Ummm..what are you saying?

 

This will defeat the purpose of finacing your car if you change the car after 5 years of ownership.

The last car I financed was my 99 Accord which I still have. It has been paid off since 2003 and has paid for it self 10 times over. I finance this car with the intention of keeping it for at least 8 years. Maintenance is manageble and sips gas, a major factor in my decision the purchase it.

The G on the other hand was a different story I leased my G simply because I have no intention of paying the upkeep after the warranty expires. And as we all know the G is no stranger to repaid work. I have been lucky with my G so far no major repair work and even if I did have issues it was still covered under warranty. To be honest i cannot wait to get rid of the G. It's been a good car but it's time to move on. With 1 year left in my lease and the condition of the car right now I would have no problem in trading in the car and getting top dollar for it.

 

This is another misconception on a lease. DO NOT PAY EXTRA for extra miles that you incure during your leasing period. As long as you are getting another car from the dealer you DO NOT HAVE TO PAY EXTRA. I have done this personally and have not incured any penalty in excess miles. Of course trade the car in before the lease is over. This means it has to be at least 6 months before the lease is up and not 2 months before you return the car.

 

This is true if you only go over by a couple of thousand. If I took a standard 2 year lease at 15000 miles per year. I would be 20,000 miles over my lease. I dont care how great you think you dealer is no one will waive those fees. At 6 months early I would still be about 10,000 miles over.

 

I was a good 40k + miles over on one of my leases and didn't pay a single cent over mileage. But hey if you want to pay for your mileage up front that's all up to you.

 

I like to keep my cars for three years and three months and two days so a lease doesn't make sense for me. I either have to return the car earlier than I want or pay for an extra nine months I don't want.

So I buy instead of lease and sell the car exactly when I want to sell it, on my terms and with the exact number of miles I wanted to drive.

It's easy to make buying better than leasing from the money side too. If you're looking at a three year lease, buy the car instead and keep it an extra six months. You'll beat even the best lease deal anyone has ever gotten. So instead of changing cars every 3 years, buy and change out every 3.5 or 4.5 or whatever.

 

You can sell or trade “leased” car whenever you want, just like when you had financed, you can also purchase your leased car when the term is up as well, so I don’t quite understand that statement.

Are you getting that extra 6 months for free when you finance rather than leasing? NO, so when you add that 6 extra payment and compare it to the lease, you might not beat the lease deal! Besides, you can lease it for 36/39/42 months, longer the term? lower the payment, just like when you financed.

 

If you trade it in before term is up? there is no overage charge on the miles, it might lower the value of car if it has higer than normal miles but same goes for financed car as well tho.

 

Exactly!

 

It is much less hassle to sell a financed car without getting burned since the contract is much simpler. I also find it hard believe that you can get out of a lease early without paying some sort of a penalty. I know several posters have made this claim, but it has never been explained in a way that makes sense. Someone is paying the early termination fee. The transactions are complex enough that the fee can be hidden in lots of places.

Now if someone posts a story where they leased a G35 and negotiated a trade in for a M3 by first fixing the price of the M3 then working on the trade-in value of the G, I might be impressed. But so far it's stories of I traded a G35 for another G35 and got a great deal and didn't pay early termination fees. I just wonder if you got a good deal but not a great deal.

Also, I have never ever ever heard anyone anywhere say buying out your lease make sense from a money standpoint. That isn't to say people who do it are dumb, it's better than buying yet another brand new car. Just don't think you made out better leasing then buying out verses buying in the beginning.

There is very little depreciation in those extra 6 months compared to the first 6 months for a new car. So yes, I will beat the lease if I buy and hold onto the car 6 months longer than the lease. So instead of 7 new cars on a 3 year lease over 21 years, you only buy 6 during the same period. Who knows, maybe you find one you like and hold it for 5 or you buy a 2003 G35 and decide to hold out for the 2008 coupe instead of facing the hard do I lease for 1 year question.

 

for me a lease made sense. I own a business, I lease the car and the business pays the lease. I don't worry, because I get to drive a new car every three years. also if you look at it this way, a person buys a car, and finances it for 5 years, but usually gets red of it before it is paid up. you buy the car, pay x amount, the trade it in, usually for a loss, less than what you owe, you lose money every time. lease is much more beneficial for this reason alone.

 

Not trying to be difficult or out to offend anyone, but do you even understand what “early termination fee” is? Selling or trading the leased car are just as hassle free as financed car, ppl tend to make leasing more difficult than it is.

Quote the following from one of my lease contract…

Basically the “early termination fee” is the value of your car at time of termination minus the amount you still owe (payoff amount) plus 395. So all you should be paying is the 395, if you paying more than that, its cus your car’s value is lower than the amount you still owe (upside down), which it isn’t all that dissimilar than finance contract. As long as you satisfied the payoff amount, there is no early termination fees, cus you are not terminating it early, someone buy out your lease contract. “Early termination fee” is only apply if you actually just return it early without first “satisfied” the payoff amount by either selling it or trading it.

 

Funny you should mention M3, now I didn’t trade my G35 for it but I did try trade my leased Element of it, most of the BMW dealership have one maybe two M3 coupes on the lot and good percentage of ppl were ordering them which is what I end doing, so there isn’t much room for negotiating, I only get 500 off with or without trade in’s, the most I could get for my Element was good 3k below than what I still owe on the lease, of course I could’ve carry it over to the new contract or pay the difference myself, but I end up put the Element on consignment with one of the car lot, even after 4% consignment fee, I was still able to get about 700 back. Incidentally, that car lot told me that, 11k was wholesale price for the Element at that time, which was what BMW dealerships was offering me for it, so its nothing to do with what make of car itself or whether if you trade it in with same dealership.

I didn’t say it makes sense by doing that, as I have wrote in one of earlier post, it was directly to rebut of your post below about inflexibility of lease.

You could keep the leased car how ever long you like.

So you are telling us with certainty that you will recoup those 6 payments fully and able to beat a lease deal? Do you have some type of math to back it up? Mind you that monthly payment on the lease is lower than financed to began with, so over 21 years of none stop car payments? don’t you think lease would come out ahead? you cant just base on how many cars you leased/financed over course of certain period, I sure cant say which will come out ahead without some type of real world price comparison, besides ppl cant lease the car for longer than 3 years at a time? so I don’t quite understand what you are trying to say there.

 

So if you had financed the element instead of leasing it you would have gotten $1100 back instead of $700? That is assuming your early termination fee was the same $395 you mentioned below?

I mentioned the same dealer because there were other posts saying overage miles won't count against you if you do your trade at the same dealer. As you pointed out, it's very hard to get more than wholesale from a dealer so any break that guy is getting is probably paid for by the low amount he got for the trade in.

 

True, but we're specifically talking about the money aspects of leasing vs. buying and if you plan to keep the car longer than the lease term you're much much better off buying. Early termination of a lease is cheap compared to taking the buy out at the end. Of course, my contention is that you can never know what you want 3 years in the future so you should take the safe path and buy.

First, I can beat a lease deal without the extra 6 months because very few people follow the lease contract perfectly and end up with extra fees. Above I am leveling the playing field and by agreeing that a good lease comes out even with a good finance deal and stating why I think buying is still better than leasing even if the money calculations are the same.

Of course I won't recoup the full payment, but I will recoup more of my payment than the payment your going to make on a new car. At the beginning of a either a lease of a financed car, the car loses more in depreciation that you pay in payments. This is even more true for a lease since the payments are lower. Toward the end of the term you start gaining a little bit of equity so more of each payment goes towards equity. For a lease deal, idealy for the leasing company you've built equity in the car by going under miles or because the car has strong resale value. I don't see why you need to see the math to understand that buying 7 cars in 21 years is more expensive than buying 6 cars in the same amount of time.

In the simple case, the money comes out the same on a lease vs. buy. You pay lower monthly payments, but when I sel I have enough equity that I get the extra money back. We'll both end up losing the same amount of money over the same amount of time. Don't think this only works because it's a simple case. The simple case I'm speaking of actually favors the lease.

The other side is that cars depreciate faster in the first 3 years. So the longer you own a car the less money you lose per month.

I agree, I think you can even get a 6 year lease? I simply said if your thinking about leasing for X years, buy instead and keep the car an extra 6 months and you'll save money. In addition to that plan you might find that you didn't predict where you'll be in three years and maybe you want to keep the car longer so you can spend that extra money in other areas of your life.