Hi I have a dealership offering me the following lease. Not sure if it’s worth it? I asked if they could do $44,700 and they came back with $45,000
Vehicle: VW Atlas 3.6L SEL 4motion
Location: California
Personal credit: excellent
MSRP: $46,699
Sales price: $45,000
Drive off $5,000 (~$3,400 is being used as cap cost reduction).
Lease wear and tear included: yes
Taxes included: yes
Monthly payment: $649/month.
Not very great at trying to figure out if what I’m being offered in the vehicle space is not so great, good & great. Thanks for any help in advance.
It is practically impossible for us to tell you what a “good” monthly payment is for your specific lease as lease programs are highly dependent on region, personal qualifications, tax rates, etc.
We always recommend the following method before you ever contact a dealership. If you do all of the work up front, you’ll have a stress free dealer experience and set yourself for success.
Read Leasing 101 (Blog | LEASEHACKR) to understand how to calculate a lease payment and the variables. Monthly payment is an output, not an input!!
Pick a specific vehicle that you want to target
Gather the current MF, RV and incentives from Edmunds forums for your zip code
Research the LH marketplace and other deals that have been made recently on your vehicle - what was their pre-incentive discount? How did their lease terms differ?
Plug your numbers into the LH calculator (CALCULATOR | LEASEHACKR), and use a pre-incentive discount similar to what you have seen
Create a target deal, this is what you’re trying to negotiate to. You can try different terms, selling price discount, etc. and see how your monthly payment is affected. It is also possible that different trims of your vehicle may have different MF and RV (i.e. this is very common with GM), so make sure that you look into that. Come up with a set of inputs that give you the output that you want - your desired monthly payment.
With a target price determined, you now have a deal to pursue and compare dealer offers against. More importantly, you have a solid foundation to work from.
As @mllcb42 suggested, follow the steps to get the residual, MF, and incentives from Edmunds (you need to post and wait for reply), plug that into the calculator to see just how marked-up the back-end is.
Don’t pay to reduce cap cost unless you know exactly what it’s doing for you.
Don’t buy any products if you can’t breakout their cost and know the markup
This deal is so bad, it should include 2 compound fractures. But you need to go through the process to understand why because you need to be able to run the numbers for yourself again, and again…
In the alternative, you can check the marketplace to see if any dealers here are advertising anything that catches your eye, or hire a broker to do all of this for you.
Thanks everyone for your replies and input. I’ll continue to read and figure out how it all works together.
When you say services if well versed people in this area, are you referring to brokers? If so, I have contacted one a bit ago. Found their contact info here on LH.
Ah to be honest our current lease that’s coming to an end is a 2018 Atlas SE w/tech. Probably got a horrible deal as I’ve got no clue how it works, hence all the questions and wanting help this time around but of course timing doesn’t help with all that’s going on around the world.
The space it provided us drew us to the Atlas, with 1.5 year old at the time and a newborn on the way, space and sitting comfortably was at the top. The driver and passenger in the Atlas are allowed to sit really comfortably with two car seats in the 2nd row. We hardly used the 3rd row but def. used the trunk space with the 3rd seat down to the max.
I don’t particularly like the Atlas in terms of how sluggish it can feel at times, at the moment need a suv with an AWD system as we want to adventure out a lot more now that the kids are a bit older. The Atlas awd seems have got decent reviews, but I’m totally open to any recommendations.
I have equity in the Atlas, payoff is around ~$20K and carvana is offering ~$26,200. However I’ve got ~59,700 miles on the Atlas currently so not sure if it makes sense to purchase it vs. just handing it in.
