Buying a car, whether it’s your first or your 5th, can be a pretty long and annoying experience, there are loads of options out there now, and it is hard to know which option is best for you. It is an important decision to make as the wrong decision could leave you suffering financially.
I have recently been looking at buying myself a used Vauxhall Astra, and my browser kept bombarding me with adverts for Vauxhall Astra contract hire deals, which I must admit became more and more appealing the more I looked, but does leasing a car make fiscal sense?
From a purely financial perspective it is not a great idea to lease a car. This is no surprise as you are giving out money for something that you aren’t going to own. However, buying a new car doesn’t make financial sense either, for it will depreciate rapidly unless it is a special limited edition or something which you don’t plan on putting any miles on.
That leaves you with the option of buying a used car that is at least 3 years old. By this point the car will have taken the biggest hit on its residual value meaning you don’t stand to lose as much on it and it is still relatively new. However there is always the risk that is associated with a used car, that there is no guarantee that there isn’t an underlying issue that you don’t know about, and you may end up spending a fortune on a used car over the course of a few years. So maybe when you think about it like that leasing isn’t the worst option.
With used car horror stories in mind, and my own first hand experiences, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to get on the internet and do a search for personal car lease Vauxhall Astra. The second you hit enter on search like that you are hit with a hell of a lot of choice, and before long you will be seeing offers every, ads will pop up on other web pages you go to that have nothing to with cars, until small monthly payments do actually start coming way more appealing. Hardly surprising, in my case it was either buy a £8,000 used Vauxhall Astra 1.4T 16V 150 Elite 5dr and set up a finance deal, or pay £172 a month for 3 years after an initial payment of £1,726. The lease looks more manageable for obvious reasons, the car is new so it will be under guarantee, you shouldn’t get hit with any huge service bills and you don’t have to worry about the cars residual value at all.
The point that got me was my purchasing habits when it comes to cars, if I bought it outright by the time I got to paying it off I would typically be looking for a new car anyway, so regardless of how I go about it I’m going to be spending the best part of £200 a month for the foreseeable future. Obviously, the benefit of buying a used car outright is I can get some money in my pocket each time I trade the car in. But it is extra admin and shopping around, having to barter with dealers etc which is genuinely up there with my least favourite things to do, right behind selling a car privately.
As you can probably gather I am leaning more and more to personal contract hire Vauxhall Astra being the best option. To answer the original question, does leasing a car make fiscal sense, no, but your other options aren’t exactly fantastic and leasing makes sense in just about every other aspect. If I could get a Vauxhall Astra business car lease, through the company I work for, that would be ideal.