I've mentioned in a few threads about getting a pretty cheap lease on an Ioniq 5 and have had enough questions I figured I'd start a thread.
I started looking into a cheap EV car to drive the family around in and offset my gas bill. My goal was to not sell any of my cruisers, but just add a car where all the costs for that car would be less than my current gas bill.
My gas bill with the 3 cruisers was a minimum of 600/mo so an all in lease cheaper than that was my goal. While replacing one of our cruisers with an EV would absolutely save money, my research for keeping them all and only offsetting my gas bill always resulted in not being worth it.
I started seeing videos about a new change that happened recently that allows dealerships to take all of the federal and state tax incentives, and apply that amount to the lease period. So for math purposes, let's assume a 55k msrp car gets total tax incentives of 15k. Instead of applying the 15k to the 55k, they calculate how much they would make on a 2 year lease and apply it to only that timeframe. So, if they expected to make 20k for a 2 year lease on a 55k msrp car, and they can apply 15k of incentives to that portion of the cars value, they only need 5k on the lease from the buyer. Cheaper cars like a leaf, they may make all the money for the lease on the tax incentives the dealership collects and not have to charge the buyer much of anything. There are dealerships offering a 9/mo lease on a leaf for instance.
Around that same time, I got this email for a car I was actually kinda interested in.
150/mo sounded great but I needed to crunch the numbers to make sure I didn't somehow end up paying more than 600/mo all in at the end of the month.
I went to the dealership, and left once they told me it would be 150/mo + tax which came out to 175 or something. I told them I saw 150/mo in the email and was not interested in paying any more. They called me a day later saying if I would pay it all up front, then they would let me pay a total of 3600 for the entire 2 years and it was mine, sales tax included. That came out to 150/mo if I were to pay over time. I think @Westward Cruiser may have gotten an even better deal.
I then got a quote for my insurance and that came out to 120/mo. Then you also need to factor in registration, which was 1200.
So, all in, I paid 3600 for the car including sales tax, 1200 for registration, and then I have insurance costs of 120/mo or 2880 for the 2 years. Over the 2 years, that comes out to 7,680, or 320/mo.
- edit - an obvious miss in the calculation is how much more my elec bill goes up per month due to the car. For 1200 miles per month, it costs me about $40. We tend to fill up for free at electrify america while doing the grocery shopping, but if we didn't that would be a little more.
Also, while not everyone can get the tax incentives when purchasing a car outright, depending on your income, everyone can take advantage of the tax incentives this route.
I started looking into a cheap EV car to drive the family around in and offset my gas bill. My goal was to not sell any of my cruisers, but just add a car where all the costs for that car would be less than my current gas bill.
My gas bill with the 3 cruisers was a minimum of 600/mo so an all in lease cheaper than that was my goal. While replacing one of our cruisers with an EV would absolutely save money, my research for keeping them all and only offsetting my gas bill always resulted in not being worth it.
I started seeing videos about a new change that happened recently that allows dealerships to take all of the federal and state tax incentives, and apply that amount to the lease period. So for math purposes, let's assume a 55k msrp car gets total tax incentives of 15k. Instead of applying the 15k to the 55k, they calculate how much they would make on a 2 year lease and apply it to only that timeframe. So, if they expected to make 20k for a 2 year lease on a 55k msrp car, and they can apply 15k of incentives to that portion of the cars value, they only need 5k on the lease from the buyer. Cheaper cars like a leaf, they may make all the money for the lease on the tax incentives the dealership collects and not have to charge the buyer much of anything. There are dealerships offering a 9/mo lease on a leaf for instance.
Around that same time, I got this email for a car I was actually kinda interested in.
150/mo sounded great but I needed to crunch the numbers to make sure I didn't somehow end up paying more than 600/mo all in at the end of the month.
I went to the dealership, and left once they told me it would be 150/mo + tax which came out to 175 or something. I told them I saw 150/mo in the email and was not interested in paying any more. They called me a day later saying if I would pay it all up front, then they would let me pay a total of 3600 for the entire 2 years and it was mine, sales tax included. That came out to 150/mo if I were to pay over time. I think @Westward Cruiser may have gotten an even better deal.
I then got a quote for my insurance and that came out to 120/mo. Then you also need to factor in registration, which was 1200.
So, all in, I paid 3600 for the car including sales tax, 1200 for registration, and then I have insurance costs of 120/mo or 2880 for the 2 years. Over the 2 years, that comes out to 7,680, or 320/mo.
- edit - an obvious miss in the calculation is how much more my elec bill goes up per month due to the car. For 1200 miles per month, it costs me about $40. We tend to fill up for free at electrify america while doing the grocery shopping, but if we didn't that would be a little more.
Also, while not everyone can get the tax incentives when purchasing a car outright, depending on your income, everyone can take advantage of the tax incentives this route.
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