It completely depends on what your renting. Rent to own is a stupid idea but renting a jackhammer to break up some concrete patio in your back yard makes a lot more sense than buying a new jackhammer. Renting a home when you’re on a 12-24 month contract where you’re pretty sure your next work assignment won’t be in that same city makes sense. Renting when the cost of ownership is higher than the cost of renting makes sense.

How many people that get suckered into to owning their vacation (i.e. timeshare) wish they would have just rented their vacations. I.e. pay for them when you take them.

Now certainly people renting items out make money but it isn’t necessarily the person renting that’s taking the hit, it could very well be the manufacturer of the product being rented. If everybody went out and bought a new jackhammer every time they needed one the manufacturers of jackhammers would be doing great. Instead the people renting jackhammers do pretty well and the people that occasionally need a jackhammer save money by not having to buy a new jackhammer.

[quote=moneymaker]I’m just amazed when I see people I consider really smart, leasing vehicles.[/quote]

Well if they have a small business it can make a lot of sense to lease a vehicle because of the tax treatment. You can actually come out ahead vs buying new depending on the terms of the lease and expected depreciation. You can argue it might be better to buy used but these days you aren’t getting that much of a discount buying lightly used.

[quote=livinincali][quote=moneymaker]I’m just amazed when I see people I consider really smart, leasing vehicles.[/quote]

Well if they have a small business it can make a lot of sense to lease a vehicle because of the tax treatment. You can actually come out ahead vs buying new depending on the terms of the lease and expected depreciation. You can argue it might be better to buy used but these days you aren’t getting that much of a discount buying lightly used.[/quote]

Yeah, we thought about leasing a car for business. I think it makes a ton of sense to lease for business since if you are self employed or even if not (s-corp/c-corp), there are very few ways to lower your fica taxes. A huge car lease for a car you’d like to buy anyways makes a lot of sense since you will now deduct that against your taxable income from the business which just took off 15%+ from fica…Since the payment is monthly, leasing is probably much better than owning a car for the business due to all the ownership rules I’m guessing. Tax on the car is also assessed monthly I think which gives you a bigger deduction also.

Whenever I’ve shopped for used vs. new, especially for things which are Certified Pre-Owned, I rarely saw any great deals personally.

If you shop pretty aggressively and do a lot of price checks online with what people are getting cars for new, I rarely, saw used cars going for much less. You also have limited car options which you might not like and limited colors.

It’s true a private part deal may make sense, but a lot of sellers like to inflate their car price and it’s VERY time consuming IMO to find a “nice” car used…which match all your specs.

Just my own experience at least.

Not to mention on a new car, you can probably get better financing if you needed it (like 0%).

I think leasing makes sense for businesses that don’t want to deal with amortizing/depreciation and I can totally see that, it takes away the accounting hassle. For the average consumer, I feel that leasing leaves a lot of gray area with regards to all the terms added to a lease, and I know that the dealer is surely going to be the one taking advantage of the terms.

spd, show me a car on craigslist that sells for under $5,000, not from a shyster.

I saw somewhere on TV that people are renting out their own cars. I have a car that sits a lot, and I’m wondering if there’s an internet service that will allow me to rent it out. What about liability issue?