To swapalease or not

[HAULN-SS]

Hey, so here's a thought experiment.

While living in WV, I have put roughly 2000 miles a month on a car for going to work and back. I was looking around on some of these lease trader websites, and I see that, for approximately the same money I was paying for the malibu, I could buy a (probably better) car with say 2100/miles left on say 12 - 15 more months of lease. The reason being that, i guess, people banked miles, never got around to using them, and now want out of a lease.

Take this car for example:

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.swapalease.com/lease/details/2013-Ford-Fusion.aspx?salid=789300">http://www.swapalease.com/lease/details ... lid=789300</a><!-- m -->

Not saying I would buy it, but just a good example. This is a Titanium edition of the car. For $7500 you could drive the piss out of it for those 16 months (which I would do), and then turn it back in no questions asked, and with no downpayment up front. This works out to approx 15 cents a mile. The malibu on the other hand which has basically no residual value has so far cost me about 11.5 cents a mile, with almost none of the features of that car.

Also, you can search by buyout amount too. For that car, if you were dead set on buying a ford fusion Ti, you could potentially pay that lease, and the buyout for $24,xxx total for a car with 10k miles on it. That's about 4k less than the cheapest used one i could find on truecar.com used car search.

Thoughts?

[Ken]

That's how I got my car, I assumed the lease from another owner in CT after he put about 8K on it.

Worked out great for me, I got a car I would otherwise not be able to get and without a down payment (at least in name, I had to pay taxes on the amount left on the lease when it came over). Not only that, at least through MMCA, they actually LOWERED the payments based on my credit. Had no idea that was even a possibility. Also found out that the original leasee is always on the hook for the payments, I guess that made sense but also kind of surprised me.

The buyout value, can't recall the exact number, was actually very fair and it's still my gameplan to buy it out once I'm done. Unless of course, i'm just flat out sick of it.

EDIT:
Forgot who it was that mentioned it in another thread, but if you though buying out of state was bad? Leasing is 50x worse. It took me about 4 months to complete the transaction. Still worth it, but goddamn what a pain in the ass.

[HAULN-SS]

What is MMCA?

In doing my research, I read that it depends on the leasing company whether the original buyer is on the hook for the lease or not. I am assuming you did some kind of legally binding transfer correct?

What was the process for the out of state thing? I was kind of wondering about that myself.

[Ken]

Mitsubishi Motor Credit of America.

That makes sense, and yes it was one of the many documents that I filled out. That document itself though, was surprisingly simple. It was a one pager, where basically the PO just filled out his name and info and then I filled out mine. Basically just stated that I would be assuming the remaining X payments and he was still legally binded to pay should I not comply.

To be honest, I'm not sure if it was so much the actual state transfer or MMCA being such a huge pain in the ass. From what I discovered though, it really varies on which states you're dealing with, especially with taxes. The title really wasn't a big deal, since the PO never "owned" the car anyway.

In my case, I had to pay taxes on the remaining payments of the car when I transferred it here to NY. What was annoying though, was that since Connecticut collects taxes bi-yearly (or something like that) they reached out to the title holder. Who reached out to me. Who calmly explained that's not my problem and got them to harass the PO for those funds.