One of the most common questions people ask when considering getting a car is whether it’s better to buy or lease. There are pros and cons to both but how do you decide which is the best option for you?
What’s the difference?
First of all let’s look at what the key differences are. If you buy a car you own the vehicle outright, subject to any finance you’ve used to buy it of course. When you come to change it or dispose of it you’ll get its remaining value back when you sell or trade it in.
Leasing involves making an initial payment followed by a series of monthly sums over two or three years. At the end of the term you can either simply hand the car back or opt to pay a residual amount in order to keep it.
Which is the Best Option?
Which you choose depends partly on your personal circumstances and partly on the type of car you want. If you buy a car it will depreciate – in other words lose value – over the time that you own it. If you plan on keeping the car for a long time this may not be too much of a problem, but if you plan on changing it regularly then depreciation will be your major cost.
If you’re considering car leasing Leicester companytotalmotion is one of many offering a range of options. When you take out a lease the monthly payments are calculated cover the depreciation of the vehicle. This is one of the reasons why prestige cars that depreciate more slowly are relatively cheaper to lease.
Having said that, if you cover a high mileage then leasing may not be the best option. Lots of miles will mean the car loses value faster, for this reason there’s usually a mileage cap on lease agreements with penalty charges if you exceed it.
If you would need to take out a loan to buy the car then you need to compare the loan repayments against the lease payments. A lease will often be cheaper with the added advantage that the initial deposit required will usually be less when leasing a car than when buying.
Road tax is usually included in the lease so that’s another cost you don’t have to worry about. Often insurance can be arranged through the leasing company too which means that premiums may be lower than if you owned the car and insured it yourself.
You can opt to have servicing included in your lease too, making it a way of fixing your motoring costs so there’ll be no big bills to take you by surprise.Note though that wear and tear items like tyres and exhausts aren’t usually included so you’ll still have to pay for those. Because most lease deals don’t run for more than three years you won’t have to worry about the MOT either.
It’s important to weigh up all of the pros and cons and do the calculations carefully but leasing can be a cost effective way of motoring and get you into a car you might not otherwise be able to afford.
