Selling Your Lease

Situation: Mrs. B decides she wants a new car.  But must do so without loosing money on current lease.
Current Lease: 2007 VW Jetta GLI with 10 months remaining and a $17,500 payoff (total payoff).

So I set off to find the best possible way to get out of the remaining 10 months and get her in to a new G37 sedan. My initial thought was to use leasetrader or a similar service. However with VWcredit, the original lessee still remains liable for the car even after a lease transfer. There are some ways around that, but involve excessive fees and an additional credit company. Transferring lease = no longer an option.
2nd option was to trade the car in on the G37. But trading in = rolling $3500 negative equity into the G37 lease. Trade-In = Not an option.
3rd option is to find a buyer and sell them the car outright for my payoff amount. So, I put the car on auto trader. No real leads until I upgraded to a “premium listing” with them. Then I started getting good leads. Funny how that works. Anyway, I found a legitimate buyer in Texas. He was very nice, communicated very well, and wanted to use his credit union to finance a loan. So far so good. His credit union agrees on our price of $17,500, his credit is excellent, they send me a few pieces of paper work to sign including me signing my permission to allow the credit union to payoff my lease. Credit Union then contacts VWcredit and ATTEMPTS to payoff my lease. Get a call back from his credit union, “VWcredit will not put the title in a 3rd parties name even with your permission. It must be put in your name if they are to issue a title. Therefore we cannot send payment.” So after a full headache filled day of calling around and verifying this, I was ready to give up. But, thanks to my excellent salesman at Sewell Infiniti of North Houston (plug) I learned that an In and Out would take care of this problem (note: not all dealers will do an in and out, some restrictions apply, see your dealer for more information :). I trade the GLI in to the dealer for $17,500 and at the same time they provide financing for my buyer and sell him the car for $17,500. Because I’m trading the car in to a dealer, the whole putting my name on the title thing becomes a non-issue. Everybody wins.
In summary, getting out of a lease is possible but can cause heartburn, headaches, and money loss. But if your car is in good shape, and can sell at or above its payoff amount, then you might want to consider this In and Out process at a participating dealer.