How do I hand off my car lease?
 

Not sure if this belongs in Tilted Motors, but need to start somewhere...

My wife and I have a Volvo wagon, with a lease that doesn't expire until Dec 2006.

Turns out we need need to upsize cars (second child and all), but it would cost us an arm and a leg to pay off the existing lease (~20 months of payments).

So, our question to the crew here at TFP is: is there a market for selling cars with leases that haven't expired? In other words, is there a market for people taking over existing leases?

One thing to keep in mind - we have ridiculously low mileage on the car. Less than 12k, and we've had the car for almost 2 years, so the car would be a good pick up for anyone who is in the market.

Thoughts?

I'd go to the dealer you bought it off of and see what they will do first. I believe that most dealers would probably take the old car back and lease you a new one.

I don't know about other areas but here in NE Ohio, dealers advertise that they will buy out leases on your purchase of a new car. Those cars then get sold to places like JD Byrider and other "buy here pay here" places.

Just the kind of practical suggestion I was looking for!

FYI, I spoke to Volvo and they were not particularly helpful. Their response was "sure you can get out of the lease. Just pay off all the remaining payments!" (which is more than $5k)

Also, the upsized Volvos are too rich for our blood. SUV is a fortune, and the big wagon is a handful, too.

take your volvo to another dealership like nissan or whatever. they will be more than happy to get you out of their competitors car and into one of theirs. i did that with my last car and had no problems.

Well, yes they are, but everyone I've spoken with wants me to eat the remainder of the lease payment, which is a lot.

The results of my efforts:

When you are dealing with a sizeable amount on your outstanding lease, no dealer is going to eat it just to get your business. They will need to pay off the lease when they take your car, so they are going to factor that into their price.

Nobody I have spoken with seems willing to eat part of the remaining lease (in fact, they typically charge me some amount over the outstanding lease payments).

that sucks man, i don't know what else to tell ya. you might just have to wait until you pay off a little more of your car.

Sadly, that was not an option. We absolutely had to get a bigger car, so we wound up paying off the lease and getting a new one.

That means I have (or will) effectively pay for the use of 2 cars for the next 18 months, while only actually being able to use 1.

Lesson learned: when leasing a car, be absolutely sure you will not need a different one over the course of your lease.

We've just run into a similar situation, and we were lucky enough to get a salesman who doesn't work on commission to give the straight poop.

As you have found out, a lot places don't even want to deal with it. The ones that do generally are going to roll the payoff amount into your next purchase, so that you are still paying for the other car, just via a new payment. When we went over the numbers with the person, she indicated that we would be about $5k short on a "trade-in" and considering our remaining payments were under $4k, she recommended that if we were going to buy, it might make more sense to keep both until the lease expired - assuming we could afford a double car payment for another year. We haven't decided yet what to do, but that may be our option since the new car would be a convertible and the "old" car is an SUV. Oh the pleasures of a changing mind.

Yep. If you have the ability to keep both cars (parking being a major concern), you might as well, since you are paying for them both anyway.

Granted, in doing so, you also take on the burden of insuring 2 cars, maintaining 2 cars, etc.