Buy or lease a car?

If you’re only going to keep it a couple years, lease it. This is expensive but better than buying new and trading in after a few years when vehicle depreciates at the highest rate. If you are willing to keep it even five years and pay it off, you will likely to pay less on a per year basis. Example: buy $36000 truck and trade in 6 years later for $22000. The truck cost you $14,000 to use 6 years or $2,333.33 per year excluding maintenance, gas and insurance. If you can get it sub $2000/ year for something you like, you’ve done well. The longer you own it, the cheaper it is.

I would like to think I’ll keep it for a while but to be honest I don’t know. It will be my first car to purchase, I have owned the same car since high school.

Buy used cars until you have a pile of money, let someone else eat that depreciation. That said there are some models ( Toyota’s, Jeep wranglers, etc) where a two year old model with 20,000 miles may only save one $1500. In that case, I would splurge new. Good luck

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Looking to get a new car in the next several months.

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If you can pay cash, buy a 2 year old, low mileage model of what you want. Save $10-15k and it's still in warranty.

There are some rare instances where the lease incentives are such that it is cheaper to setup a lease and then purchase outright after the first payment. Kia is a recent example that I'm aware of where this made sense, but you have to do some good research.

Here are a couple resources to research current lease deals and programs once you've decided on which vehicles you're interested in.

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