Oh, I know. The one positive thing I’m seeing is any A-Class that’s been put up for a lease transfer has been in the same $$$ range as mine. Either dealerships just aren’t heavily incentivizing it, or the few on LT/Swapalease are also just trying to get out of their shitty deals.
Can you tell me more about prepaid maintenance and why it’s bad?
You are paying dealer price for maintenance that you will not benefit from unless you will purchase the car at lease end. Most savy lease hackers keep their maintenance to the bare minimum required if they pay out of pocket. I would think some people even skip it , but it is not ethical in my opinion.
Edit: Grammar
From my experience, one of the main profits for finance dept at the dealership is from selling those maintenance packages. Their goal is to claw back the potential profit “lost” from the sale price discount.
There was a time a finance person was trying to sell me the maintenance package to cover the brake pads for $1k, telling me that how other customers didn’t purchase it and blaming dealership not reminding them to buy the maintenance package (yea, that has to be true ), despite the fact that my lease was only 24 MONTHS FOR 20K MILES
When I was signing for my 1st lease, the finance guy’s office was literally set up with all sorts of props like blown tires, punctured tires, etc. And the guy was pointing to different props depending what kind of maintenance coverage he was trying to sell me And that was before I came across leasehackr, so I felt super lucky I stood on my ground and said no to all of them.
As a rule of thumb, unless you know exactly why a maintenance package is worth buying (e.g., I believe some brands like MB sometimes bumps up RV when you purchase maintenance packages), just say no.
You made a bad financial decision first time around and now you want to make another bad financial decision by getting rid of it so you don’t remember your “incredible dumb, impulsive decision”.
We all should thank to OP, people like him are only the reason we all can get good deals :). Joking aside, OP should try to cancel those maintenance and excess wear and tear insurance, at least you can save $100 bucks a month by doing that, then I would try to flip it.
Since you guys are mentioning about keeping maintenance to minimum. do you get it done outside and have copies of it to hand it over incase of issues? I paid about $25/month for my GLE for maintenance (yes bad first deal) and I am sure they just did oil change and tire rotation. I used to be concerned about the car dealer/manufacturer dinging me about maintenance not being done.
I have not heard of anyone charged for skimped maintenance. This is something very difficult to prove for them and even if they can, it is too much of a hassle to pursue. Do you guys know if there is a clause in lease contracts that says customer must perform proper maintenance?
are you joking? I literally wrote what you wrote and pointed out how it’s a bad financial decision to comp someone to take it so soon. feel free to do it because you don’t like how it drives (although I still don’t understand how one doesn’t test drive a car), but from a financial point of view what you are doing is yet another bad decision.
I probably see this once a week where someone who leased 15k miles per year for 3 years ran out of their free BMW maintenance and it blaming us for not telling them past 36k miles it it not covered and they will have to pay out of pocket. We just show them the form they signed that says we reviewed extended maintenance with them and they declined it.