The dealership called me to offer a trade-in for $0, and same monthly payment on a new lease. I They will take my 2023 Hundai Santa Fe Hybrid Blue (with 6 months remaining on the lease), and give me a 2026 Santa Fe Hybrid Limited (one trim level above current). a key-for-key exchange. They are supposed to call me back with the exact numbers, but haven’t yet.
I have a couple of questions:
Should I be considering this deal? My alternatives would be to finance a buy out oof my low-mileage car which would lower my current monthly ($560, after zero drive-off & capitalized taxes), but there are some upgrades in the 2026 that I would like (7 seats, heated steering wheel, premium audio).
When I try to use the calculator and put in the price of a new car ($50K) vs. the trade-in value (~26K buy-out) I get negative numbers on the monthly payment, and the deal score is a 6. How should I interpret these numbers?
No one can tell you without looking at the real numbers first. Ask them to send you the numbers. Meanwhile, go test drive a 2026 (exact trim you want to get) at a different dealership to figure out if the upgrade is worth it for you.
You were marketed-to. If this is something you’re interested in, do the leg work on what your current lease is worth, what it will take to exit, and what the best deal is you can make on a new lease. Otherwise you have our permission to ignore this and go about your day.
It would help if you posted a link to your calculator.
You might be getting a negative number b/c the buyout is not the same thing as your trade in value. Unless Hyundai is offering a legitimate pull-ahead program (which I doubt is the case), the dealership is buying out your lease and then rolling whatever negative equity (if any) into the new lease. They are not “exchanging” anything.
That’s why other posters have suggested you first do the math to figure out how much it will cost to get out of your current lease and, independent of a trade, what a solid deal on a 2026 Santa Fe looks like. W/ that info, you can then determine what, if anything, the dealer is hiding from you.
According to the AI, this is a very good deal for this car. I guess that’s why the dealership said they’d call me right back with the numbers and then disappeared
The very fact that you’re going by “AI” and not doing the legwork to figure out the math on the new lease should tell you that you don’t understand leasing and just asking people here to do the research for you.
Why, if I may ask? I took the price of the new car, the residual value and money factor from Hyundai through the calculator, and my current monthly payment, and had it calculate the monthly payment for a zero drive off with no discount, and then what discount on the car my monthly payment would reflect. What’s missing?
“AI” will give you an aggregation of bad deals that are public (with varying inputs dependent on the AI model algorithms, etc.) but very likely will not give you a “behind the scenes” and accurate calc of what a “good” deal is.
If you were to feed all LHer info on your Santa Fe into an AI model you still would not get where you need to be. Not every great deal is posted for obvious reasons so as was said above, do the legwork.
Okay. A lot of people are you mad that you asked this without doing research. Let me guide you in direction of research.
Step 1: Call Hyundai financial and find out your 10-day payoff. This is the dollar amount it’ll cost to buy out your existing car.
Step 2: Plug your car into Carvana & Carmax. Is there positive equity? Is there negative equity? Is it a true break even? (Within a few hundred dollars of payoff, I’d consider a true break even).
Step 3: Build out a Leasehackr calculator with this new found info. What is the price they are selling the new car at? Is it discounted at all? If so, is the discount on par with other broker offers while accounting for their fee? Is it actually $0 due at signing or is there positive equity in your trade being used?
You have the full right to ask the dealer how they’re constructing this offer. Ask for a deal worksheet - ask them what the MSRP & selling price are. Plug it into the calc and verify it’s accurate —> it’s very easy to move numbers around but if you have all the data (I.e. your trade value, residual, MF) they cannot pull a fast one on you. Post your best attempt at a calc once you get this info, and then others will chime in & help you rather than crack jokes.
Lots of questions to ask, but asking AI will get you roasted & toasted by your friends here on this forum.
Yep. Done that. Also have a (ridiculous) proposal from LeasEnd for a buyout right now (buyout price from Hyundai without taxes).
A similar car to mine on Carvana is ~$100 over the total buyout price from Hyundai. The actual Carvana offer is the buyout price excluding taxes
This is where it gets complicated. When I posted the question, the dealership said they’d be back with number within minutes. They’ve disappeared since despite me texting them twice. I need to call them back. So I don’t have any actual numbers, otherwise I’d post them.
What I admittedly didn’t do is shop around with other dealerships.
#3 is why I went to the AI - for math. I didn’t ask “Is this a good trade to do?”. I asked: if this the full price of the car with no discount, and this is the money factor from Hyundai, and this is the residual value, and this is the tax rate and these are the fees, what would be the monthly payment for a $0 drive off.
And then I asked: If the monthly payment was my current monthly instead of what it calculated, what discount would that reflect on the original price of the car. And then I put that discount back into the calculator, and I got ~18 years. Which I think is a good deal?
I’d like to learn what I’m missing from using the AI this way, and how I could improve that.
