Leasing a vehicle then buying it once the lease is up VS...

Financially, it will not make sense to lease to buy. It’s usually better to just buy it up front.

There could be a very rare case where the lease rate is super low and buy rate is super high through heavy lease incentives.

However, leasing will lower your cash flow required. You’d basically be taking out a balloon loan and forced to refinance it at the end of the lease term.

Ok thanks y'all! I just noticed that my current vehicle has WAY more trade-in value than I expected so a straight-up purchase probably makes more sense.

I leased a vehicle back in 2013 for my wife. We lived in west palm beach and barely drove anywhere. A year into the lease my work transferred me to Orlando where we ended up going 20,000 miles over our lease allotment. We ended up having to just buy/finance the vehicle at the end of the lease term and I felt like we got completely raked over the coals. Can’t/wont be able to lease as long as we live in Orlando.

From an interest rate perspective leasing is almost always more expensive (Way more expensive) than buying a car outright. There are very very few occasions where people can negotiate a super cheap lease, but it's pretty rare, and almost doesnt exist right now with the shortages. Places like leasehackr and whatnot you will find people who get something like a Civic Si for $150-$200/mo for 24 months with little to nothing down, mostly because they believe the residual value will be that high though.

There is an argument for leasing then buying to stretch payments out over like 6-8 years if you want to but I would bet nobody doing that is "investing the difference" really.