I bought an EV (plug-in hybrid) and got a rebate that was taxed. It took me forever to figure out that this needed to go into “Taxed Incentives” column. The “Post-Sale Rebate” field indicates that gov incentives go there, but unfortunately, a government incentive against the vehicle gets signed over to the manufacturer and you STILL have to pay taxes on that part of the capital cost, so you cannot put it into that box. Please repair the “i”(nformation) bubble to move the “gov’t clean vehicle incentives” comment from “Post-Sale Rebate” to “Taxed Incentives”.
My ford lease has a $645 acquisition fee and a $395 disposition fee. There is literally no way to enter the disposition fee for a ford, so it doesn’t appear properly in the calculation. Please make the disposition fee a real box; you can populate it from the maker, but please let me edit it.
I am assuming that “Sales Price” is what goes onto the CA bill of sale form and is used for those purposes to determine licensing fees. Can you please put an (i) bubble to indicate that this is what it means.
My lease agreement does not include the MF nor does it include the residual amount. I am unaware of ANY leasing fee that explicitly writes down the residual amount. Please modify the residual box as follows. Have 2 boxes, one is a percentage, and the other is a residual value (like, $13,000). Allow customers to enter either number, press a button, and the other box will be calculated automatically.
The post-sale rebate is for rebates like the CA CRVP, which isn’t taxed.
MF is not required and usually isn’t displayed on a lease agreement, but the residual value (buyout price at lease-end) is. I can’t imagine your lease agreement NOT showing it.
None of your points are really valid except the disposition fee.
The sales price is very self-explanatory: what the dealer is selling you the car for before incentives. Your argument on government incentives seems like you were just confused about it. Haven’t seen much other confusion so no need to give what isn’t broken. Makes total sense how the calculator is now. There isn’t a need to add a second residual box because that will confuse some people even more. Just divide the dollar amount by MSRP on another calculator. Very simple.
Disposition fee is fixed to our knowledge, which is why we don’t provide it as an input. Ford must have raised its disposition fee. We will update it on the calculator. Thanks for letting us know!
Disposition fee isn’t a variable at the time of sales and won’t roll in till the end of the lease, so it only impacts the Total Lease Cost. Having the Disposition Fee as an input box might open more questions?
No matter how the selling price changed, the Ford i bought had a residual that was 34% of MSRP. So, not all dealers (apparently) work with a residual value that is a percent of negotiated price, in the case of Ford, residual value was computed as a percentage of MSRP, period, it never changed as value of the car changed, the residual value always stayed the same.
Since your calculator never displays the residual in dollars, it is impossible to tell if you have entered the residual correctly. It appears that the calculator calculates residual from the negotiated price, but not all dealers, i.e. Ford, work this way.
It would be much better if the calculator would produce the number that CA uses for the registered selling-price of the car, I could never see it in the numbers I entered. It is not clear from the hint bubbles whether the discounts are applied to the Sales price, or whether they are already included in the Sales price.
I would also recommend an (i) bubble for Months “Total number of months of the lease including the first month” so people don’t e.g. accidentally enter 35, 38, or 41 or something like that, or you could give a warning for a weird number like that.
How about creating a new class of car called “Generic Car” in case you are subleasing from a broker or for cases (like Ford) where things have changed and you need to enter all the information manually?
From these recent posts of yours, seems like you should read up on the basics of leasing. Almost no one else is confused by these very basic leasing items.
I still think it would be better to enter the residual value in dollars since that is what shows up in most lease agreements. Or you could have both a dollar box for residual and a box for percentage; enter a number in one box click a button and the other box is calculated from MSRP.
I got a very confusing lease document because there were three different sales prices in the document, to confuse me. There was an agreed selling price there was an agreed selling price plus $1,100 in fees which was Doc fee wearcare and Lease origination fee. Finally there was a much larger number which was on a state of California purchase form, maybe inclusing tax?. If I subtract the federal rebate of $4007 I don’t get either of the other numbers! So i am still not sure where that number came from.
I think I got a good deal on a car (no substitutes available) with a 34% residual. Given that the residual cannot be changed I think I didn’t do too badly at less than 1% of MSRP tco per month. Of course the only real benefit to me comes if I buy the car at the end in which case I saved 24% off of MSRP including Federal rebates. I wish your calculator had a way to credit deals like mine where the residual is unavoidably low; a nine year pay back under these circumstances is not terrible. Like maybe a leasehackr score of 10 is good for 50%+ residual, 9 for 40%+, 8 for 30%+.
The LeaseHackr score has nothing to do with what the RV is set at. It basicly just looks at the effective monthly payment (or total costs) vs the MSRP.
I didn’t want to make a new topic but it would be great if there was an option to just roll in taxes to a payment and not both the 1st month and DMV especially when all the dealers I’ve talked to need 1st month and DMV.
One thing I’ve always noticed that I think is a mistake is when you hover over “i” for “Total Lease Cost” it mentions that it excludes post-sale rebates, but I don’t think that is true (nor should it be). If you play with Post-Sale Rebate cell, it changes the Total Lease Cost, so I think that info box should be edited.
Also, is the point of the Leasehackr score to sort of compare the lease to purchasing the vehicle? I know it’s complicated to make that exact comparison, but wouldn’t it be more accurate to calculate the Leasehackr score using the sale price as opposed to the MSRP, since if you WERE purchasing the car you would pay the sale price.
I was wondering about this as well. The ability to specifically add/subtract any potential upfront costs either into the lease or simply pay upfront. I played around with this quite a bit when I was looking to keep my payments just over $350 for MSD purposes. I believe I payed only the 1st month and then acquisition fee upfront, everything else was baked into the lease.
I love the LH calculator
My suggestions to improve it further.
Adding extra line items to display followings:
Interest paid per month
Taxes paid per month
alternatively a table showing the spread of RV, interest paid on monthly basis
Also a pie chart showing the RV, Interest paid, taxes paid over the length of the lease.
