Quote:
Originally Posted by Need4spd28
Hmmm, I'm not 100% sure how a legal address is defined, but we do live together and both of our cars are currently registered at that address. Different addresses on our drivers licenses though, if that makes a difference.
And I suppose it's possible that the lease could expire beforehand, for the sake of argument. I mean, a date isn't set yet anyway.
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OK - I am in a similar situation and have done extensive research on this. Easier if the car "changes hands" will explain what I mean. You're best plan, purely from a $-savings perspective, is to stick with the two cars and put as many miles as you can on the X1 to save your M3. You don't want to both go over. You won't want to just turn the car in since you'll pay a huge mileage penalty. And you cannot under any circumstances buy it out since you will be overpaying big time and you cannot renegotiate your residual. It is what it is. That said 120 days before lease expires your dealer can, if they want, negotiate a fair market wholesale value for the car and buy it. So let's say your buyout is $30K and the car is worth $20K. You have to pay $30K there is no discussion there. Dealer can pay $20K to then put it on the lot and sell it themselves. You should speak with your dealer as I have with mine, and this is where the address and married or not can matter. Dealer buying the car to put into stock and selling it back to her is somewhat fishy because they are basically sticking it to BMW. They can, however, sell it to you because on paper the two of you have nothing to do with each other. At least not yet. So you need a dealer willing to do you a solid and you'll have to pay some fees for inspections and whatnot since they are selling you a car that they own and you could come after them if they sold you a car with crap brakes or something, but it can be done. Assuming you have a decent relationship with your dealer it should not be too much of a problem. Some dealers would buy and sell to her, but it's just a lot less problematic to sell the car to you.
That's if you want to keep the X1. If you don't, you can do everything I just described and get another car - but it would have to be a BMW from the dealer that was doing a "courtesy deal" on the car you weren't keeping. If you want to leave BMW entirely all of this gets much more complicated.
So bottom line before you do anything give your dealer a call and talk through options with him. I assume were it not for the mileage issues you're perfectly happy with the cars and aren't looking at another just for fun. My advice was based on the premise of minimizing $-hemorrhage until your leases are up.