At the end of your lease, don’t buyout your car! At least, don’t buy it out until you’ve looked at the market and found on the true value of it. We are about to find dramatically lower prices for used cars as lease returns flood the market and there are no consumers willing to pay for larger trucks and SUV’s (and hopefully sports cars).

One of the casualties of dramatically higher fuel prices is the car leasing business. These once profitable arms of car companies like GM and Chrylser are now exiting the leasing business in a hurry. With such large inventories of large cars/pickups/SUV’s that are leased, noone is buying them back at the end of the lease and prices for these in the used car market are getting utterly demolished. Sometimes fetching a 15% discount from their buyback prices.

What does this mean for us? Well if you currently lease a car, you might find it harder to lease a new one when it ends. There will be less leasing companies around and lease rates won’t be very competitive anymore. Moreover, the buyback price of the car might be a lot higher than the market rate if you drive a SUV or any car with a large engine.