I'm pretty sure I may not like what I get for a response here, but I have to ask anyway. I've never leased a vehicle before. I just picked up my '04 EX AWD two days ago and leased it for a 48 mo. term w/ a 15K/yr miles limit. I signed up for $340/mo. I was ecstatic to get out from under the payments on my trade-in, which were draining the lifeblood out of me each month. The dealer paid off the note 100%. I've been a victim of the "upside down" version of trade-in payoffs, so this was a big deal to me. In my glee at saying about $200/mo in payments, and the general overall feel-good state of acquiring a new E, I realize now I may have been taken to the cleaners on the lease payment. Can anyone give me some perspective on this? Is it a good, fair, poor, or Oh-man-they-get-a-sucker-like-you-only-once-a-decade deal? Thanks.

Well, I don't really have time to reply in-depth, but based solely on 340.00/mo x 48 mo... you'll pay $16,320 to drive for 4 yrs, then be left with nothing. Hopefully, the 340.00 you quoted includes tax, and you won't go over your alotted miles.

For comparison, I bought mine (a AWD 5sp EX). With a 60 month loan, I pay just $3.11/mo more than your lease and I can drive as many miles as I want.

I hate to say you got a bad deal, because if you can live with the payments and can tolerate the fact that you'll have to give your car up after paying more than $16k for it...more power to you.

Personally, I couldn't even consider a lease because I'd get killed on the mileage (drove 10,000+ mi since late july).

[edit: one thing I didn't consider is how much you actually owed on your trade vs. how much the car was worth to your dealer (in terms of its resale value). Depending on how much that was, your $340/mo lease *might* not be such a bad deal, for what it's worth]

Wow. :cry: Talk about your hard lessons. Be prepared for a huge dose of buyer's remorse. I truly hope that learning about how car deals work after the fact doesn't spoil your enthusiasm for your E, because the vehicle itself is and will be a good experience for you.

You can take at least a little bit of solace in that all or at least most of us have been schnookered by a dealer on one or even all of the issues I'm about to cover. They are indeed hard lessons that frequently have to be experienced first-hand... but usually not all at once!

Anyway, without knowing the numbers behind your "$340/mo.", here's what I can tell:

1) While you may have been upside-down on your old car relative to it being a trade-in, since it was new enough to have payments on, it apparently had some value. Had you sold it on your own, it may have taken more time to "get out of it", but you would have realized at least 10-15% more for it, which in all likelihood would have paid off the loan.

2) I will presume that since this is your first posting here you did not negotiate well on the Element purchase, and paid above "dealer invoice" for it, if not MSRP. I will go out on a limb here and surmise that you should have paid roughly $19000 for your E, not including tax/title and paperwork fees.

3) Leasing a personal vehicle is a big mistake 99.9% of the time. There are tax benefits of leasing if you take a deduction for business use, but that's about it. At $340/mo. it's sounding like your "cost factor" (lease jargon for interest rate) is very high, or the dealer rolled a huge number into it ($6000 to 8000?) to cover your upside-down trade-in.

4) In contrast, assuming an outright purchase at $19000 under Honda's 3.9% financing without figuring the plus or minus from the trade-in, your monthly payment for a 60-month loan would be around $350. And you would have owned it outright at the end of the loan.

5) Car dealers smell desperation and impatience a mile away, and will prey on it. If the first words out of your mouth were "all I can afford is $300 a month", they also identified you immediately as a "monthly payment buyer" and therefore knew that they had you at a severe disadvantage. That gives them the green light to pull all sorts of sleight-of-hand to make some pretty ugly numbers come close to (but, strangly enough, never quite meet) your stated target. That's primarily how you ended-up with a lease.

6) You needed to do the research first, not after the commitment. Once you've signed the paperwork, you're done, and in more ways than one if you didn't do your homework. Talk about a setup for disappointment.


I have total sympathy for you. You were frustrated with your situation and desperate to do something about it, and certainly excited about the prospects of your new car. But it's those very issues that work decidedly against you in a environment that's full of pitfalls and "gotchas" designed to divert your attention from the facts and figures you really should be paying attention to.

We all do something like this once (or even twice), so don't beat yourself up too badly over it. When it comes right down to it you now have a great car and a bunch of new friends who can share in your excitement as well as offer a collective shoulder to cry on when the lease payment is due.