Calculate Your Own Car Lease Payments

Can you calculate your own car lease payments?

Certainly.

Using an online calculator is the easiest way.

But you can also use a business calculator, such as those made by HP. However, you can't use the build-in annuity-based functions because that is not what car dealers and lease companies use. They use a much simpler formula that approximates the results of the business formula. The results, however, are only different by a couple of dollars. All lease companies and banks routinely use the simpler formula.

Therefore, if you want to use the simple version of the lease payment formula on your HP business calculator, you'll have to enter the function manually and save it for future use.

I won't explain the simple payment formula here but you can find a full detailed explanation on my LeaseGuide web site at www.leaseguide.com/lease08.htm. It's also easy enough to use this formula with a simple drugstore-variety calculator.

Best Car Lease Calculator

I, of course, believe that my lease calculator (www.LeaseGuide.com/calc.htm) is the best that can be found.

Actually I know of one that is better, but it's for dealers and is not available to consumers. The reason it is better is that it shows exactly what a lease costs, using the dealer's own figures for interest rate (money factor), residual value, and add-on fees. These are figures that we don't have as consumers, unless we ask and get them directly from the dealer. We can guess at the figures for planning and estimation purposes, but we can't know for sure.

Therefore, for any consumer lease calculator to produce exactly the same results as a dealer's, you must input the same exact figures used by the dealer. If a dealer won't give you these numbers, you should see another dealer.