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Comment by artisinal

16 hours ago

Renting. It's $57 per month for 24 months and then you have to hand it in.

So you pay $1368 for the privilege of using the Duo for 2 years.

You get the choice to pay the remaining value of the phone and keep it, or enter a new "lease" agreement for a brand new phone at the end of the term. The formula is simple:

purchase fee = device list price – lease payments made – remaining discounts or trade-in credits.

If you're paying $1368 over 24 months, you could pay the remaining $632 after those 24 months and keep it with 0% interest.

  • So let's say you go to Hertz or Avis at the airport, you get a car for a month at $1700. The car has an MSRP of $40,000 and Hertz/Avis gives you the option to buy the car for $38,300 after you return it.

    Is that leasing or renting in your country?

    • Let's say you go to BMW or Lexus or Ford. You pay them $3000 and agree to pay them $500 a month for the next 3 years to use the car according to some conditions. The car is worth $60,000. You pay $21,000 over those three years. When you bring it back, they offer to let you buy it outright or to just hand it over to the dealer.

      Is that leasing or renting in your country?

      Is the difference between renting and leasing even meaningful? You chose a car rental agency for your example because it costs more per month to rent from a short-term rental agency. What is a lease but a long term loan? What difference does it make that I rent my apartment by signing a document called a "lease agreement"? Am I a renter? Or a leaser?

      Renting/leasing is not automatically bad. The terms are what make one a good or a bad deal.

      2 replies →

Lease. You can buy it out at the predefined price at the end.

  • English is not my first language, sorry. If you have a device that you pay a monthly fee for, but you can't keep it at the end of the contract, where I am from we call that renting.

    Leasing is a financial construction where you actually own the product / property, with the bank having the option to claim it if you fail to pay.

    • This is not true, with leasing you don't own the product or property at all. Leasing is basically long-time rent. For example, when you lease a car, you don't own it - the leasing company does. In some cases, you can buy out the object at the end of the lease (like cars), in some cases you can't (like apartments).

      > a financial construction where you actually own the product / property, with the bank having the option to claim it if you fail to pay.

      This is called financing - basically, buying a thing with bank's money which they give you as a loan. For high-value purchases, there are often limitations on what you can do with the object, or requirements (like a requirement to have homeowner insurance for mortgages), but there are usually less restrictions compared to lease since you are the owner.

    • Ah.

      Renting is you pay $X a month and when the contact ends everyone walks away. You don’t get the thing back, the other party does.

      Leasing is close but slightly different. You still pay $X, you still don’t own it and can walk away at the end.

      But with a lease you are given a choice to buy the thing at a pre-arranged price when the lease is over. So when you sign the contract you know that at the end you can pay $700 and it’s yours. Or you can still walk away.

      It’s far, far more common with cars. The dealership guesses how much the car will be worth and offers you at lease based on that. If the car is worth more at the end of the lease than your buyout price, you can buy the car cheaper then you could, on the open market. If it’s worth less, you can walk away. You didn’t lose as much as you would have if you had gotten a loan, and you could go buy the same car used if you wanted for less.

      For something like a phone, I’m not sure it really matters that much. So I don’t know why they decided to do leases.

    • It’s a lease, not rent. I don’t know the exact numbers on this but you can pay “rent” for two years and then pay like $300 (I don’t know what the right number is here) at the end to own it outright at that point. So at the end of the day you pay like $200 more than someone that buys it outright from the get go.

      4 replies →