Way Over on Your Lease Miles? Store Your Car!

Leasing is becoming an ever more popular alternative to buying or financing a car.

Since it’s basically a long term rental, you can acquire the car for a lower-than-purchase out of pocket cost. Maintain it for less, and turn it in for a new version (or different car) when you’re all done!

However one of the biggest challenges when leasing a car is the mileage limit. These are often artificially low (10-12k miles per year) when compared with what people in the real world actually drive. And the penalty per mile over can be upward of .25 per mile!

The programs are, as expected, to favor the selling dealers and protect their downside - a car with a lot of miles will auction or resell for less at the end of the lease term. Therefore the dealers want to recoup on the depreciation for added miles.

There are lots of good guides out there for skirting the problem of mileage increases… I particularly like Doug Demuro’s article on Auto Trader about this topic.

But none of these articles bring up a practice that we have seen here. YOU COULD STORE YOUR CAR!

This is something we do see our new customers do from time to time. Their lease is coming to a close in the near term and they know they’re going to be over on miles. Some quick math could yield that it is less expensive to store the car than to drive it and pay the penalty. 

While the car is in storage, you could use Uber, buy a beater car, rent a car through Turo, or even just bum rides from friends.

Contact us and we’d be happy to discuss!