Our Lease Calculator Hijacked

Our Car Lease Calculator is the most popular page on our entire web site, and has been so for many years. It is unique because it is built with Flash and Actionscript, which allows it to calculate better, faster, and without swapping web pages from a server. Thousands of visitors have used the calculator to help them understand car leasing, as it is not only a calculator but also a learning tool. Every step of the calculator is fully explained so that the user understands how and why the step is important.

Our calculator has become so popular that others have tried to hijack it and hack to their own purposes. Fortunately, the fact that it was developed using Flash makes hacking very difficult. Flash pages are impossible for most web developers to "reverse engineer" and open up to make changes.

However, one company, LeaseTrader.com, has managed to do it. They have not only hacked our copyright-protected Lease Calculator, they have changed the name on it from our company name to theirs, and put it on their own site as their own product.

To make matters worse, they have also distributed their version of our calculator as a free download to dozens of software download web sites all over the Internet as a way of getting publicity for their company. We have notified the company of their violation of our copyright, to no avail. Some companies apparently have no respect for the rights of others and will use these "black-hat" techniques to further their own purposes.

We hope that the company will eventually resolve the problem and stop using our copyrighted product.

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.

Lease Calculator - Having Problems?

All lease calculators require that you insert certain information about the lease for which you want to calculate monthly payment amount and other costs.

Most of the needed information is basic and easily obtained for entry into a lease calculator. However, two of the required figures often leave users puzzled as to meaning and source.

First, there's residual value. This is the estimated wholesale value of a vehicle at lease-end. Although there are sources of estimated residuals, the values from these sources can vary greatly. Using one of these values is fine for use in a lease calculator if you are only using the calculator to play around and explore the effects of such factors.

However, If you need to know an actual monthly payment amount for an actual lease, you must get the residual value from your lease provider, which in most cases is a car dealer.

Second, there's money factor. Money factor is the finance rate for your lease, similar to interest rate on a loan. Except that money factor is expressed as a very small number, like .00200. It can be converted to APR interest rate by multiplying by 2400.

To get the money factor that will be used for a specific lease, you'll have to get it from your car dealer. Rates change frequently and depend on your credit rating. If you only need an estimated money factor for use in a lease calculator, I suggest you go to Bankrate.com and get their current new-car interest rate. Then divide it by 2400 to get money factor.

Why Use a Lease Calculator?

One of the most searched-for terms related to car leasing is "lease calculator". Since I have the most popular lease calculator on the Internet on my LeaseGuide.com web site, I know a thing or two about using them to the greatest advantage.

Based on comments and emails I've received, I have found that most people want a lease calculator for one or more of the following purposes:

1) To check the accuracy of a dealer's lease payment quote. Often, dealers calculate lease payments using figures that they haven't told the customer about. For example, extra dealer-profit fees may be added into the calculation. Unless the customer has a way to check the dealer's math, he will have no way of discovering the add-on fees.

2) To help determine an affordable vehicle price range for a lease. Since lease payments depend largely on vehicle price, having an online lease calculator allows playing around with various prices to see payment results. By finding the vehicle price range that produces monthly payments you can afford, you'll quickly find out if a luxury car — or economy sub-compact — is in your future.

3) To compare the cost of leasing versus buying. Although a lease-versus-buy calculator may be more appropriate here, many people already have a loan quote and simply want to compare that with a lease for the same vehicle.

Some people, I discovered, expected a lease calculator to do something that it can't do — tell them if their lease is a good deal or not. For that, we created a special kind of lease calculator (the Lease Evaluator, part of our optional Lease Kit) that actually evaluates a lease payment figure for a specific vehicle and spits out an analysis indicating if the deal is average, good, or bad.