[YoMamaDrums]

Ready to purchase my Ti Sport. I'm thrilled Alfa is back in the USA! When I bought my 1991 Spider I was bitten by the Alfa bug and it has never left me.

There are 4 Alfa dealers within 100 miles. I want to be a great Ambassador for these beautiful cars.

I've decided to lease since Alfa's reentry is unproven in the US Market. We usually pay cash for our cars so I'm new to leasing. I read a post where someone leased a Ti:

$53k sticker
$2k down + 1st month payment
$480/month + tax, 10k, 24 months

Still debating between:
White w/Red Leather Interior
Stromboli Grey w/Red Leather
Powder-coat 20" Sport Wheels Black

Any tips? Thank you. I've enjoyed this forum.

 

[lost1750GTV]

don't be afraid to walk out and buy elsewhere.

 

[onno]

don't be afraid to walk out and buy elsewhere.

Good advice, particularly in So Ca where there are multiple dealers. Here is an ad fro ma NW dealer.

 

[stelvio_hawaii]

I leased a Ti Sport a week ago. There was $3750 in manufacturer incentives and the dealer added another $2500.

You should be able to do a lot better in So Ca as there are more dealers than in my area.

 

[tipo949]

Socal buyer

Ready to purchase my Ti Sport. I'm thrilled Alfa is back in the USA! When I bought my 1991 Spider I was bitten by the Alfa bug and it has never left me.

There are 4 Alfa dealers within 100 miles. I want to be a great Ambassador for these beautiful cars.

I've decided to lease since Alfa's reentry is unproven in the US Market. We usually pay cash for our cars so I'm new to leasing. I read a post where someone leased a Ti:

$53k sticker
$2k down + 1st month payment
$480/month + tax, 10k, 24 months

Still debating between:
White w/Red Leather Interior
Stromboli Grey w/Red Leather
Powder-coat 20" Sport Wheels Black

Any tips? Thank you. I've enjoyed this forum.

Hey, where in SoCal?
i might be able to steer you in the right direction....

 

[1265]

white red, uhmmm no.
stromboli red, could be
20" black, yes !!!!

 

[YoMamaDrums]

Orange County. Thank you

 

[OlderAlfaFan]

Jump in before March 1 - dealers have monthly incentives that result in rewards. I just got a slightly better lease deal today than the one mentioned at the top of this post.

 

[LeonY]

I would not put ANY money down on a lease. EVER. I got 0 down, plus DMV, Fees, 1st month payment, 530/month including taxes for 15k miles lease 36 months. MSRP was 54,095 on Ti sport with all options including wheel package and sport seats, the dealer has about 4500 in incentives, plus you can negotiate the price down to below invoice. I know for sure there is overstock of the cars in US right now, they dont even want to order new ones til sell remaining. Go to Fiat dealer, much more flexible than Maserati. Good luck!

 

[pelucidor]

Echoing what Leon said re not putting down money up front on a lease (called Cap Cost Reduction). Basically you have the option to pay $2000 across 24 monthly payments of $83 per month, or pay it all on day one (no benefit or discount in paying up front). Also if you have an accident and write off the car in month 2 of 24 you don't get anything back from the $2000 you paid up front from your insurance whereas if you had paid that $2000 over the 24 months you would be better off. Of course sometimes one is aiming to stay below a $ amount per month (to keep spouse happy or whatever) so a small Cap Cost Reduction might be ok (but $2k on a $53k vehicle is way too much).


When leasing you are paying for two things: depreciation on the vehicle over 24/36/39 months and the interest on borrowed money to the bank (who actually owns the vehicle during your lease). The current Money Factor (MF) for Stelvio Ti Sport for 24 months is 0.00008 (*2400 = 0.192% interest so very low and under $10 per month in your case - and you can't effect this number as it is set by the bank). The Residual Value (RV) is also set by the bank but assumes MSRP ($53k in your case) and on 24 month/10k miles per year is currently 61% - so your vehicle will depreciate 39% over the 24 months and be worth $32330 to the bank at the end. If you managed to negotiate your sale price of the vehicle from $53k to, say, $50k (called the Cap Cost) and then applied $4000 of rebates and incentives (set by Alfa Romeo, varies by region) to that negotiated price to get to $46k then you are only paying for $14k depreciation over 24 months = about $580 per month. Add the $2000 in up front Cap Cost Reduction you mentioned and the $580 drops by about $83 per month to $497.


I made up the above numbers but hopefully you get the gist of it. And you may have noticed that everything above is fixed by the bank or by Alfa Romeo (MF, RV, MSRP, Rebates etc) and the only thing you can control is the negotiated sales price - just like if you were buying the car vs leasing it. Focus on getting a good sale price - below invoice is easily possible for the Stelvio tight now.


Some unscrupulous dealerships will lie to you about the Money Factor (interest rate) and say you are getting a great deal at 2% (vs the actual 0.192% set by the bank) or will muddle other numbers, or keep incentives for themselves, or hide a bunch of stuff in inflated inception costs (registration, doc fees etc) - just walk away from any dealership not willing to disclose the actual numbers they are using.


I use Edmunds for MF and RV info for leases: https://forums.edmunds.com/discussi...-alfa-romeo-stelvio-lease-deals-and-prices/p6

This is a good lease calculator: https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/auto/auto-lease-calculator.aspx

Hope this helps. Having said all the above I think your lease deal is not too bad - I ran some reverse calculations and am guessing your final price including rebates is about $45,700 so over $7k off MSRP. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions - I've leased my last 15 vehicles and enjoy discussing the process.

 

[1929]

Echoing what Leon said re not putting down money up front on a lease (called Cap Cost Reduction). Basically you have the option to pay $2000 across 24 monthly payments of $83 per month, or pay it all on day one (no benefit or discount in paying up front). Also if you have an accident and write off the car in month 2 of 24 you don't get anything back from the $2000 you paid up front from your insurance whereas if you had paid that $2000 over the 24 months you would be better off. Of course sometimes one is aiming to stay below a $ amount per month (to keep spouse happy or whatever) so a small Cap Cost Reduction might be ok (but $2k on a $53k vehicle is way too much).


When leasing you are paying for two things: depreciation on the vehicle over 24/36/39 months and the interest on borrowed money to the bank (who actually owns the vehicle during your lease). The current Money Factor (MF) for Stelvio Ti Sport for 24 months is 0.00008 (*2400 = 0.192% interest so very low and under $10 per month in your case - and you can't effect this number as it is set by the bank). The Residual Value (RV) is also set by the bank but assumes MSRP ($53k in your case) and on 24 month/10k miles per year is currently 61% - so your vehicle will depreciate 39% over the 24 months and be worth $32330 to the bank at the end. If you managed to negotiate your sale price of the vehicle from $53k to, say, $50k (called the Cap Cost) and then applied $4000 of rebates and incentives (set by Alfa Romeo, varies by region) to that negotiated price to get to $46k then you are only paying for $14k depreciation over 24 months = about $580 per month. Add the $2000 in up front Cap Cost Reduction you mentioned and the $580 drops by about $83 per month to $497.


I made up the above numbers but hopefully you get the gist of it. And you may have noticed that everything above is fixed by the bank or by Alfa Romeo (MF, RV, MSRP, Rebates etc) and the only thing you can control is the negotiated sales price - just like if you were buying the car vs leasing it. Focus on getting a good sale price - below invoice is easily possible for the Stelvio tight now.


Some unscrupulous dealerships will lie to you about the Money Factor (interest rate) and say you are getting a great deal at 2% (vs the actual 0.192% set by the bank) or will muddle other numbers, or keep incentives for themselves, or hide a bunch of stuff in inflated inception costs (registration, doc fees etc) - just walk away from any dealership not willing to disclose the actual numbers they are using.


I use Edmunds for MF and RV info for leases: https://forums.edmunds.com/discussi...-alfa-romeo-stelvio-lease-deals-and-prices/p6

This is a good lease calculator: https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/auto/auto-lease-calculator.aspx

Hope this helps. Having said all the above I think your lease deal is not too bad - I ran some reverse calculations and am guessing your final price including rebates is about $45,700 so over $7k off MSRP. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions - I've leased my last 15 vehicles and enjoy discussing the process.

Wow, I have never leased I only buy. I have never fully understood the whole leasing thing. This is one of the best explanations I've heard. My last car purchase I inquired to a salesman about the difference between leasing because he was pushing for a lease for some reason (with intention to buy the vehicle at lease end). He certainly never explained all you did and conveniently "left some things out". I guess when you lease as many cars as you have you become expert. Thanks for the great explanation.

 

[pelucidor]

Thank you for the kind words - I have learned a lot by making every leasing mistake possible in my early days. Leasing works best for cars with high Residual Values (think the established luxury brands like Mercedes, BMW, Lexus), or for cars with a large gap between MSRP and the actual selling price (thanks to rebates, dealerships willing to go below invoice etc). I think Alfa is buying some leasing market share with huge rebates for now and hoping it's residual values will go up in later years as it becomes more established and the cars demonstrate long term quality (this also happened with Lexus when they first came on the market). If you like to keep cars 3 years or less then leasing might make sense in some cases vs buying/financing the car and then selling it in 3 years. I always run the numbers (I used to work in FinTech building investment reporting systems) and for me leasing usually makes sense although I actually financed my Tesla as the lease deals were awful and the finance deal was incredibly good (plus I don't mind keeping this particular vehicle for 5+ years).

In your case I think your salesman probably thought the banks residual value was too low (banks are guessing the value of the car three years from now and don't always get it right without a lot of historical information). Imagine the bank thinks car is worth only 40% of residual value at end of lease and you have a guaranteed buyout of $30k if you want to keep the car. But if the actual value of the car ended up being $35k due to market demand etc then you could buy it off the bank and resell it immediately and make a $5k profit. On the rare occasion this happens the dealership is happy to buy the car off you even before lease end (and pay off the bank loan for you) so they can make a big profit on it as a used car - this happened to me on some of my BMWs.

Finally worth mentioning that you should never lease a car outside its warranty period (again luxury brands have 50k mile warranty - imagine having to do major repairs on a car at your own expense just months before returning it on a lease!) and you cannot make any big changes to the car while you have it as you will have to restore the car to original spec on lease return (I actually asked if it is ok to powder coat my Stelvio wheels - Alfa dealership said yes, BMW would have said no).

 

[YoMamaDrums]

I agree. Thank you for the incredibly helpful information. We're glad you are part of the Alfa family!

 

[Scalewoodman]

This is great info + thanks. The one thing I didn't see was the relationship of miles traveled. We do 15-20K min/year and most leases call out 10K miles at a low payment rate. Where do anticipated miles figure in (or did I miss that).

We always purchased our Jeeps as I am meticulous about care and maintenance and we were sure we'd be happy long term (and we were), over 100K (last one almost 200K) so running the wheels off made sense. I 'bond' with my cars and gambled we'd love this one enough too.

Closing in on retirement we purchased our Stelvio at a nice discount + saved the bank fee - with good credit it was a good deal. My wife- who was finance manager in the car business- felt it was excellent however we decided not to lease for these reasons.

Of course when she noted we'd run Stella 9 years and replace it as with the next one as my 'last car' it put things in perspective (over my dead body literally) to short term lease the next ones thereafter because we'll have more cash in retirement than we will know what to do with. And of course I'd have fewer places to go.

So we are counting on Alfa to have high resales to roll into more later. Meanwhile the plan is to run the wheels off and enjoy long miles vs hard driving.

 

[pelucidor]

The miles per year has an effect on residual value - a car with 30k miles after 3 years is obviously worth more than the same car with 45k miles after 3 years. So for example on the Stelvia Ti Sport a 2 year lease for 10k miles per year would have a residual of 61% whereas doing 12k miles per year has a residual of 60%. I always get 3 year leases with 15k miles per year which has a residual value of 49% on the Stelvio (and would be closer to 60% on a similar BMW - Alfas residuals will increase over time with more leasing history like Lexus and Audi did).

If you go over the mileage limit at the end of the lease you pay a penalty - typically $0.25 per mile for luxury brands - or you can prepay the extra miles at the start of the lease at a cheaper rate (say $0.20 per mile) if you know you will need to do say 20k miles per year and the lease only goes up to 15k miles per year. If you end up doing less miles than the lease terms then you get no money back of course.

Typical leases calculated by the banks in terms of residual value are for 36 months or 24 months and with 10k or 12k or 15k miles per year (Stelvio is also available at 39 months and 15k miles per year for RV of 48%). The lowest monthly lease cost will usually be for 36 months and 10k miles per year (lowest total miles for high Residual Value, and with payments spread over longest time) which is what is usually advertised.


Congrats on the upcoming retirement - also keeping a car for 100k+ miles and 6+ years (assuming no problems) makes way more financial sense than leasing cars or buying and selling cars over short timeframes. I think Alfa Romeo will improve on residual value over the years if quality stays good and brand awareness spreads.

 

[Jeff]

The negotiator Jim Camp often said, "Negotiations start with 'No". When one party starts saying no, then you're in a place to start negotiating. I have found his quote helpful in negotiating deals.

 

[James Hidden]

Question on the downpayment topic - as i really appreciated your advice, @pelucidor - what's the smart thinking when it comes to putting a trade-in towards your lease? i own a 2nd hand audi, prob about 7k trade in value - obviously it would have a fairly hefty impact on my monthly payment (and i have no use for the car if i have a brand new stelvio, nor do i particularly fancy the hassle of selling privately) - but is it a terrible idea / waste, given the 'avoid downpayments on a lease' general rule...?!

New to leasing, and found your summaries very helpful, so would appreciate any intel...! cheers