Year, Make, Model, and Trim: [2018 GMC Acadia FWD SLE2]
MSRP: [$37,805]
Selling Price: [$34,101.38]
Rebates: [$6039.73 (4550 in CCR, Auto Show and Conquest plus 1489.73 in GM reward points]
Trade-in: [Negative equity of 2303 trading in the last 7 payments of my Honda CRV lease plus the 350 dollar disposition fee]
Months: [36]
Annual Mileage: [15,000]
MF: [56%]
Residual: [0.00100]]
Security Deposit: [$0]
Total Due At Signing: [$379.99 first month plus the GM points included in the rebates]
Monthly Payment (incl. tax): [$379.99]
Zip Code: [08619]
Sales Tax Rate: [6.625%]
Leasehackr Score: [Not entirely sure? Negative equity kinda messes with calculating everything. If you take out the negative equity and GM points it’s about a 9. It’s basically a 1% deal on a three row SUV when you take out the negative equity and GM points. I’m pretty happy. Love the truck too! Thanks to everyone here for the tips, info and inspiration.
I’m not knocking it, BUT you DID have HUGE rebates from CCR and GM reward points… You negotiated $3704 off sticker. I guess that’s good.
To me this whole “lease hacking” thing is really nothing more than getting a particular dealer to do a crazy deal that they may have to do in order to get rid of “lot rot” and demos/loaners or program cars with miles and HUGE incentives from the manufacturer or directives from the GM/ comptroller to get the vehicles off the floor plan.
I mean, no one here is affecting MF or residual (save for MSDs where applicable) with their “hacking”. No one is doing a 33 month lease or a 15 month lease or a 23 month lease. It’s just price that’s being affected.
That TOTALLY depends on the dealer and who needs to move a unit to be in line with dealer internal finances or stair step manufacturer programs/incentives to move certain units for industry bragging rights.
So when you get a dealer to do what “you” want, it’s nice that YOU suggested it, but they are the only ones willing to do it at that time. CERTAINLY of the thousands of dealers nationwide could there be more than one that will do this deal? Yes. but if you live in Alaska and the dealer is in Miami–not going to help. There ARE dealers who will deal, but not every month and not every time. It’s really a game of musical chairs.
In the end, you did as well as you might have done with the knowledge you have and the dealer you chose. End of story. Enjoy the new ride.
He also had a lot of negative equity rolling into it.
Lease hacking certainly takes a dealer wanting to move a unit, but there’s a lot of other factors at play. High residuals on certain models or a bunch of lease cash, and then applying the lease cash over a short term (usually 24 months).
HOW is that HACKING, unless I’m misunderstanding the term itself? All you’re doing is using the info at hand. Now I AGREE that this site is useful in that it is info sharing, but that’s about it to “hacking” a lease.
The hacking part is knowing what models would make a good hack (and that varies from month to month), finding a dealer who will sell at a great discount (needs to move a unit) and then stacking together every possible bit of extra incentive (which vary wildly from month to month and manufacturer to manufacturer).
The other bits you mention about strange lease term length and RV adjustment just aren’t going to happen because they aren’t structurally within the capabilities of the finance companies.
Because you have to know these things and take advantage of them. The normal person is going to go try to lease a car and not know about lease cash. The dealer is going to make it look like they’re giving them a great deal or discount but it’s mostly incentive based.
Plus the real key is knowing what term works out best. Technically a 24 month lease should never be cheaper per month than 36, but understanding and analyzing each car to find the one that makes for the cheapest monthly payment is what makes it hacking to me. I think the others answered it quite well also.
Yeah good point on the 24 vs 36 months. Previous a dealer kept saying 36 is always cheaper than 24 until I asked him to run the numbers and showed him that 24 worked best in this scenario.
I’ve laughed at that line before and showed them that. I don’t know in my case if 24 months would have made a difference, but even if it did I had 2303 in negative equity to spread across, so I needed 36 to make it work. Is this a crazy deal like @mlconte 's BMW wagon or @nyclife 's awesome Volvo deals and other offers? No of course not, but I was also working within a 100 mile radius in the NY/NJ/PA area on a non demo current model year 3 row SUV (There’s a reason you don’t see too many people posting deals on them), so I don’t think that getting 10% off MSRP before the rebates was a bad get. I gave about 5 other dealers in my area an opportunity to match or beat and they couldn’t or wouldn’t. Of course the rebates and lease cash helped, don’t they always? I’m sure that they were sitting on enough Flex Cash to make the deal, as I had a dealer admit that he didn’t have it on hand to match.
In regards to some of what you mentioned, I think that the “Hacking” portion of things might be a bit of Hyperbole from the founders of this site. There’s no magic bullets that are going to turn bad deals into good ones. You simply have to work within the parameters that are in place. The “hacking” part of lease hacking comes from being able to target a vehicle that suits your needs that has the best possible combination of residual value, money factor, rebates and dealer discount. This is why I targeted the Acadia. Thanks to the GM points my choices were very limited. Traverse programs stink right now and the Enclave is too expensive. Where I “hacked” things was casting my net as far as I was willing to go to find the highest trim Acadia I could possibly afford with the lowest possible MSRP. That’s how I found this one. Strangely enough I found some AWD SLE2 models with identical programs priced LOWER that the dealers wouldn’t budge on. I don’t think “lot rot” was a motivating factor since it was only there about 130 days. Obviously you want it gone faster than that but I’ve seen stuff on lots well over 500 days that places wouldn’t budge on. Long and short of it, I think I was fortunate to find a lower priced, higher trim level unit at a dealer who needed to hit their goal and had the Flex cash on hand to make it happen. But at the end of the day, that’s the name of the game.
Shamelessly bumping my own thread because I’d like some feedback from the experts. Think I could have pushed for more than 10% off? They called me back in about 5 minutes flat on that offer, which I thought was a stretch given the other quotes I was getting. I’ve gotta do this all over again with a Malibu between now and probably Labor Day (unless this GM 500 dollar mileage forgiveness sticks around, that buys me more time.) The challenge now is that unless I get really creative I’m not going to have any GM points to use, but that also opens up my options in terms of brand, and opens up Conquest possibilities for other GM stuff down the line if I go that route. If the incentives made sense I’d possibly consider going Bolt/Volt for this one, but that would probably take some governmental intervention/incentive at the state level. Can’t go above slot on this one either, but I will be in a position to possibly pay off all the remaining payments myself, or enough to trigger pull ahead if that’s not restricted by time left.
I thought your deal was ok. Lots of GM CCR cash and GM card always help. What was a real bummer was rolling in your payments on that other car. Were you over in miles, hated the car. Why did you want to give up those funds. Without that, this would have been a very slick deal.
The bonus expired at the end of the month. I really was tired of the Honda, wanted something bigger and nicer, and I had an incentive from a family member to take advantage of the expiring bonus too. Otherwise I was prepared to wait for a lower level trim to hit a lower number that I was looking for.
When buying or leasing a car, hacking can easily be defined as just knowing what you are doing. Reading this site and Reddit r/askcarsales, a significant portion of car buyers are totally unprepared and end up paying way too much. Of course, dealerships make most of their money on those folks and ideally we just help them move metal to hit incremental bonuses.
It really is a funny business, I look at it almost like pro wrestling in terms of the theater involved in the sales and negotiation process. I guess you could refer to the people on this board as the “Smart Marks” who know it’s all fixed. The outcome really is predetermined once you know the programs and how low a dealer is willing to go.
Touching on the whole hacking subject, I agree, it’s just about being far more informed than the typical buyer. That’s what lets you objectively evaluate what is typically seen as a murky subject by most.
Case in point, look at the comments in almost every article on leasing on a car website. According to them, it’s absolutely retarded to even consider leasing because you’ll get fucked every single time. And that there is literally no other way to buy a car that is financially acceptable except a CPO and driving it for 5 years or more. Yet we can show plenty of times that between taxes, repairs, tires, resale, etc. that it is actually more feasible to lease in that regard compared to buying.
However you see people lulled into the $600 a month payments on a $35k car because they add warranties, take the marked up MF, or don’t even try and negotiate a discount because they think a downpayment is the only way to get a lower monthly.
Look at the $54 a month i3 deal, that was “hacking” in that the person knew their state and local taxes, the incentives, the residuals, the MF, pieced together the discount required which was more than reasonable for a dealer and was able to walk a dealer through the process so that in the end, it’s literally stealing a car.
In the case of my BMW, it was knowing what cars to hunt for, what discount off MSRP would work, what questions to ask the dealer, what MF to make sure was hit, and then having to walk them through my local state taxes since it was an out of state deal.
It’s really just building a deal to your specs, making sure that the math checks out and you have all the particulars correct, and getting someone somewhere to say yes.
I love when I get asked what I do for a living when on the phone with dealers since they are usually taken aback at talking to someone who has an idea of how the deal actually gets made.
So from what I’m seeing it looks like my gambit might have kinda paid off? I knew the 3k conquest was coming, but it doesn’t look like the Acadia got it. In turn I got to use the 500 dollar top off bonus and got the Auto Show cash that expired. Yay me?
