How To Evaluate a Car Lease Deal After the Fact
Did I Get a Good Deal or Bad Deal?
Even if you are familiar with leasing a car and have experience, it can get confusing when actually conducting a deal in a dealer’s office where there are numbers flying around left and right, adjustments being made, papers being signed, and fatigue setting in.
You think you got a good deal on your lease, but did you really?
Those numbers in your contract don’t seem to match up with what you thought they should be. Has something changed or is it just some rearranging to fit the contract form.
Did you actually get the discounted price you negotiated? Was that the number used when they calculated your payment?
What’s the finance rate — it’s nowhere in the contract? Did they give you the right credit for your down payment and trade-in vehicle? What fees have been added?
Did they make any mistakes?
How could I know?
Fortunately, we have developed a unique calculator, that we call the Lease Inspector that is part of our popular Lease Kit that is designed specifically to analyze any car lease deal from the numbers in an actual lease contract.
You enter the numbers into the Lease Inspector directly from your lease contract — numbers such as Vehicle Lease Price, Gross Capitalized Cost, Cap Cost Reduction, Adjusted Cap Cost, Residual Value, Term, Mileage Allowance, and Lease/Rent Charge.
After clicking the Evaluate button, the Lease Inspector immediately shows you the detailed results of its analysis.
It shows you how your Lease Price stacks up, and whether your Residual Value is high enough to be considered a good deal. Even though your finance rate (money factor) is not shown in your lease contract, we calculate it for you from the other numbers you entered, and then tell you if the rate is good or not so good. We then combine all the elements of the analysis and give you an overall rating of your lease deal.
Finally we compute the monthly lease payment amount from the other numbers in the contract, the same way that the dealer computed the payment that is shown in your contract. We show you our payment number so that you can compare it with the dealer’s payment number in your contract, which allows you to discover if “mistakes” have been made in the dealer’s math.
Make no mistake, the Lease Inspector is a unique and powerful tool that has never been available before to automotive leasing consumers. Even if you have no interest in the many other features of our Lease Kit, the Lease Inspector could easily justify your purchase of the Kit.
While the Lease Inspector can tell you if mistakes were made in your lease deal, it also tells you if your deal was good, bad, or just average. Fortunately, if mistakes were made, you can revisit your dealer and get the mistakes corrected. However, if you find that you simply ended up with a terrible deal, you won’t be able to do anything about it now that you’ve signed the contract and taken delivery of the vehicle. Hopefully, this won’t be the case.
Please take a look at our car leasing kit and all its features before you lease your next vehicle.