bridow

i leased through honda of joliet. 316/month for 36 months - 12k a year with 1750 down. leasing isnt for everyone, but its a tax write-off for small business owners. my cars an '03 so thats probably why i got a "good" deal imho

jasonw

Considering you can get S2ks below invoice, you can easily sell for far more than purchase price - 13,000 after 3 years...

For me, that would be $16,540. Even High-mileage '00s sell for more than that...

PilotKD

Makes no sense, huh? Lets see. You buy an S2k for $29,995, brand new and put $20,000 down on a 36 month finance with 4.0% interest, 7% sales tax. You're monthly payment is $357.09 with no additional fees added for registration/tags. Now, there are loads of 3 year old S2k's going for anywhere between $19k-23k range. If you think you'll be able to sell you're 3 year old S2k for $25k you're smoking the good stuff. Especially if you actually drive it and have a significant amount of miles on it (like me: 20k+ since Jan '04). If you've got 30k+ miles on it after 3 years, you'd be lucky to get $21k for it. Now, you threw $20,000 into a car and payed $760.24 worth of interest over 36 months. You sell it for $21k and wow, would you look at that, you profited $239.76. Was it worth dropping $20,000 into something that is just going to depreciate vs maybe putting your $20,000 into a house or an IRA, 401k, stocks, bonds, CD, you name it? I love it when people harp on buying vs leasing because unless you can part with that kind of money without batting an eyelash, leasing becomes a whole lot more attractive. Either way, you're not driving a collectors item.

jasonw

If you buy new for $30K(more than I paid) and sell for $21K(low-ball), with $700 in interest, you will have paid $9,700 for 3 years. How does that compare to your lease?

KGB

I've sold 2 S2k's and people who say they'd easily get over $20K for 3 yr old s2k with 30K miles on it are dreaming. Asking price is one thing, the offers that owners get and the selling price is another matter all together. If you want to know actual value look at completed auctions on ebay.

Elistan

This is simply based off of 180 or so MY02 S2000s listed on www.cars.com... Of course, a lot of those are dealers... So this time, I've only extraced those for sale by "Classified Ad" and "Individual Seller" on the assumption that those are private sellers. Obviously, trade-in credit from a dealer would be a good bit less.

That yielded 33 cars with an average asking price of $23,280 and a standard deviation of $2,186.

$33,150 MSRP minus $23,280 resell price equals $9,870 lost from depreciation. Or $12,056 if you lower your price by the standard deviation. Then again, if you assume a new-sale price of HardtopGuy's $30,995, that's only $7,715 and $9,901 lost.

Look at our For Sale section on s2ki for MY02s, I see:
56k miles, $17,500
29k miles, $21,900
18k miles, $21,900
18k miles, $23,500
16k miles, $22,500
41k miles, $22,000
13k miles, $25,000

So at the low end, the $17,500 car lost $13,495 from an easily doable sale price of $30,995.

(Obviously I'm simplifying things by not paying attention to sales tax, registration and the like - but don't those things apply to both the lease and the outright sale? )

ProV1

huh? where did $700 interest come from.. even w/ 5.25% APR you're looking at $3300 - $3400 in interest payments if you finance

jasonw

Not if you finance for 36 months. And my rate is 4.75%. I was going by the numbers PilotKD gave. Of course these are all variables. I was just shining a light on some of the advantages of buying...

00S2K01S4

Hey this lease wouldn't have been so bad back in Sept of 99. Let's see:

Paid: MSRP + $6500 +TTL = ~41K OTD

If I was to sell my car, I would probably ask around 19K and sell for 18K. Looking back, I would still do it again. This car is great.