Sticky 2019 Jeep Cherokee Lease Eva l

In a bit of a pickle at the moment and trying to evaluate what the best course of action is. My wife has a 2017 Honda HRV 25 mos into a 36 mo lease, paying $290/mo (by herself, I don’t have a car) and she’s currently over-miles by 4k (40k miles, 36k total). In an effort to get out of the lease and into a better/safer car, we are considering a Jeep Cherokee 2019. Since we plan to cut daily driving by over 50%, leasing should suffice (she drives daily to work and we plan to move closer to her office in the coming 4 months; 2-3hrs of driving daily to 40-50mins). She is tired of the go-cart Honda and looking to get something with more oomf.

I received quotes from a few places on leases and am requesting advice on the existing deal/situation:
Base Jeep Cherokee Ltd 4x4 2019
MSRP: $36,835
Dealer Discount: -$1,218
Selling price: $35,617.00
Rebate: $3,750.00 (to help payoff Honda lease, check in hand)
Terms:
42 Mos, 15k Annual Miles, $0 Down (pmts cover taxes, registration, plates & 1st mo pmt)
Monthly: $514.00 (**EDIT, it’s actually $429, not that it makes it MUCH better)

Original Honda lease wasn’t great for sure, this is my first time dealing with leases and cars in general. Would much rather just buy a used car outright, especially if you intend to drive it as much as she did.

Before looking at a new car, I think you need to get a buy quote for the CR-V from CarMax, Carvana, Vroom, etc. and compare that with an official payoff quote from Honda (as if you were to trade the car - residual + remaining payments + any termination fees). Then you can figure out what your negative equity is.

As far as a replacement, I would encourage sticking to 36 months to ensure you stay within warranty and also avoid paying for a 4th year of registration.

Also, generally leasing to buy does not work out in anyone’s favor except in pretty rare circumstances. You might end up paying much more than you otherwise would…

This is absolutely atrocious for so many reasons.

  1. Your dealer discount is miniscule and laughable.
  2. You’ll be out of warranty by the time the lease ends (and considering Jeep reliability you don’t want to do that). You don’t want to buy a Cherokee at the end of the lease.
  3. You’re rolling in 11 months of payments and the rebate doesn’t help you at all. Everyone gets that rebate.
  4. Look into Carvana / Vroom / Carmax quotes instead of rolling in negative equity.
  5. This belongs in the worse deals of all time thread and is not something you should be actively considering

Really appreciate the feedback here. It’s definitely not good, we understand that, but we would be going from one person paying to two splitting it, which is why we looked around. I’ll look into the third party quotes.

That doesn’t make any sense though. How is two people splitting an awful deal any better than one person paying an awful payment?

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Yeaaah that payment is shockingly rubbish. Good advice already posted. Get the payoff and Carvana etc quotes and then review. It’s worth noting you can get $50k+ X3’s and Q5’s for less money than that.

If you’re intent on the Cherokee, do a quick search on here for what numbers people have been getting as a guide.

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Dealer originally quoted $429/mo same terms and everything, over the phone, but emailed $514. Will research and clarify this as well

So she drives 20k/year, but you’re looking at a 15k lease and considering 12k? The only difference at the end of the new lease is that you’ll be even further upside down.

Edit: don’t convince yourself than the HRV is “unsafe” just to validate rolling so much negative into a new lease, because it’s not. If you want to get into something different do it with open eyes.

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She’s going to be driving much less daily in ~3 months… as I originally stated. Going from 2-3 hrs daily to 40-50 mins. Not an excuse for a bad deal but figured I’d correct your comment.

It’s probably also worth noting that the Honda seems to have better safety ratings than the Jeep according to NHTSA too. If safety is important for you I’d be looking at SUV’s that have a bunch of the safety tech as standard like the new RAV4 or even a C-RV really?

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I took that comment with a big grain of salt, since you said ‘plan’ twice as opposed to ‘are’ or ‘will’ etc. I plan to have a 250% ROI in my day trade account…

What’s value vs payoff on the HRV according to Vroom, Carvana etc? You’re better off either selling it to a third party, or hiding that amount of negative in a vehicle with big dealer discount/rebates (check marketplace and shared deals sections).

Thanks firefighter for the info. I looked into some quotes and it looks like the negative equity is just under $4k. I’m completely new to this leasehackr stuff so bear with me… we would need to buyout the hrv at the payoff amount then sell to a third party to efficiently get out of the lease?

Wouldn’t it be easier to just try and drive less on the weekends and eat the fees at the end of the lease or do these third parties (carvana, vroom, etc.) make the process fairly quick and painless? She can’t be without a car for an extended period of time (>1 week). Afterwards, we could look into a much better lease (since she’ll be driving much less in the future) and begin anew. Looking for constructive feedback.

You need to figure out how many miles she is likely to drive by the end of the lease.

You’re 4k over with 11 months to go. At current driving pace average of 1600 miles a month, that would be an additional 17,500 miles in the next 11 months for a total of 21.5k miles over the lease limit. Assuming $0.20/mile overage x 21,500 miles, you would be at $4300 at the end of the lease in overage charges. If it were $0.25/mile overage, you would be at $5375. Need to see what your lease says.

The Carvana, Vroom process is fairly easy - if you have negative equity, you would cut your Carvana/Vroom (I believe - someone can check me) a check for the negative equity and they take the car away now.

However, $4000 buys a lot of mileage overage. If you can afford to just cut a check now, your best bet is probably to ride out the lease, watch your miles the best you can to minimize cost, pay the overage, and be more careful next time. Rolling over negative equity is almost never a good idea and you pay either way.

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I’m still baffled how you went looking for a ‘better/safer car with more oomf’ and settled on a Cherokee?

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People want what they want and Jeeps can occasionally be good values. I’m not here to judge that (usually).

Ensure that you are looking at the buyout for dealers. Honda makes it a bit different IIRC.

Even if she’s driving 40-50 minutes a day that still sounds like you’re going to go over 15k miles per year (unless it’s in crazy traffic like NoVA or NYC, etc)

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didn’t think posting here would be such a free-for-all… then again, its the internet. Believe me, there was a lot of discussion about what she wanted, her family is a jeep family and we have a friend that works at a dealership in service (no we didn’t get this quote from his dealership), took a while to get her off of a wrangler…

thankfully the 40-50 min amount would be all highway. I’ll keep that in mind for quotes… think she’ll end up riding out the lease and I’ll help her cut a check at the end

Thanks for the info! Broke down the two scenarios; if we moved and she drove <=1000 mi/mo vs if we didn’t and she maintained her current rate and got a range of overage fees of $2.7k - $3.3k @ $0.15/mi. Should be less than neg. equity as quotes ranged from $3.7k - $4.7k, but could easily be worse. So we’d be paying roughly $1k+ to use a third party to get out of it :confused: . Appreciate all of the helpful comments!

With those payments from original post, you can get a Grand Cherokee Overland. Grand Cherokee Altitude and Limited are less than $500 so if you are set on a Jeep Cherokee, payment should probably be under $400 for a good deal.

Check out Edmunds forum for MF/residual in your zip code. Do some more research on the #s and good luck.