, fees, and reporting are described on this site.
Michael also has a background in computer science and developed dealership software to automate deal structuring and finance-office workflows. That habit of breaking a process down until it can be modeled is part of why this site leans on plain explanations, comparison tables, and calculators rather than sales language.
He later moved to the provider and agency side of the automotive business. In 2019, Michael and Emilia Aufmuth founded Elite FI Partners. His current work focuses on F&I products, finance-manager training, dealership support, and dealer participation (reinsurance) programs across automotive, powersports, RV, and marine dealers. That practical, ongoing work is the source of the educational material published here.
On Dealer Reinsurance, Michael writes about the topics he works in directly:
Michael’s experience is practical and F&I-focused. He is not an attorney, accountant, tax adviser, actuary, or investment professional, and nothing he writes here is legal, tax, accounting, actuarial, or investment advice. Reinsurance decisions involve considerations that vary by dealership, state, and time, and they should be reviewed with your own qualified professionals on your dealership’s real numbers.
Michael co-founded and works at Elite FI Partners, which offers F&I products, training, and dealer participation program assistance. That is a commercial relationship, and it is disclosed openly. This site is kept education-first; how that separation works is described in our Editorial Standards and Methodology.