Ignoring your option load for a second, this is a good time to be able to use LH’s lease vs finance calculator to quantify what it means to lease vs buy/sell-later. It makes more sense for you to see your payment options than just write off leasing because Max is a anti-lease-Debbie-Downer.
Go find a financing offer and sense check this, but for now I’m going with a 60 month loan at 5.5% interest to try and create an equivalence vs the lease. I’m assuming the “down payment” on the financing is equal to the DAS you’d have on your lease minus the first month’s payment.
The LH calculator allows you to see the implied impact if you were to use your vehicle for 36 months and then sell it. I’m using the same residual as the lease because I don’t think anyone else has a better resale value forecast for 2027. Also, I’ve removed the lease disposition fee because I’m assuming you sell your BMW in 3 years without out of pocket reconditioning or pack costs. Which is what a lease disposition fee is meant to cover (but is waived if you roll into another lease)
Since you may really really really like your BMW, maybe you’ll keep it 4 years instead of 3. The LH calculator doesn’t have BMW 48 month leases on X3, but typically the 37-48 month depreciation hit @ 12k per annum is ~10%. If you compare a 48 month vs 36 month lease on a MB GLC 300… the resid hit is 11%. So 10% seems fair. Leasing is still “better” on an affective monthly basis.
Then, going to 60 months… this is where buying/owning-longer is smarter.
Anyway, you’re a smart person. You already know this car is expensive, and German cars depreciate pretty fast. Only you will know if you’re ok getting a gently used CPO right now is ok for you. And only you will know if you’re cool driving this BMW for 5 years. If these things are not in your cards because you don’t want to be in a used car and you start to dislike vehicles after 3 years… then lease away.