Why You Should Not Lease! A sampling of Yukon Denali Leases

If you have read through this site, you know that I offer many ways to help you figure out if you are getting a good deal on your lease. I also stress the importance of not leasing a car if you are at all unsure of any factors that determine how a lease is done. It is to easy to not know what you are getting and when you are purchasing something such as a Yukon Denali, you are spending $50K. You should know what you are doing, but many people do not.

I decided to sample Yukon Denali leases since most of them come fully loaded and it lessons the chance for expensive upgrades. Using Edmunds.com, I determined that the cost for a fully loaded Yukon Denali with an extra 5K in add-ons (sunroof, larger wheels, DVD, Navigation, etc) should cost about $50,000 not including any rebates. Through some research I was able to collect details from offers and prior purchases of leases.

I sampled 10 Yukon leases and here is what I found:

You can see the payments, terms, and residual payoffs vary greatly. Next I totaled the payments over the term and added the residual to determine the final cost (It does not show any down payment the buyer put towards the car so assume the total price below is lower than the actual total price). I then put in the cost over the same term for a 5% loan based on a fully loaded Yukon with $5K in upgrades costing $50K and compared the two.

You can see the difference. Car 10 ended up over $8,000 higher than the $50K car I put together. In fact, out of the 10 cars I sampled, only 3 came in better, and two of them we would have to assume they had full upgrades and did not put more than $356.00 dollars down. Also notice how bad most of the 39-month leases worked out.

If any of the 7 other cars had put money down, the terms become worse. To make matters worse, the blue book on a 2007 Yukon Denali is $37,000. Wow, look at car 1 and car 10, at the end of the lease term you have to pay nearly what the car is worth today after making 27 payments of over $700 per month. Sound like a good deal? I guess if your spending $50,000 on a car what is an extra 6-10K right? At least you had a nice sales person and your car payment met your budget.

I hope this puts a little more light into how much a lease can cost you if you don’t know all the terms. I would like to say that someone spending $50K knows the terms, but as demonstrated here, that is not the case.

Leasing any car, expensive or not, you can get ripped off. There is a reason all the ads push leases, either do your homework or don’t lease. Remember never buy a car based on a car payment.

If anything know this.
-A lease is simply financing the depreciation of the car. American cars lease bad as they do not hold their value. Cars like Toyota, Honda, and Nissan lease better.
-The more a car holds it value, the better your lease payment.
-Down payments for leases should be very small since any amount is usually applied to the residual (a dirty trick), which if you turn your car in the money is pocketed by the lease company.
-Always know the total cost if you were to buy the car at the end of the lease. Dealers will say this does not compare to a purchase, that is a lie. It does and it should be close to what you would buy the car on a conventional loan under market interest rates.
-You will be upside down on 90% of leases.

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The guys over at Idee have launched a very handy product for photographers, or anyone for that matter, interested in knowing how and where a certain image is being used. Simply upload or identify an image you want to search and the tool finds other sites that are using the same image and provides you with the url to the image.

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Anyone that runs a blog knows the important of link building and the time consuming task it takes to build them. One way to fast track your efforts is to use Promotions or contests. To be successful, however, they should be well laid out, offer an enticing prize, and not come with to many rules. If your promotion is all of these things, it will have the potential to go viral and generate a lot of good links.

One example of a well laid out promotion comes from David Airey, who runs a logo design blog. Take a look at the first headline and then scroll through the prizes he offers. They are good prizes and entice you to keep reading. Near the end he gives very simple instructions on how to enter and when the results will be announced. His promotion is simple, yet effective. The hardest part was probably getting the sponsors to give free product, however, you would be surprised at how easily you can get promotional giveaways if you make the effort.

One thing David did to probably get free prizes is include his sponsors in the promotion. You get an extra entry for every five sponsors you mention. This creates a good incentive for the sponsors to kick down some freebies for you to offer in the promotion.

Key Strategies

1. Keep it simple. The more hoops for the users, the less your promotion will succeed.

2. Offer something of value. It can be a service, cash, product, valuable insight, or free access to subscriptions. Offering something like a free like on your Page Rank zero site will not entice the readers.

3. Layout. Spend some time with the title and the goals you want. Layout them out in a easy to follow format and specify what you want the users to do and why.

4. Promotion. This is probably the toughest. If you have regular visitors, then you will probably be fine, if not, then you will have to spread the word in forums, comments, and posts. If it is a good promotion, it may go viral for you.

5. Set your goals. Make sure you set the goals of the promotion and see if they are realistic with the prizes. If you plan to get 30K readers, offering a $5 gift certificate at Starbucks is not going to do it. When well thought out goals are set you can monitor your success and fine tune future promotions.

A contest can be a great way to acquire links. If really think out your strategy and offer something that is easy to understand yet enticing to your audience, it will succeed.

Are you afraid of people reading your blog? Do you want to publish your work only for your viewing pleasure? Well, here is how! Make sure to follow these 7-tips and you can be assured to have no readers, be very last or non-existent in search engines, and earn zero income!!!

1. Make sure to use no Keywords in your stories and posts. Keyword density matching keywords in your titles are one of the many things search engines use to assign value and rankings to content. If you truly want to end up at the bottom use titles with words like things, it, and they. Have you ever done a search for things? If not, let me save you the time: Google search on things yields 550,000,000 results. You will sure to never be in the first 400,000,000 results.

2. Don’t include any social bookmaking links. In the rare event that someone does come across your blog you want to make sure not to give them the opportunity to easily bookmark your site. This may cause un-desirable traffic and increase your ranking in search engines. If you use Wordpress by all means don’t use any of these plug-ins:

Thank You Mashable for providing this snipit from (300+ wordpress plugins list)

Digg Button

Digg IT

JPFAdd to Reddit

ShareThis

Sociable

SocialBookmark Buttons

Social BookmarksPlugin for WordPress

SocializerPlugin

SocialList

Socialogs.com

WP-Notable

3. If you are using Google Adwords make sure to have more ads then you actually have in content! This works great, using this strategy should keep you off the radar in google or any other search engine. In addition, if a reader does happen to stop by, you can be guaranteed they will leave in no time flat.

4. Make sure to create lots of mirror sites with the exact same content. Another great strategy to get you blacklisted from search engines.

5. When creating your content, make sure you always hide it in very deep directories. Search engines like shallow directories, so to keep them from sniffing around and finding searchable content, just add some deep directories like mysite.com/content/article/website/current/index.html.

6. Never write different, exciting, or pre-news posts and articles. Just take a look at this case example found on Johncow.com.

Dean gives a great summary how he changed a good but boring post into something that did exceedingly well on digg (remember tip number 2 about social bookmarking sites). A good post/article can have a snowball effect and bring doom to your site by the unexpected social bookmarking scene. It is very important that you never do this. Last thing you want is to be creative.

7. Never, under any circumstances use trackbacks. After you have achieved your well written but boring non-creative post/article, make sure you never use trackbacks if you happen to reference another blog. For a great explanation and example see optiniche – wordpress trackback tutorial.
   Again never use this as it could bring credibility to your site from bigger and better bloggers if they like your content. With credibility, you gain traffic and search rankings and we know this is the last thing you want.

We hope these tips have been of great Value. We strive to bring you better Value in all the things you do! Happy Blogging!