To Buy a Car on Lease or With a Loan?

When buying a car most Romanians would take credit or use the leasing option, a study performed by Gallup Romania found. Almost half of the respondents would go for a long term credit, expanding over 49 to 60 months.
This is so because the financial capabilities Romanians have are pretty limited: only a quarter of the respondents said they would rather pay the car in advance.

The options for either credit or leasing are almost equally divided: 35% of the people interviewed said they would prefer the leasing, while 31% said they would like taking a bank loan more.

"One very important conclusion of our study is that people do not know - 44% did not - what is the difference between leasing and bank loan," explained Guenter Koenig, president of Porsche Bank.
Those that favor leasing or bank loans say these are financially comfortable options, while those that like to pay in full and in advance say they do so to not pay high interests and because they do not like to have debts to pay.

Romanians who make a bank loan to buy a car prefer to have it in euros - 43%, or in Romanian lei - 42%, while only 10% of the respondents liked their credits in dollars.
"This may be because of the frequent fluctuations of the dollar lately and the future integration of Romania into the European Union," explained Koenig. Most people like long-term loans in order to be able to pay the monthly installments, few of the people questioned saying they would like better short-term loans - less than two years long.

Over three quarters of the people willing to buy a new car first choose the car brand and then the bank they will take the loan from, the study found. And when choosing the bank, people go for the banks that analyze swiftly their request and documentation and that ask for pay-back installments close to their financial capabilities.

The Romanian Commercial Bank, the Romanian Development Bank and Raiffeisen Bank are the first three banks which respondents could name. At the same time, Raiffeisen Bank gets good marks from the public as a flexible bank, which offers good options for customers borrowing money, having small commission fees, and Tiriac Bank is perceived as providing good services.

The study was performed on a sample of over 6,000 people, of which 803 fit the target-group: over 22-year old, with a net income over 7 million lei, and envisaging buying a car in the next two years.
The Gallup poll was conducted via telephone, between 18 September and 1 October, in cities with over 200,000 people.

In the target group sampled 53% are university educated, and 41% are high-school educated. Almost half of them are aged between 22 and 35, while over 44% of respondents have net monthly incomes between 7 and 20 million lei. Of the Bucharest dwellers, 27% said they would pay in advance for a car, while 37% said they will opt for leasing.