I’ve been playing around with the calculator to understand where it differs from the one on a dealer website. I expect the dealer’s one to be wrong, but I want to be able to say why. In the process I’ve realized there are some things about the calculator, or leasing, that I don’t understand. Most related to changing DAS by moving charges between being paid upfront and being baked into the monthly payments. Note that I am doing these for NY State.
A particular example is the acquisition fee. My naive expectation is that if I start with a calculation where it is paid upfront, I should be able to get it into the monthly payments by either 1) Unchecking the button, 2) setting the fee to zero and adding the amount to the selling price, or 3) dialing in a negative down payment for the same amount.
In the examples above, the “Selling Price” version and the “Negative Down” version agree with each other but disagree with the “Uncheck” version. The difference looks like it comes from taxes.
Why not post a lease sheet or some actually details of this mystery car. The calculator is usually within a few bucks of whatever the dealer is quoting you if you input everything correctly. Without a lease sheet and calculator link it’s hard to know what’s going on.
I certainly can. Wasn’t trying to be mysterious — I thought this would be simpler since it makes the question just about the calculator not someone else numbers/website.
They can be marking up the MF causing a difference as well or rolling incentives into the selling price. With a deal sheet someone like @joeblogs would probably be able to tell you in a minute what’s going on.
When you capitalize or “roll in” anything, such as an acq fee or any other dollar amount, you incur rent or finance charges on it. The higher the MF, the higher the charge.
Even when you set the MF to zero, the difference between acq fee upfront vs capitalized is that the LH calculator doesn’t tax the upfront acq fee
This is the dealer website. I don’t have full control over everything. In particular I can’t seem to control what it uses my DAS for and what it capitalizes. It decided to split my taxes between the two.
This is my first attempt to recreate in LH. I can reproduce the tax here by hand, So I feel like this makes sense. LH Calculator
This is a sceond attempt. The difference is unchecking the upfront acquisition fee and adjusting the down payment for the same DAS. I don’t yet understand why it is different from the previous one. LH Calculator 2
As @max_g said, “Even when you set the MF to zero, the difference between acq fee upfront vs capitalized is that the LH calculator doesn’t tax the upfront acq fee”
Note that the price difference between your two calculators is $67 total lease cost. 8.825% tax on a $750 acquisition fee is $67
I may be doing something wrong but this isn’t what I’m seeing. It looks to me like like the LH calculator is taxing the acq fee if you pay it up front and then double taxing it if you don’t.
Here is a super simple example. The car is free, the money factor is zero, you just pay the acquisition fee of $750 and taxes of 10%. I think taxes should be $75. And that’s what I see here. Paying upfront
But I see $150 here. Not paying upfront.
If I was confident that I knew what I was doing with the LH calculator I would play around with money factors, tax rates, etc. and see if I could guess what was going on with the dealer’s calculation.
But I got sidetracked when the LH calculator itself surprised me. As a result this topic is more about learning what the LH calculator is doing than it is about figuring out that particular lease. And right now I don’t know if I just don’t understand the calculator or if it has a bug.
You can always do it by hand to double check, but it’s always within $5 +/-, I also use leasematic, well worth the $2, especially when you’re at the dealer and want double check things. Tons of spreadsheets out there too. But like I said the LH calculator is pretty close, there’s no reason to sweat a couple bucks here or there.
All those numbers generated on that’s dealers website don’t me squat until you get a lease sheet with real numbers.
