I am a 2nd year MS student with 1 course left to graduate, planning to sell my current car in MA, move to Bay Area and lease a new car or take over a lease from others. My credit score is above 760 for more than 3 years. Here is a list that I am interested in:
Toyota Corolla Hatchback: around $180 a month? cheap, good looking, helpful dealer, easy leasing process?
Veloster Turbo: around $260 a month? I heard that Hyundai’s dealer is quite bad, how about their maintenance service in Bay Area?
Mazda3 preferred package: I see in this forum that Mazda3 does not lease well and I did not see many brokers dealing with Mazda. Around $300 a month?
Mini Cooper S: around $300 a month? Did not see brokers dealing with Mini too…
I did some homework in the forum and I saw that Mercedes, BMW(and Mini), Toyota(and Lexus) are friendly to lease transfer while others are not. So that means if I lease a Veloster Turbo or Mazda3, if I want to jump out of lease, I will go ask Carvana, Carmax, Vroom to appraise, see the difference and buy out. Isn’t buyout option easier than lease transfer? What is the potential problem of the buyout option?
Thanks for reading. Feel free to leave any suggestion. I learned a lot from this forum and expect to learn more!
You’ll probably want to target programs that have a good Grad rebate, although most of them require an offer letter stating your starting salary. Otherwise, purely as a student you’re not perceived to have enough income to sustain a lease.
You may not have enough credit depth to qualify for a lease assumption at BMW and even more unlikely at MB. Maybe Toyota but they’re really slow. You also miss the opportunity to apply rebates such as recent grad when taking over an existing lease.
Hyundai has a good grad discount, and for a period of time, they were doing $900 towards your student loans as a post sale rebate for California and Phoenix Az residents. It may still be available.
You won’t get much of a help by throwing ballpark numbers for those cars. Not because people are not willing to help because there are so many parameters that will impact the deal. If you want a shortcut, you can start with advertised deals by LH brokers though I don’t think I have seen Veloster or Corolla recently.
Thanks for your reply. What if I can prove I have enough cash to buy this car? I just simply want to have more cash on hand and especially I am owning a Subaru Forester that is popular in MA, so I want to sell in MA instead of shipping to CA.
