With the changing market landscape, many hackrs are leveraging financing programs to optimize their vehicle cost, even though they do not necessarily plan to keep the car for long. Per our community’s requests, we are incorporating a finance calculator into the Leasehackr Calculator to help our users compare their options.
As with everything we do, we are intentional with the tools we develop. Instead of building yet another auto loan calculator, we incorporated the Leasehackr approach, which accounts for rebates and the scenario of ending the loan early to tap into potential equity and to get a new ride (a common practice among seasoned Leasehackrs). We also took care to break down the figures in an intuitive way so you know how each element impacts your cost and how they compare between lease and finance. And of course, it’s shareable via links so we can help each other vet our deals.
Though tools like this look simple, it takes countless hours to conceptualize and implement. If you like what we do, consider supporting our work by:
Spreading the word and educating others on how to hack a deal using the Leasehackr Calculator.
Sending us ideas on how we can make the calculator easier to use for new users.
Letting us know if you’ve found any bugs and outdated program information on the calculator.
Contributing to SIGNED!. The SIGNED! database has been instrumental for us to cross check our work.
Giving us tips on SEO – we would love to spread our collective knowledge to a wider audience.
As always, we welcome your feedback as we evolve our tools around our community needs! Thank you for your support along the way to make our tools and community better!
Not sure if it’s happening to others as well but the calculator links appear to be broken for me. It’s failing to populate the calculator.
Update 1: Seems to be make-dependent. Acura is working fine (first option). Tesla is not.
Update 2: I can isolate the issue with the other makes when “acqFee_check” parameter is in the url. For Tesla, that respective checkbox cannot be unchecked in the UI.
I tried this with a previously working link and had the same result. The query parameters in the URL were the same except for the new fin_xx ones.
In the browser console, I see some errors with The specified value "NaN" cannot be parsed, or is out of range. & jQuery.Deferred exception: capFees is not defined. I’ll update this post if I can find something more concrete.
Removing the &acqFee_check=true gets it working again. That does change the calculation but I wanted to find the element/data point could be leading up to the error.
I think the “trade-in equity” line should be changed to two separate lines, “trade-in value” and “trade-in payoff”. Also, maybe a checkbox indicating whether the “trade” is actually owned or leased.
For example, if someone owes $45k on their trade in that’s worth $50k, you’d put in $5,000 on the calculator like this: CALCULATOR | LEASEHACKR
This scenario would be correct if the “trade” is a lease return, but it’s incorrect if they actually own the car they’re trading in. e.g. The customer has a payoff $45,000, they’re still entitled to up to a $50,000 tax benefit.
Another suggestion - I believe the Jeep acquisition fee went up from $595 to $895. @DistrictCars@Clutch@AutoNinjas please keep me honest and confirm if this is true.
