Is that for a new lease or buying a car you were leasing? I’m thinking of getting a short term lease instead of buying to wait for the new Scouts to happen and am hoping there are deals to get to avoid paying much up front. For the folks using brokers, how do you find good ones?
I wouldn’t worry too much about the inhumane hours. When I was a car salesman back in the early 00’s I was working M-S bell to bell meaning open to close. Most of the time you’re just hanging around the place bullshitting with the other salespeople waiting for an opportunity to sell something. It’s a weird lifestyle and you didn’t make anyone get into it.
He’s almost certainly getting half of the car deal even if you come in and buy it from someone else at this point.
This had a happy ending, worked with a different sales guy today who was able to drop the price $3.5k below this. I think saying “yeah I can stop by this afternoon, I’m on my way to [competing brand’s dealer] to test drive [competing model]” on the morning phone call helped.
But yeah in the future 100% going with LFS’s suggestion and finding a broker to do this shit for me. I feel like I got out easy this time with only two dealer visits (though I did blast email inquires to like ten last night, what a slog), in the past it’s been more like 5 each time I have to do this.
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You poor, poor bastard. I hope you created a new email just for this. They will be unrelenting.
Congrats on the deal!
I’ve never leased a car. I’ve always been under the assumption it’s just a more expensive and complicated way to finance a car. Are those bad assumptions?
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You can usually get better payments than on a loan which may get you into more car than you could afford to buy, but there is usually a good sized down payment to get into one. The downside is you don’t end up with anything at the end of the lease. Some people like that because they can get a new car every couple of years and they don’t mind always having a car payment.
Only way to buy a car, straight cash!
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Occasionally you’ll end up buying the car at the end of the lease and selling it for profit. We made about $5k on our last lease but that coincided with the crazy post covid car market.
Another nice thing with leasing especially if you’re a low mileage driver is your maintenance costs are basically zero besides oil changes and maybe some fluid stuff around the 30k mileage if you get to that point. No buying tires, brakes or any of the other stuff that comes with owning a car for more than 4 or 5 years.
I’d say it’s a good option for people who don’t drive a lot but also want to change up vehicles frequently.
I’ve also leased cars through my business which had some tax advantages.
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This is the thing that I just have no interest in.
I’ve owned 3 cars in my life. First was a hand-me-down from my parents. Other 2 were full cash purchases.
Wife and I both bought cars in 2020 when prices and interest rates were low. We could get better deals on the cars by financing even though we planned on just paying them off almost immediately. Then interest rates immediately sky rocketed and we hadn’t paid them off yet. So now we park the money in a money market account and get more interest than we are paying on the loans.
I’m impressed you all can keep lease cars in decent condition. Feel like our get rekt by children, outdoors equipment, spills, etc so we just drive till they on life support. Even hands covered with sunscreen seem to have permanently wrecked exterior paint job and interior on parts our cars.
If you drive anything long enough, you will automatically be driving a shitbox. I think I’ve been in unequivocal shitbox territory for about 2yrs. Hope to get out next year.
I take pride into getting into shitbox territory, but there’s a point somewhere after around 250k miles and having had a few weird problems/repairs (not necessarily anything major) where I start to feel a sense of doom when I drive, and every weird noise or smell makes me feel like I’m about to get stranded by the side of the road.
I’d be happy to drive cars past 500k if I could get over that mental block that makes me eventually look for something new for peace of mind.
My motivation for leasing mostly comes from my experience buying a used BMW that I drove for 5-6 years which, once it got out of the warranty period, often needed a couple expensive services per year, and once you take those into account I’m not actually sure I ended up saving much money. I paid like $33k for the car ($36k with tax) and eventually traded it in for $10k after 5-6 years of driving it up to 105k miles, so $26k depreciation plus, I dunno, $6k? (conservatively) in maintenance post-warranty meant it cost about $5k/year to drive. My leases on newer, nicer cars since then are like $7k-$8k per year with significantly lower stress (other than the 1-2 weeks every 3 years when I have to go find a new one), and I’m happy with that tradeoff.
It’s definitely a calculation predicated on me wanting to drive a nice car, the math obviously changes if you’re down to drive a shitbox.
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MSP-PHL today.
Storms across central PA, we don’t have enough fuel to go around. Wtf, you didn’t know there were storms and just give us a fucking full load?
Divert to PIT. Let us out to get food etc. $12 vouchers. Eat at the diner walk up grill place cause the bar kitchens are already closed and McD and CFA have enormous lines. Burger and fries passable. $19.
Load us back on. Almost immediately after loading inform of us of a ground hold in Philly. Does no one have a weather app? Obvious storms heading right for the airport.
Update at 7 is to wait for update at 8. About 8 inform us that we can takeoff as soon as air traffic control calculates the route.
4 min later inform us that ground hold is back on. Shortly they then inform us our crew is timing out.
Deplane thinking we are doing the hotel thing. But wait there is a plane coming in from Atlanta at 930 that could fly us.
Me looking at app sees that’s a lie already as that flight is delayed 45 minutes.
Finally 15 min later they say let’s do the hotel thing.
So in Lyft. Have to go all the way downtown (15 miles) as a bunch of other flights have up before us. I’m not in the Lyft app as me. Try and cannot find out how to leave a tip. Feel bad. A little.
Courtyard hotel downtown Pit, 15 miles from airport as anything closer was booked up. Of course the casino is literally a 5 min rideshare away. I have pokerz monies with me but am totally fried.
No goddamn remote in room. Oh well, will listen to slumping Phillies. Desk is slammed and I plan to zonk in like 20 minutes, plus I saw most of the Olympics live on the plane.
Same plane at 810 am Tomorrow. Back in the Lyft about 6 I reckon.
Fuck.
I sort of understand why they do it but it’s dumb that they refer to the previous olympics as “Tokyo 2020”
Pretty disorganized in the morning. The computer didn’t like that we were on a flight number that didn’t have anything to do with Pittsburgh.
So they gave us all passes to get through the Security and then TSA figures out to get us through and they got us boarded in the same seats. Made it to Philly about 10:30am.
Delta has sent me 6,000 miles for my inconvenience.
Glad you made it, but I thought that airlines don’t owe you shit if it’s weather related. Is that not the case?
I think cause we ended up in a different city. Otherwise no.