How do you justify lease on this car?

I see many threads and read about the miles TL drivers are accumulating and I wonder how others justify their lease. For example, my friend has a benz on lease and now he is to the point where he has to garage it for a while due to high miles. I don't understand how you acquire a nice car and aren't able to drive it. Furthermore, lease make the car not yours.

I've had my TL since Dec 23rd and have put 6500 miles on the car so far. I'm probably on the high side, but the lease would have TL around 1000 miles per month. I guess you could accomplish this if you were to work down the street, but what about the weekends? Just mind boggling.

I did lease a caravan once and what a mistake that was. I was able to get out of it by going negative on a trade-in, but I felt it was okay because it had a transmission that was going out and the cost to replace it would have been higher than the amount I lost. This may get moved to off topic, but not a big deal since I'm just curious.

 

I justified my lease (first one ever) in two main ways:

1. I know exactly how many miles I put on a car each year.

2. I'm the type of person that suddenly gets bored and wants the "latest and greatest" new car I can find.

For the past six years, I've been driving a '91 Legend Coupe, '95 Legend GS, and '00 RL all bought as Acura Certified on financing with 21k miles on each with extended Acuracare Warranties. Problem was, I got bored after 2 years on each and bailed with 3 years left on the loans

Now I'll lease and remove the negative equity in the transactions and get into a spanking new Acura every 3 years

Just about the only thing that sucks is that to get the best lease rate @ 42 months, you're a few thousand over the Acura warranty that comes with the TL.....so I needed to fork over $800 to extend the warranty on the lease.....

BJ

 

bolt - i thought the warranty was 48 months...?

Lease vs. buy is not as simple as the original post. Yes, if you drive a lot of miles, leasing is not for you. If you like to keep a car for 5-10 years, leasing is not for you. If you want to do mods, leasing is not for you.

But you can't make the simplistic claim that leasing is a financially unsound decision. To a certain extent it is, but so is buying a new car in the first place, instead of a low-mileage one-year old model. So is buying a luxury or near-luxury vehicle, in which the extra few thousand dollars "at the margin" are buying you less and less in terms of hard, cold car.

Those of us who lease do so because: we don't put a lot of miles on our car (my commute is 6.5 miles each way), we want a new car every three years or so, and we don't like having to sell the previous car on the private market or negotiate a trade-in value. I dropped my leased CL off at the Acura dealer, picked up the TL, and life is good.

Buying is smarter dollar for dollar. A new car is not smart. I'm not smart when it comes to cars - I want what I want.

 

Before you look at the mileage costs of leasing, lets look at mileage costs of an owned car.

Any way you look at a resale value of a vehicle it is based on 12k per year. If you are over that total you are charged 17.5 cents per mile. So no matter what method you use Lease or Purchase, you will always pay for mileage. In leasing though if you plan correctly you can pre-pay for mileage up front which is usually 1/2 the cost vs waiting till the end (15 cents vs 8 cents per mile)

There is a good argument that you build up equity in a purchase where you not in a lease. You can lease 2 cars for about the same cost as buying 1 car over a 7 yr period. An yes you would own nothing with those 2 leases. But what would you own with a purchase, a 6yr old car that has likely cost you at least a few sets of brakes, tires, and other maintenance, plus your warranty was long gone at either yr 3 or 4.

 

The factory warranty is for 48mo/50k. My lease is for 42mo/15k per year.....so that's 52.5k which I will definitely hit or go over. So I paid the $800 to cover the last 2500 to 3500 miles. Didn't want to be this close to returning the car and get WHAMMED with a tranny

 

Well, ya know what they say, bolt...ya should never lease a car for longer than the warranty period...but since you have the possibility of that gap in coverage, it sounds like the extended warranty made sense...

 

I used to lease for a couple of reasons. It's deductable business expense for me. I tended to get cars every 2-3 years. I tend toward more expensive cars (previous cars were/are 98 RL, S320, couple of Lincolns). Most importantly I wasn't driving many miles. When I put those all together, I was better off leasing.

Since I started driving so many miles, I can no longer lease as affordably as I used to so I bought. My first buy was the RL which I still have.

 

TLGator- Yeah, clearly I didn't want to do that but the difference in monthly payment between the 36 mos and the 42 mos were very noticable. Also, it puts me straight into October '07 when the next generation TL comes out (or the '05 TL's come back from lease

It's the price I have to pay for owning 3 different cars in the last 6 years all on 5 year loans Learned the hard way that I'm a lease kind of guy.....