You can buy a 1,2, or 3-year-old lightly used car, mostly Certified with hardly any miles and cut your depreciation costs down and only have nominally increased maintenance costs, if any. A Certified Hyundai/Kia will maintain the 10-year limited power train warranty.

I helped my wife get a great lease deal on a 2020 Honda CR-V recently. I worked out the numbers with the lease vs purchase after her trade-in. It was the lowest monthly lease they have seen in decades! We wanted to buy, but the trade-in value was low (due to some minor body damage) and it would have been hard to sell it private party since it was worth around $14,000. I saw that the lease numbers looked better, so we investigated both scenarios to work the deal.

I later checked the approximate lease deals for that model (EX-L) and it looks like we did well.

The lease deal worked out better EVEN if she decided to purchase after the lease is up using the saving from the much lower car payments over the 3 years as a down payment and financing for 24 months more. Usually, the lease-to-own method costs at least $1,000 more vs buying and financing. We actually come out better by about 400 dollars with a lease-to-own strategy.

Her warranty from the other car was just rolled over to the new car for zero cost. Tires, rims, oil changes, tire rotations, and minor dings/scratches are completely covered.

Now she has the option to buy the car, or lease, or buy another car. She cannot lose either way.