Quote:
Originally Posted by dsmclone
What I'm asking is how much did it cost you to lease for 3 years?
Lets say you would have bought the car for $48k and after 3 years Carmax would have paid you $26k for it. So over 3 years it would have cost you $22k right? These are just rough numbers since I have no clue what you could have bought the car for outright and I have no clue what the total cost of your lease was but I'm not getting how the lease is such a good deal even with the lousy resale value.
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Do I really have to break this down all the way? Okay, here goes:
When I bought the car, the M235xi was still very new and $48k would have been an out of this world good price. I negotiated the price from $53.5k down to $50k. The residual at the time was 61%, which now turns out to have been the height of fantasy.
With BMW lease start/end fees factored in, my lease will have cost me roughly $22.5k. The only numbers I'm excluding from that total are dealer doc fees and yearly registration fees because they would be the same regardless of purchase/lease/finance choice.
That $22.5k includes roughly $1,100 in sales tax. In your world of an up front cash purchase, I would have paid sales tax on the full price of the car, which would have been $3,250. Yes, when I trade it in I would not pay tax on the first $26k of the replacement car, but that only saves me $1,690.
So had I bought the car outright, I would have paid $50,000+$3,250-$26,000-$1,690=$25,560 to drive the car for 3 years. I also could've (but shouldn't have) done a single pay lease, which would have also saved me the interest on the financed $17.2k depreciation amount, another roughly $800.
Because I leased, and because I live in a state that only taxes the depreciated amount of a lease, I saved over $3,000. I can also walk away from this weird electrical issue. If something else even worse had happened I'd be all the more grateful not to be stuck with the car.