Saving Money On Car Leasing - Part 2 - Lease Brokers And Why We Used One
Welcome to Saving Money with Andrew!
Normally, I love to negotiatate. I’ve written four posts about negotiation, including my two-part series on negotiating an apartment lease (part 1 and part 2), a reader interview about salary negotiation, and a post on negotiation basics.
But unfortunately, negotiating with car dealers is unpleasant. I’ve done it six times and have dealt with salesmen who’ve lied or misled about key terms and features, kept me waiting for long periods of time, refused to give any information via phone or email, and bombarded me with calls and voicemails for days.
Even worse, leasing or financing a car is complicated. Many of the key terms are confusing (money factors, residuals, capitalized cost, etc), and dealers often obfuscate or try to shift your focus to a monthly payment, trading off a lower monthly payment for other undesirable terms.
And so, as discussed in part 1 of this series, we used a flat-fee professional (a lease broker) to handle the entire process.
Auto lease brokers typically have connections with dealerships for various car brands and are able to offer pre-negotiated deals, often at significant discounts. While it’s sometimes possible to get these deals on your own, it can be difficult and time-consuming. Many dealers refuse to even give you quotes via phone or email, making it very difficult to effectively negotiate.
Why did we use a broker?
There was very little downside. The broker charged a $699 fee, but it was only due when we decided to go forward with leasing through them.
The time savings was enormous—we saved many hours, and didn’t have to visit any dealerships (other than brief visits to test drive cars). The whole process took three business days from our first text message to picking up the car.
The deal was fantastic, with the lease priced based on a >20% discount to MSRP (including a $7500 electric vehicle lease incentive). The total payments over the life of the lease were >$2600 less than the next-best deal we found!
People report a wide variety of experiences with lease brokers, so we were fortunate to find one we liked. We found ours on Leasehackr, a fantastic website for researching car leases. Among the great ways to use the site:
Leasehackr’s “Pre-Negotiated Deals” has a wide range of current broker offers on most popular car models. I considered using one of the deals, and also used the page for useful context on currently-available deals (to compare with quotes I received from dealers and the broker I used).
Leasehackr’s “Signed!” section shows recently-signed leases by other users, and is a great way to research what deals are possible, and whether your deal is a good one.
Leasehackr’s Calculator tool lets you input the terms of your lease to help you make sure the numbers add up, and also gives you a “Leasehackr Score” that you can compare to other signed leases (in the Signed! section), to see how your deal compares.
Finally, Leasehackr’s forums are terrific, with threads in which you can ask questions about leases and find a lease broker for a particular car. Many lease brokers, including the one we use, post links to their deal sheets (generally a public Google spreadsheet) on the forum. This lets you compare deals across brokers and find the best deal on your desired vehicle.
We used Auto Ninjas, which has been around for years and has hundreds of good reviews. We had a great experience, but there are many other reputable lease brokers out there.
It’s important to be careful when choosing a broker, however, because in addition to paying a fee directly to them, they will also likely request your driver’s license and other personal information as part of the leasing process. It felt weird to send all that info to someone I had only texted with (we never even spoke to him), so I did a lot of research beforehand to be careful.
Going forward, I plan to use a lease broker for all our future car leases. It made the experience much more pleasant, and even kind of fun.
And just as a reminder in case this post sounds like an ad—I don’t take any advertising, sponsorships, or placements for this newsletter, and Saving Money with Andrew will always remain free. I’ve never made any money from SMwA, and promise I never will.
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