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Utah Buick dealers are ready to help you make the right choice between your buying and leasing options, not always an easy job. One segment of your choosing will have to do with your personal priorities, preferences, values, and feelings. How crucial to you is driving new cars every two or three years? How valuable is keeping your risk of repairs low? How important is keeping your monthly payment down? How badly do you want to have a debt-free, payment-free car as soon as possible? Making decisions on such personal priorities helps sort out the non-financial issues, but it's also really important to comprehend the financial differences between buying and leasing.

Utah Buick dealers are ready to help you make the right choice between your buying and leasing options, not always an easy job. One segment of your choosing will have to do with your personal priorities, preferences, values, and feelings. How crucial to you is driving new cars every two or three years? How valuable is keeping your risk of repairs low? How important is keeping your monthly payment down? How badly do you want to have a debt-free, payment-free car as soon as possible? Making decisions on such personal priorities helps sort out the non-financial issues, but it's also really important to comprehend the financial differences between buying and leasing.

In a six-year thorough comparison of the purchase of a brand new $20,000 vehicle to the three-year leases of two consecutive new $20,000 vehicles, there are big differences in the amounts of money spent on down payments, tax, monthly payments, maintenance, insurance, and DMV costs. The purchased vehicle (with a five-year loan) cost $34,228 and resulted in a final few thousand dollars of retained value. The leased auto cost $39,176 and had no final retained value. That totals a $4948 greater cost to have the leased vehicles for six years, with no adjusting due to the purchased vehicle's retained value. The purchased auto in this scenario is debt-free for one out of the six years. Buying, therefore, provides a vehicle with higher monthly payments and partial equity, yet at a lower overall price, and leasing provides a car with lower payments, higher overall costs, and no equity.

So, in the six-year comparison, the cheapest route is to purchase a car, but this has larger monthly payments that could extend over the full six years. A purchaser would keep the same vehicle for six years instead of re-leasing a new one every three, but would maintain the option to keep the old vehicle as long as desired, potentially for many more years. Conversely, the leased car goes back to the dealer as soon as the lease is over, making the driver vehicle-less.

Leasing provides the advantage of a nonexistent or low down payment and less sales tax, but, generally, leasing costs more for insurance than purchasing does. Leased vehicles often have easy access to built-in gap coverage whereas purchased vehicles don't. That means that when a financed auto is totaled or stolen, the debtor could wind up paying thousands of dollars to the bank because the insurance company didn't pay enough to cover what was owed.

Leasing a car is somewhat more complicated than buying one is, and it gives more opportunities to misinterpret and misunderstand the process and make mistakes. So, it's prudent to be as informed and careful as possible when new to leasing. One thing to be aware of with leasing is that when it's over and you turn in your vehicle, if you've exceeded your allowed miles, you will pay a penalty. To get more leasing and buying information, visit your GMC, Buick, or Pontiac dealers in Utah.