i would rather be stuck in traffic than sitting here at work for 2 hours when 3/4 of hte work force has gone home and i am the only one left in my department

 

Ummm...well, let's see..Even with the sales tax (which would need to be included in both buy and lease decisions), a 6% loan with monthly payments comes out to $819.20 if paid at beginning and $823.29 if paid at end. Sans sales tax, your totals are 756.76 and 760.55 respectively. My numbers were based on 7% with no sales tax figured into the equations since it's a wash and different everywhere you go.

Your lease numbers, like mine, assume no cap reduction and so forth and with taxes and blah blah, the payments there would actually be more than I had indicated previously for a 50% residual.

The short of it is that we agree on the fact that leasing is only for people who want/need/desire a new car every few years.

 

For lease, you do NOT pay the sales tax on the whole car, you only pay it on the payments you will be making.
My number is pretty accurate. The finance number is strictly calculated using loan calculator. The lease number is not guess either, it is strictly calculated using money factor and a normal residual percentage (low-hi 60's% for most of cars on a 3 yr lease term). For a $25k list price car, $350 a month with zero capduction is completely normal, sure you have bank fee and other BS to pay but with finance you need to pay those too.
50% residual on a 3 yrs lease is ridiculous low, you should not lease a car which only has 50% residual value, of course financing to buy will be a much better choice in that case.



Ture but more than just that.
If you own a business that you can write stuff off, you should always lease.
If for personal use you still can see the deals to decide which is better. Sometimes car makers have promotional lease deal that gives you low interest rate and high residual, to reduce the monthly payment to get people interested, in that case it is very likely to work in your favor if you lease.
The sad truth is that, for most of cars today, unless you put down a decent down payment, you are always upside down with the bank, which means negative equity, negative equity is worse than zero equity of leasing.