Will Your Next Bike Be Leased?
By Steve Casimiro, Adventure Journal on December 1st, 2011
A top of the line Yeti SB-66 will run you a cool $6,150. That’s a lot of change, and a new outfit in England, called the Bike Leasing Company, thinks most cyclists would much rather pay 25 percent down and then a low monthly payment for two years, so they have the opportunity to always ride the latest technology the hassle of reselling. This setup does carry the same disadvantages of leasing a car — you turn the bike back in at the end of the two-year period. Although there is an option to buy the bike outright, which costs about 5.9 percent more over the original purchase price, not a bad deal at all. Is this a model for the U.S., too? It already was for one major startup in 2009 — and to our knowledge it died when the housing bubble popped.
If you’re reading this, you’re using a computer. If you’re using a computer, you have access to a calculator. If you have access to a calculator, you can see that leasing anything under $10K doesn’t make sense. Then again, 5.9 is less than a credit card bill, which presumably you don’t pay off every month, because you’re irrational enough to buy a $6K mouton bike, when $1K will buy you some SERIOUS wheels.
There’s nothing irrational about a 6k mtb. Priorities Rob priorities.