@virginiaann I have a 65k car on a four-year leasing and I pay around 500 CHF a month.
I put a down-payment of 10k at the beginning to lower my monthly cost. The residual by memory is around 40%.
If you are determined to go for leasing, my suggestion is to sell your car, put a higher down-payment at the moment of the signature of the leasing and keep the monthly fee at less than 10% of your monthly net income.
If you write the car off, you’ve just covered more of the cost for the bank. You don’t see any of your down payment back as the leasing company gets the payout.
If you have a sub-1% lease deal, it’s best to manage a higher monthly to protect yourself a little from the aforementioned unfortunate situation.
@virginiaann I pay 330 on a brand new car (85k) and I paid down about 38k. Keep in mind that leasing rates are way lower for new than for used cars. For a new car, depending on the brand and offers they may have, you'll find rates as low as 1%. For a used car I'd say it's hard to find a lease with a rate below 4%. Check if you have fleet discounts with your employer. In my case I got about 25% off, which gave the new car an advantage over the young used.
@proven I'm not going to keep the car, most likely. You can think of the initial payment as preloading monthly payments, it's gone. Higher initial payment, lower monthly rate and vice versa. Doesn't matter much either way. If you don't want to keep the car, the most important thing is a high residual.
Hm...so this means that even if you choose to pick a new car from the same company you pretty much have to do another initial payment (after you return the one you chose at first)
@proven You don't have to. You can, if you want to. If you don't, the monthly rate is higher. It's more or less a magic trick to make it seem like the car is cheaper per month.
@virginiaann I have a car-Abonnement from Carvolution. One Year, 14.400km and all expenses covered except fuel for 914 CHF per month. Cars worth is about ~75K CHF.
@younghen I fully agree - it would be much cheaper per month if the contract would be longer than 1 year. But we needed the flexibility. In our situation it is worth it. Uber is not available around where I live. We will get rid of the car once we move into a bigger town. But our overall experience with a car-abo was good.
@ateares Was this particular car something that you really want? I am spending a significant amount of money on cars myself so not gonna judge (at least not too much), but it seems a bit unusual "hey, we need a car for one year, let's take one that cost almost 80 grand".
I checked these long-term car rental companies and they make sense financially in very few cases.
