Breaking Car Lease

movingabroad15

Hello all,


In August 14 my partner purchased a new fiat 500 on a 3 year lease, with the ability to end it after 2 years. Since then a lot has happened in our lives and we are now moving overseas this August. We have no intention of coming back to the UK to live for at least 5-10 years, if ever.


The problem we now have, is breaking my partners lease for her car. She currently pays 200 pounds a month, and owes approximately 9500 on the car. The car, despite only being 1 year old and only having 7000 miles only values at 7500 pounds. Unfortunately, due to our families moving abroad, we have no one who we can transfer the lease to and no where to leave the car in the UK if we were to just continue making payments whilst abroad.


From using google and sites such as this, we cannot find many options open to us. We could sell the car, but that would still not give us enough money to pay the lease off. We could continue to pay it monthly whilst abroad until we have paid the excess over the value of the car, although we have no where to leave the car in the first place. We would like to settle this in a acceptable way, however we just do not have the funds available to settle the outstanding finance as I am sure you can imagine, moving abroad is not the cheapest process!


The other option is taking the car back to Fiat and explaining, although im guessing they will seek to take us to court if we cannot make payment for the outstanding amount. Whilst this is not something we want to do, as it is hassle and damaging to our credit report, we would probably be gone by the time anything got sorted, and as far as I know, they wouldn't be able to get us to return to the UK for court for the outstanding amount. Again I must stress this is not what we want to do, and is a last option as we simply do not have the funds.


Any advice would be gratefully appreciated with this. We would like to end the lease in a way that is not frowned upon by finance companies as damaging our credit record is not something we want to do if we can avoid it. We are unfortunate in the fact that we had no plans t move abroad when the lease was taken out and everything has happened so suddenly, with not very much time to sort things.


Many thanks for any advice in advance.

marlot

Do you really mean lease, or are you talking about a PCP?

If a genuine lease you have no right to sell the car.

wiltsguy_2

and try to keep your credit rating intact and not to just ignore the debt, you never know when you may wish to return to the UK. Always keep all options open

movingabroad15

Apologies yes PCP. As I said, my plan is to not damage credit ratings for exact reason you said......its a last option.


Cheers

motorguy

movingabroad15 wrote: »

Apologies yes PCP. As I said, my plan is to not damage credit ratings for exact reason you said......its a last option.


Cheers

See if the dealer / a dealer / one of the online companies will buy it and make up the shortfall.

I changed job roles and my mileage went from 500 miles per week to not needing a car at all.

Painful as it was, we sold the car back to a dealer and paid the £2,600 shortfall ourselves, rather than having the car sit there doing nothing until the end of the PCP deal.

You just really need to find the least painful way of doing that, and thats going to be ringing round and getting the best price for it from a dealer and asking the finance company for a settlement figure, which will be less than the total owed (we got £1200 off in interest charges)

The other option is to sell it privately and have the private buyer pay the finance company direct and you pay the difference at the same time, which would work out cheaper but it might take longer to find a buyer.