Hi all - You guys are great at gaming the system, so I’m interested in anyone’s creative ideas about how to make the best of a bad market, as a NJ resident. Here’s my situation:
My wife’s 2018 Mazda CX-5 lease ($350/month) is ending in November and I’d like us to cash out the equity while the used car market is still insane. But…
…the obvious catch-22 is then I need to procure some other form of transportation in the same crazy market. (My wife drives very little, but not having any car at all is out of the question, plus the CX-5 is also our road trip car. Mine is an Ioniq EV so less great for trips.)
In NJ, the silver bullet would seem to be to lease another new EV, because even if I can’t negotiate a deep discount anymore I can at least still take advantage of no sales tax and the ChargeUp rebate to get a nice vehicle for a low payment. HOWEVER…
I have a sense that in the early months of 2022 we (or mfrs/dealers) might get access to expanded federal EV tax credits, and folks in the US might finally start seeing shipments of Ioniq5, EV6, Arriya, etc., that could fall under the $45k ChargeUp price cap and offer more space, range and features than most current options.
Those rebates tie us to a car for 3 years, so I’m inclined to wait til ‘22 for better options, but my current lease ends at Thanksgiving. So what would you do in the mean time if you were me?
— Buy out the CX-5 in November and hold onto it, thereby paying tax on it and eventually selling it for less when the market is possibly cooling down next year, or…
— try to get the lease extended, with probably the same downsides?, or…
— Let a dealer buy out the CX-5 now to maximize my equity, and then… what? Try to find an okay deal on an ancient used Leaf with no sales tax, just to get by, and rent a bigger car for any road trips?
What options am I missing, to buy and sell a car over 6 or 9 months at minimal loss given we drive very few miles?
Unless you’ve got a huge upside on the equity, probably best to just extend the lease.
First while you may have equity, you might have to blow it on a higher payment because you can’t get a good lease
Second you don’t know when this bubble will pop, if you can extend the lease, the liability of the residual still lies with Mazda, so if the market tanks, you just drop it off then go get your new car hopefully with a good deal.
If you buy it out and the market tanks, it’s on you.
You are trying to make checkers into 3D chess here, and you can’t be right on every possible decision, and time them all perfectly.
A 21 Bolt now would hedge against losing the equity in the CX-5, but yeah you might be stuck.
It doesn’t mater how much perceived positive equity you have, every transaction has a $ cost. The more transactions you try to accomplish whatever this is (extreme lease arbitrage with a time-delay option to choose any possible forthcoming new product, most of which will be delayed, for the pleasure of overpaying for it when it lands vs overpaying for what things cost now?), the greater the possibility you mis-time and have to eat the costs on the other side.
Okay, well I just got some offers from Carvana, Vroom, etc., and the best is from Algo at $27,100. (I’m way under on mileage.) Meanwhile, I haven’t yet called Chase for the current dealer buy-out amount, but the contractual buy-out in the paper copy of the lease is approx. $18,500 and I have 3 payments left totaling $1,050. So if I assume the current buy-out is $19,550, then I think my equity is $7,550.
Good point. I guess I should be putting down $100 here or there to get on the list, as those are refundable reservations, but I haven’t – there’s not even MSRP listed yet for the things I suspect I’m most interested in so I haven’t known where to start. (Ioniq5, maybe Tucson plug-in…)
