Anyone ever exited a car lease?

[Schieffelin]

DH and I leased a car last year because we were able to get a really good deal on a car we liked and were planning on buying it at the end of the lease.

Now our circumstances have changed because of a job change. We had to move to a city where the insurance and taxes are astronomically high. Not to mention that we don’t really need a car that much anymore because we can use public transportation and zip cars.

Our leasing company doesn’t allow lease transfers or early termination (of course). But there is a company called swap a lease that will help you sell the car on their website through a loan buy-out program. We really really want to get rid of this car but this company seems kind of sketchy. Have any of you used anything like this before?

 

[simplyrose]

Another thing you can consider looking into is trading in your lease. We did this over the fall. We needed a cheaper car, but our leas hadn’t matured yet (but we were close…had about 6 months left). My husband read somewhere that if your least vehicle is close to it’s maturation date and is is very good condition, it may actually be “worth” more than your note. In other words, you strike even when you turn it in…the company you leased from expects a certain value for the car when you return it. Our was worth more, so not only did we get out of the costly lease, we actually had money left over to go towards a down payment after we had paid of the lease (we had no early pay-off penalty).

So let’s say our car should be worth (according to some formula) 40K when we turn it in in December. A dealership offered us 44K for it in July We paid $500 a month. So if we took his offer, we would pay off the remaining $3000 we owed and came out on top with an extra $1000 which we put down on the cheaper car. Win-win. Totally legal. Not something everyone knows about (for obvious reasons). When we had our car evaluated for trade-in, we never mentioned it was a leased vehicle.

 

[Schieffelin]

Another thing you can consider looking into is trading in your lease. We did this over the fall. We needed a cheaper car, but our leas hadn’t matured yet (but we were close…had about 6 months left). My husband read somewhere that if your least vehicle is close to it’s maturation date and is is very good condition, it may actually be “worth” more than your note. In other words, you strike even when you turn it in…the company you leased from expects a certain value for the car when you return it. Our was worth more, so not only did we get out of the costly lease, we actually had money left over to go towards a down payment after we had paid of the lease (we had no early pay-off penalty).

So let’s say our car should be worth (according to some formula) 40K when we turn it in in December. A dealership offered us 44K for it in July We paid $500 a month. So if we took his offer, we would pay off the remaining $3000 we owed and came out on top with an extra $1000 which we put down on the cheaper car. Win-win. Totally legal. Not something everyone knows about (for obvious reasons). When we had our car evaluated for trade-in, we never mentioned it was a leased vehicle.

Thank you simplyrose! This is great information. Our lease still has a couple years left on it so I don’t know if that hurts us, but it’s worth a try to get a dealer’s appraisal and try to sell it to them. At this point I only care about breaking even and getting rid of the car.