Lease buyout guides

A lease buyout loan is a used-car loan with extra steps, and the steps are where every usual source falls down. Here is who writes them and what each one actually does for you.

A buyout loan is priced off the same grid as any used-car loan. Here is what moves the number, where the dealer hides its cut, and why a low payment is not a low rate.

A buyout is the one used-car loan where the lender can know the car, the payer and the price. With bad credit that is your whole edge, and most lenders throw it away.

You cannot haggle the residual. You can remove every fee, every add-on and the dealer's loan markup, and that is worth more. Here is the script.

Ford Credit owns the car and set the residual. The Ford dealer owns neither, and the gap between their numbers is the whole negotiation.

The residual on a Hyundai lease is a contract number and it is not going to move. Almost everything stacked on top of it can. Here is where the money actually is.

People search for GM Financial lease buyout negotiation expecting a trick that lowers the residual. There is none. The money is in four other places, and the dealer is standing in front of all of them.

Short version: the residual on a Honda lease is a contract number, and nobody is going to haggle it with you. The longer version is about what you can move, and about one piece of paper that holds up more Honda buyouts than the money does.

Ally is the bank behind leases on a lot of badges, which is why the question comes up so often. The answer is the same for every one of them: the residual is a contract number. The negotiation is everywhere else.

Every Tesla lease buyout thread is a pile of answers that were true for somebody else's agreement in some other year. Yours has one source of truth, and it is not a forum.

A retailer's offer on your leased car is only worth something if the leasing company will take the retailer's money. Many will not, and the offer is a reseller's number either way.

A leased car can be bought three ways: by you, by a dealer, or by a third party. The price, the fees and the chance the leasing company says yes are different for each.

A lease buyout has two legitimate costs on top of the residual: the fee your contract names and the tax and title charges your state collects. Everything else on the sheet is somebody's margin.

Your buyout is five numbers added together, and four of them are printed in your lease or on your state's fee schedule. The dealer's version adds a sixth, and the sixth is theirs.

Three doors at the end of a lease: buy it, trade it, return it. One of them keeps your equity, one hands it to the dealer, and one pays the leasing company to take the car back.

An early buyout is the rest of your lease paid in one check. It is rarely a bargain, sometimes the right move, and always a number you should get from the leasing company, not the dealer.

The sales tax you paid during the lease was tax on the payments. The buyout is a new sale, and New York taxes it again, on the full buyout price, at the rate where the car is registered.

Connecticut treats a lease buyout as what it is, a sale of a used car to you, and taxes it on the buyout price. The tax you paid during the lease does not cover it.

Maryland does not call it sales tax, and that confuses people into thinking there is none. There is a 6% vehicle excise tax, collected by the MVA when the car is titled, and a lease buyout is a title transfer.

Virginia's Motor Vehicle Sales and Use Tax, SUT on the DMV forms, is charged when a vehicle is titled to a new owner. A lease buyout titles the car to you, so SUT is charged on the buyout price.

California taxes the buyout of a leased car as a purchase, at the combined rate for the address where the car is registered, and the DMV collects it when the title moves to you. The tax you paid during the lease covered the payments, not the car.

A buyout package is the leasing company's side of the sale: a price with a deadline and the forms the state wants. Here is what every page does and which pages are not really part of it.

The leasing company owns the car until the day the payoff clears. Getting the title from its name into yours is a separate process with its own clock, and nobody at a bank or credit union runs it for you.

Both paths end with you owning the same car. One pays tax, title, fees, and interest once. The other pays most of them twice. Here is how to add it up and when the second path still wins.

A lease buyout is you paying the leasing company the price in your contract and taking the title. Here is the whole process in order, who does each step, and where it goes wrong.