The Case for Leasing — What the Numbers Actually Show
In the first episode of Inside the Lease, Kelly Strausser, COO of D&M Leasing, and Chase Kennemer, President of D&M Leasing in Ft. Worth, sit down to talk about one of the more persistent questions in consumer auto finance. Does buying a vehicle actually make more financial sense than leasing?
The answer depends almost entirely on how a driver actually uses their car.
Strausser opens with a straightforward benchmark. True ownership means paying cash, holding the title, and driving the vehicle for 10 to 12 years without a payment. For someone willing to do that, financing can pencil out. For everyone else, the math shifts considerably.
Many people in Texas trade vehicles every three to five years. When someone finances over 72 or 84 months and trades before the loan ends, they don’t walk away with equity. They walk away with negative equity, which then gets rolled into the next deal. Interest compounds on top of it. Over two or three vehicle cycles, what started as a manageable loan becomes a debt position that’s genuinely difficult to exit.
Kennemer describes it as a trap that tightens with each trade. A buyer loses their down payment on the first deal, carries a small negative balance into the second, and by the third vehicle finds themselves $10,000 to $15,000 upside down with fewer financing options and less negotiating leverage. At that point they often get steered toward vehicles with large manufacturer rebates, not because those vehicles are the right fit, but because the rebate is large enough to absorb the rolled debt and still get a bank to approve the loan.
One of the more counterintuitive points both Strausser and Kennemer make is that a vehicle depreciates at the same rate regardless of how it was purchased. If two people buy the same truck with the same mileage and the same equipment and trade it on the same day, the trade-in value is identical, whether one paid cash and one leased. The market values the vehicle based on make, mileage, condition, and time. How it was financed doesn’t factor in.
A lease, when structured properly, is built around the way someone actually uses a vehicle. Term length, mileage, and monthly cost are aligned to real driving habits rather than reverse-engineered from a payment ceiling. The goal is to match the financing to the depreciation curve so the driver isn’t carrying money into a trade that the market won’t give back.
Currently about 20% of Texans lease. In some northeastern markets that number is closer to 70 to 80%. Strausser attributes part of that difference to education. Those markets started leasing earlier, built familiarity with the structure, and over time it became the default for drivers who trade regularly.
Inside the Lease is a video series focused on automotive finance education for Texas consumers.