There are many reasons to lease a car rather than buy one new or used. It could be that you don’t want to spend so much on upfront costs, you only need it for work for a short period of time, or maybe you need a new car for the short term and don’t want the hassle of selling it later on.
It doesn’t matter what your reasons are for leasing as they are all valid. The problem is that when you have bad credit you may feel that leasing a car is out of the question. Is it actually the case, though?
The reality is that there are a number of bad credit car loans for people to buy new and used cars so there are some options for leasing as well. We’ll go into some of the ways that you can lease a car when you have bad credit.
How bad is your bad credit?
You probably got into some financial trouble in the recent past and figure that your credit is ruined. There is no doubt that whatever missed payments or even charge offs on a credit card will crush your credit rating. However, unless you know your credit score, you may be wrong about how bad your credit is.
A bad score might be something around 650 but that is still good enough that a car dealer with in house financing could approve you. If you are around that score or even over, then you probably won’t have any issues with securing financing for a leased car.
It is a good idea to do a check on your credit report to see what it is and what has been reported. You can check for free without it impacting your score.
Pore over your report
Before you head out to the dealer to truth to secure a lease, check out your credit report and go over all of the details.
It pays to not only know your score, but to know what has been reported. You may find some of the items listed are erroneous and are contributing to your score being worse than it really is. You can then report these irregularities to the credit bureaus that have to investigate.
Make sure to have copies of payments and other evidence that the information is incorrect and provide that to the bureaus.
Just pay more
There may be some dealers who will outright reject anybody with bad credit. There are some, however, that will still give you financing, but you will have to pay more to get it. If you can handle paying higher out of pocket in the beginning and then a higher rate you can secure it.
Where some dealers may require no down payment or a low one to get into a lease, you will likely need to have a few thousand dollars to hand over for a down payment. Then, your interest rate will surely be higher than average as you have proven yourself to be a high risk.
