i have had both an Op lease and a novated lease in the past.
Op Lease was fantastic it was 13k pre tax so 9.1k or there abouts, i was doing about 25,000 a year but it didn't matter the FBT, petrol, etc... where flat fees and averaged across the fleet.
At the time to have a comfortable car would have been
$.8k cost of finance $10k of cash @ 8%,
$3.3k of fuel 25k at 11l per 100 at $1.2 (note i was using 14+l as it was all city driving)
$1.5k insurance (i was young)
$1.5k of 'depreciation'
$.6k Rego
$.8k maintance
So 8.5k (using very low numbers for the assumptions) but instead of driving a 6 year old car with potentiall risks big cash items breaking, i had a brand new car, fixed out goings and if i left the company i simply handed back the keys it was great.
Afterwards i got a novated lease as the numbers where a lot more expensive but my idea was to get a car at a decent discount (which i did) and sell it after the 3 years which based on 3 year old cars should have gotten me 55+% of original RRP vs the final payment of 45% of my discounted buy price. The problem was my situation changed, broke up with a partner who was driving the car during the week (i didn't need a car during the week), then got made redundant so instead of getting the running costs pre GST, and 70:30 pre
ost tax i had to pay post tax cash for them. So my out of pocket went from being all inclusive to just finance for the car, i was only 1.5 years into it and the payments are scheduled like any loan so that not much principal had come off it.
I held it for a few months as it was paying quite a bit of principal off and i still needed a car, then managed to sell it (as i said selected a car with good resale) for about the residual lease value. The main issue was the 'extra' money i had paid early on which was supposed to be offset by the winfall at the end was just extra money i had to pay in the end.
If i was to novate lease again i would probably get a 1-3 year old car with extended factory warrenty on a 1 year lease (with intention to roll into additional 1 year leases). The big issues for me.
If your situtation changes (e.g. move office/house/lose parking/split with partner) and your KMs go down you may move brackets which will change the money you pay or worse you fail to make the bracket which means you just end up with a nice bill for a few 000' or worse 0000'.
If you are unemployeed you may end up with a rather expensive non tax favourable car loan (i was about 2 months between jobs).
If you move company while they may offer novate leasing they may not use the company you are with, the options i had was to get a total new lease which refinanced my existing lease and had about $2k in fees or i could role my existing finance into a new provider and again had about $2k in fees.
