Great Lease Deals – Have You Missed The Boat? | The Best Car Finance Blog In The World

Great Lease Deals – Have You Missed The Boat?

Friday, 30. January 2009

Do you ever feel that you are banging your head against a brick wall? How many times did I say before Christmas that some of the deals that are available may never return so take them whilst you can. But no, obviously I was lying or simply trying to pull a few deals in to pay for my extravagant Christmas and New Year celebrations. The truth is that I wasn’t. There was a huge effort on the part of some manufacturers to move their overstocks of cars and it proved to be reasonably successful so the big shift was the reason why you saw £26,000 Mercedes for not a lot more than £200 per month and other ridiculous deals but what has happened? As a result in the decreased demand the manufacturers have pulled back production with several factories closing for periods of time. Honda announced a 2 month closure then extended it to 4 months. Land Rover and others are following along the same path. Why are they doing this? To stop filling fields with unwanted cars, not that they were anyway but if you watch the news you will see the same aerial shot of a field of cars and told that manufacturers are backed up with cars they can’t sell so the conclusion for many is that prices and lease rates will plummet further as have interest rates. Wrong wrong wrong!!! Yes of course there will be some good deals as manufacturers look for a shot of cash in the arm but they aint overstocked anywhere near the level that is being reported. Certainly not to the level that would cause them to give their cars away. As for interest rates, of course they aren’t going to be anywhere near the bank base rates, banks earn money by charging interest so if they dropped their rates to 1.5% they would all go bust. The rate is a composite and includes things like admin charges that are going up as they chase late payments and worse still bad debt as a result of losses sustained following car repossessions so interest rates will continue to rise. Even car prices will increase (Citroen increase prices at the start of February) so I’ll repeat myself, if you see a great deal that you like and it fits into your budget, don’t wait for the rates to reduce further, they may do but there is a fairly good chance they won’t. OK rant over! By Graham Hill