the question of leasing versus buying a car comes up all the time and depending on who you talk to can be rather controversial what is the better financial decision though in order to figure that out we need to figure out what the total cost of car ownership is per year in order to get a fair comparison between Leasing and buying a car it sounds pretty simple but there are a lot of factors that we want to break down in today's video in addition there's also intangibles that you might want to consider before buying versus leasing a car such as depreciation maintenance plans and just the feeling of overall ownership costs these days can vary quite widely as the current autol loan interest rates are higher than ever bringing the average monthly car payment of a new car in America to almost $729 per month if you do want a cheaper monthly payment though people usually tend to lease their cars in this situation so I don't know if you know this already but when you are leasing a car you're basically renting the car for a set period of time usually about 3 years is the standard term and at the end of 3 years you need to give that car back to the car dealership during those three years you're making monthly payments on the car and those monthly payments cover four different things the first is depreciation since cars lose value over time when you lease a car what you're essentially doing is you're paying for how much the car's value goes down during the time that you're leasing it for example if a car is worth $30,000 at the beginning of the lease and then $20,000 at the end of the three-year lease term you're essentially making payments on the $10,000 loss in value over that lease term number two your monthly payment also covers a interest or a finance charge car dealership leasing the car to you is lending you the car value for the leases term so you're going to pay a finance charge for this and this is usually determined by the car dealership's Bank as well as broad economic factors like the current interest rate your monthly payment will also cover any taxes associated with the lease that's Factor number three as well as any fees with the lease that's number four leasing then is usually cheaper on a monthly basis than buying a car and financing it because leasing you're only really covering the difference in loss and value of depreciation and you're not basically financing the entire value of the car right then so let's use an example here because that usually illustrates it a little bit better say we wanted to buy this Toyota Rav 4 hybrid which suggested retail price is $31,385 say you want to lease it for 3 years and pretend you make a down payment of $3,000 on this car which is a pretty typical ask for a three-year lease term all right so the term is 3 years you'll get 12,000 m a year and at the end of the lease you'll be able to buy this car outright from the dealer for their set residual value of $2,088 if you're wondering how I got this number I just looked it up on the edmonds.com car forums where you can find the residual value of almost any car you're looking at buying the information is typically crowdsourced from other car dealers all across the country and usually just requires a Google search you can see this post that I found from a couple months ago this says that the RF 4le hybrid that we were looking at has a residual value of 67% so I simply just multiplied 67% times our purchase price of 31475 that means the total amount that you're going to pay on on your car lease over 3 years is the $3,000 down payment as we talked about before as well as all of the payments added together so that's $394 a month for 36 months that brings our grand total to $1 17,18 to lease the car for 3 years that's how much we would have paid in total and at the end of 3 years you're given the option to buy the car outright for $2,883 years you buy the car outright that way we can compare the cost of leasing to the cost of buying in terms of total cost cost of the vehicle that means you're able to own your Toyota Rav 4 hybrid after the lease ends for a total of $ 38,2 72 okay let's go ahead and run the numbers for buying the car but before we do that make sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't subscribed already I'm planning on releasing a bunch of videos in 2024 about financial topics just like this one and subscribing is free and you can always change your mind later even though secretly I hope you don't actually change your mind and you just never unsubscribe for my channel forever I'm just kidding you can do what you want but let's talk about buying now all right so when it comes to buying you'll typically make a down payment on the car and then you're going to finance the rest of the car over that term whatever you choose and the terms are usually a bit longer usually five or 6 years what that means is that you're taking on a loan with the financial institution that's usually provided to you by the car dealership and you're making payments on that loan so principal and interest for the entire life of that loan until you pay off the car your interest rate is going to vary differently depending on what the economic factors are at the time so what the interest rates are in the United States as well as what your personal credit score is with an excellent credit score these days usually the interest rates for an auto loan are between 5 and 6% so we'll use 6% in today's video now of course if you are watching this in the future and interest rates have comeone down what you can do is just Google the fact you can just Google this average car loan interest rates and the month and the year that you are currently in and you'll probably get an average estimate of what your interest rate is going to be all right so using a 6% interest rate again the car that we're looking at is31 $1,475 we'll also make a down payment of $3,000 and let's pretend that we're going to finance this vehicle for 5 years or 60 months that means our monthly payment here is going to be $551 a month we'll be paying that for 60 months and at the end of 5 years the Toyota RF 4 actually keeps its value quite well and only depreciates 21% according to car edge.com that means at the end of five years we can resell this car for $24,885 of course this is the toyoto Rav 4 on car.com it might not be the hybrid version so if we want to take a more conservative approach we can say that we can resell the car for maybe 24,000 or 23,000 it doesn't really matter as long as you are comfortable with your estimate and you are playing around with that calculation for your own situation in any case let's continue with our example that means the total cost of car ownership for this Toyota RAV for hybrid is going to be our down payment which is $3,000 plus the monthly payments of $550 $51 time 60 months and that's going to give us a grand total of $36,250 hypothetically sell this car for the market value of $24,885 that means your total cost of car ownership for the past 5 years has been the total price that you paid $36,800 over 5 years all right but I know what you were thinking right now which is that Humphrey you just compared a 5-year financing term to a three-year lease term you can't compare these two these are not Apples to Apples comparisons and I definitely agree with you so let's do the same numbers for a 3-year financing period if we were to buy the car outright over 3 years we would still make the same down payment of $3,000 but our monthly payments would now be $866 for 36 months that brings our grand total to buying the car in 3 years to $ 34,1 76 you can see here that if you finance it for just 3 years the overall total cost of the car is a lot lower because you're not paying that much in interest however the monthly payments are a lot less manageable so here's what a full table of what the total cost looks like of this particular car across financing and Leasing and the different terms so if you buy the car for over 3 years 34,1 76 if you buy the car over 5 years it's going to cost you $36,988 something2 but now what I want to do is actually compare the cost of car ownership over a certain amount of time especially if you just want to return the car after three years so in this hypothetical example we are going to return the car after we leased it for three years figure out what the costs are for that as well as if we bought the car we're going to buy the car and then sell the car after 3 years and see how much it costs us there in the buying scenario if we use the three-year cost that means the total cost of the car is $34,100 your total cost of car ownership is going to be $852 over those 3 years and leasing scenario we only put our down payment down so that's $3,000 and our monthly payments of $1 4,184 over3 years so $1 17,18 was spent on the lease over 3 years and then you turn the car back in that is a huge disparity right like $117,000 or more to basically lease a car for three years or $88,000 to own the car for 3 years and then sell it off we'll talk about how we're going to resolve that in a second here but there is one huge reason we actually need to consider here when we're talking about this situation and that is that often times the residual purchase price of the car is going to be a lot lower than the market value that you're going to be able to get for that same used car in the market remember in our earlier example when I said you could lease the car for 3 years and then you had the option to buy it for $2,088 but if you were to own the car outright for three or 5 years you could sell the car for close to $24,000 or even $26,000 so what gives there the reason this is happening is quote because today's used car market has a lot of demand that means your car's resale value is almost guaranteed to be much higher than your residual value in other words you'll be able to buy your lease for much less than you would be able to sell it for so each car is going to be a little bit different depending on the used car market at the time now to get a fair Apples to Apples comparison of leasing costs versus buying costs after you don't have the car anymore let's pretend the person who leased the car actually bought the car outright got the residual value price that they got 2188 and then resold it for $226,000 or so that means that particular person would have paid $ 38,2 72 for the total Car Plus the lease and then they got back $ 26,120 bringing their total cost of leasing to $1,148 so here's what that looks like on a yearly basis in this table right here if we bought the car it would have cost us $852 total and if we leased the car it would have cost us $2,148 total that means the car ownership per year cost for this particular situation was 2684 per year in terms of buying or $4,049 per year in terms of leasing So based on the math right here for this particular car it's definitely more economical to buy the car rather than to lease the car in this situation and the big takeaway for this video is that for most people and most cars it's going to be more financially economical or financially prudent to buy a car especially if you're planning on owning the car for a long period of time over five six or seven years of course this is going to depend on a lot of things like depreciation and residual value as well as what you can get for it in the used car market if you're wondering how it's going to work out for you and your particular making model you need to run the numbers yourself there are going to be some scenarios in which there are cars that are much better to lease than to buy for example let's pretend that you wanted to drive a Range Rover or some sort of sports car that has high maintenance costs and a lot of depreciation these are sometimes better to lease because you can drive a luxury car for a lot cheaper than owning it out right if it has maintenance issues it will likely be covered by the dealer and often times you are only paying tax on the depreciated car amount rather than the least car amount leasing a car might also depend on your personal situation if you're the type of person who wants to lease or try a new different car every single 3 years and you're really not that diligent in taking care of your car perhaps leasing is a better option for you leasing may also be good for someone who runs a business and needs a car as part of that business and is able to write off some of those payments netting them some savings over time the other great thing about leasing is that you generally don't have to worry about car maintenance at all usually they have dealer warranties for whenever you're leasing the car for the entire term so that if they're is an issue you can just bring it to the dealership and they will fix it for you but with leasing also comes some disadvantages as well often times there are mileage limits so if you get a lease that can only allow you to drive 10,000 m a year if you go over those 10,000 miles you generally have to pay 10 cents or 25 cents per mile that you go over of course when you buy the car you don't really even have to worry about that you can put as many miles on the car as you need to and you just generally don't have to worry and you have that peace of mind another disadvantage of leasing in my opinion is that if you get into a lease for 3 or four years and you don't like the car after let's say 6 months or 12 months you're generally stuck in that lease unless you're willing to pay a early termination fee and that can actually be pretty hefty and lastly I think one of the disadvantages of the lease is that at the end of the lease term you don't have a car to show for it and you generally have to be expected to Pony up and pay the entire amount if you want to buy it out right so what I want to sum up here is that buying is probably better for somebody that fits the following four criteria number one you're probably someone that wants the best financial option in most situations and then number two you don't mind driving the same car for 5 8 10 12 15 years number three you actually like the sense of ownership and that makes you proud and gives you some peace of mind and number four you don't really want to have to deal with the limitations that a lease will put on you leasing is generally better for somebody who fits the following criteria so number one they want a new car every 3 or 4 years number two you're somebody that wants to drive more of a car for a lower monthly payment so maybe you're eyeing a sports car you could generally get a lower payment for that than if you were to finance it with the dealership number three leasing is better for you if you don't think you're going to go over the mileage limits like let's say you know that you don't drive that often then perhaps leasing is a good option and number four leasing is pretty good for those business owners who are able to write off a portion of their lease payments from their business all right I hope this video was helpful if you did enjoy it make sure to subscribe to this Channel and check out my next video on cars that I'll leave up right here for you guys and I will see you guys in the next video all right [Music] peace