Please, go easy on me here… Have never even consider leasing, but it seems to be the best solution for us now. Looking at a Toyota RAV4 in Texas (Waco or surrounding) and just need a gentle nudge on how to get this rolling. My thanks for your compassion on someone the used to buy cars!
How do you know leasing is the best solution for you when you don’t know much about it?
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Totally fair question, Jon. It seems the best as we drive about 8K miles a year and begin to hate paying lots of maint costs after year 4. Leasing, at the moment, seems like a better option. Sound fair?
Just helped a friend on a RAV4 LE 2WD yesterday.
MSRP: 25888
They had a whole bunch of dealer add-on’s (which I don’t count in the MSRP as I consider them freebies-carpeted mats, trunck mat, tint, pinstripes, scotchguard, some external paint protection, 2 years of services)
Selling price is 21,250
And they gave 1,000 more for the trade in than anyone else.
Not sure what the RV or MF are since it was a cash deal.
I’m thinking there is some more room on the price, but the friend didn’t want me to be more aggressive in pricing (go figure)
Good info and thanks~! I’m shooting for a similar price point, but was thinking more like 20-something. Planning on reaching out to about 5 local dealers and seeing what they can meet.
Appreciate the help!
You can buy an extended warranty after year 3 for $1,000 (or maybe even less), which will be about the same as your lease acquisition costs of about $595 (if not marked up) x 2 (you go to the lease #2 after 3 years). Then if you hold a car like RAV4 for 4-5 years and then trade it and buy again, your monthly payments will be on par or lower than lease payments on the same car due to a lot of equity in he car. I’m assuming 60-63 month financing at a decent rate of 0.9-1.9% and a high resale value car and MSRP $35K or less…
One thing you want to do is familiarize yourself with the different Rav4 trims and options so you know exactly what you want, that way you’ll know roughly what the MSRP of the car you want is rather than have a dealer try and push stuff you don’t need. Use the Rav4 build tool on the Toyota website to learn about the trims and options and how much it will cost you. MSRP is everything with leases and you need to know this to know what kinds of payments you can expect. Toyota also has special lease offers on their website, another good way to get a rough idea of what a lease might cost you and a good starting point before you start bargaining with dealers. Here’s the current deal in my region (SoCal)
Read Leasing 101 and How to Calculate Payments by Hand.
Then search for How to negotiate in this forum. There are at least two very good threads.
Perfect, max_g!!! My thanks! Going to look at some tomorrow then the fun begins!
Thanks for your tips. Now I got enough reasons to avoid leasing my next car. Looking to get into a rav4 or cr-v