Hi everyone, I need some help with this lease. My wife is currently leasing a 2017 Chrysler Pacifica with only 2 more months of payments left (4 year lease). Her next van that she wants, is either another Pacifica, Odyssey or Sedona. She just basically wants the cheapest payment out of the three. Doing my research and using the Leasehackr formula. It looks like we can get anyone of those Van’s at basically the same trim level for around the $300 a month mark. The problem I’m having is that her currently lease is going back with 13,000 miles less than expected. Those are miles / depreciation that we ultimately paid for. My question is how much extra leverage I should shoot for (due to them selling the car for a much higher price due to the fact that it has low miles) when negotiating with the dealer? Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks for the help,
Brian
Be sure to specify your location when asking for input on a deal! Tagging by state (e.g. CA, NJ, NY) is mandatory.
Your options are to turn in the lease, in which case the under miles are irrelevant, or to sell them the car if it has positive equity. Best way to determine that is to get purchase quotes from a few different sources (carvana, shift, vroom, etc) and compare it to your current buy out amount.
Odds of a 4 year lease FCA product having positive equity?
@Njustidokite9184 the Odyssey is leasing the “best” out of the choices mentioned. I don’t see $300/mo possibly happening on any of these. You may also want to consider just buying one given that you’re not using the miles and depreciation that you’re paying for. But you’ll have to do the math to find out what makes the most sense.
@chrishs2000 The only reason why I’m down so many miles is because my wife and I had a baby in which she stayed home for quite some time and then worked from home due to start of covid. We normally use all of the miles. Terms of old lease were 48 month lease, 12k miles a year.
Whenever I see a calculator with the mf set to .00100, I assume it’s the default calculator value and hasn’t been corrected. Are you inputting rv/mf/incentives from edmunds?
Cash in on positive equity by selling to one of the usual suspects (ALGo, Carvana, etc). No point trading or turning it in and expecting a dealer to make you whole
@HersheySweet yes, I used defauly mf and dealer fees. @mllcb42 no, I didn’t use edmunds, I have to readjust that. @jamiemose No not yet. I wanted to see the outcome on Leasehackr about the last lease first. @Kctham18 Ok, thank you.
Thank you all for your input, it is greatly appreciated.
Without correct values in place for rv/mf/incentives, you should completely ignore any output of the calculator. At this point, the numbers it’s giving you are completely meaningless.
So, what are you basing your selling price off of? While it’s great that you’re trying to put together a deal first rather than going in to negotiations without any idea of what to expect, you also need to be realistic about what the current market is.
Like @mllcb42 said, without the actual RV/MF/incentives, the numbers are meaningless, and you’re not being efficient with your time.
Well broken record here but you are putting gibberish in, to get gibberish out. You need exact mf, incentives, etc. without that, you’re just day dreaming.
@jamiemose@mllcb42 the selling price is one that I found online in my area. Truecar was also stating that people in my area were getting an avg. of 4k off msrp. I didn’t think that they meant with incentives. The incentives list was found on Truecar. Sorry if I am wasting everyone’s time on here. I just want to make sure I know what I’m talking about once I speak with the dealers. I do truly and sincerely appreciate all of the guidance.
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 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, 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.