Tailor Your Lease To Your Exact Mileage Needs!

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And one of the dangerous things that everyone thinks they know about leasing is that you don’t get enough miles. Everyone goes way over their allotted mileage, then ends up owing the leasing company thousands of dollars to make up the difference. You may even know someone who saw that they were getting into mileage trouble, and then stopped driving their leased car for the last several months of the lease. What a waste – making your monthly payments and not driving the car. There has to be a better way!

Who Says You Can’t Have All The Miles You Need? No One!

As we go deeper into the art and the science of leasing, the one thing that everyone should take away from the discussion is this:

You Can Have Whatever You Want If You Are Willing To Pay For It

That’s right! Leasing is a financial transaction based on your usage of the vehicle. You pay a certain amount per month for a certain amount of vehicle usage. If you want to get more usage out of the leased vehicle by driving it more, you simply pay a bit more. No one will object to your doing this.

Run The Numbers On What Your Mileage Needs Are

Let’s say you are looking at a lease for $299 per month and it comes with 12,000 miles per year, or 1,000 miles per month. You run the numbers and realize that this will only cover your commute to work and your pleasure mileage for about three weeks of the month. So you know up front that this is not adequate for your needs.

Here’s a little known leasing rule: additional miles added into the lease up front cost less than those miles from when you go over your limit. Sometimes it can be significantly less. So it makes perfect financial sense to add more miles into the lease if you know you will need them.

Know What You Are Paying For Extra Miles

An easy way to know how good a deal you are getting on the extra miles you are adding up front is to check how much any miles you drive over your mileage limit will cost you. This will be spelled out in black and white in the lease agreement details. Once you know this per-mile cost, compare it to what you are being asked to pay up front.

If the dealer won’t specify a per-mile cost for additional upfront miles, but offers you only a higher monthly payment number, it’s easy to do the math. Divide the increase in the monthly payment by the number of additional monthly miles you requested and you will have the per-mile cost.

Get What You Need Up Front And Drive Happy!

The solution? You add an extra batch of miles to your lease. These typically come in specific “modules” of 7,500, 10,000, 12,000 or 15,000. These are usually added to the largest mileage standard lease of 15,000 miles per year, or whatever the leasing company offers as the maximum.

This will bump your monthly payment up, but now you know exactly what it will cost. No more stressing about the mileage. You’ll enjoy driving more, and you can also feel good about saving money by building those miles you need into your lease. Everybody’s happy and there are no unpleasant surprises at the end of the lease.

All Things In Moderation

There are a few warnings to heed when adding extra miles. First, avoid adding so many miles that you exceed the mileage allowed in the new car warranty. If you do, you will no longer be covered for repairs that the warranty had been responsible for. Now it all comes out of your pocket, and defeats one of the main economic principles of leasing: don’t lease a car past the warranty period!

There are high mileage leases available for those drivers who worry about driving too many miles and fit a specific set of circumstances. They are not suited to the average leasing customer, and we will cover these high mileage leases in a future article.