I’ve had, for the past three years, a 2006 Mini Cooper S that we bought (not leased), and it’s just about paid off (yay!). I had been reading that the resale value for Minis was killer so was doing some investigating online and sure enough, values were ranging in the $16,000 to $19,000 range. The car had low miles and had been well taken care of, all of which I figured would increase the resale value. Now don’t get me wrong – I LOVE the Mini! It’s the most fun car I have ever owned, bar none. But over the past three years I had come to realize that it was more car than we needed. The Mini Cooper S also doesn’t get the greatest gas mileage AND uses only premium gas. It had a navigational system built-in that was nowhere near as good as our little Garmin Nuvi. Anyway, so I did this online evaluation, which asked me what I’d think of replacing the 2006 Mini with, and I input a 2009 Mini Cooper. Almost immediately I got an email from Long Beach mini (where we bought the S) and they invited us in to do a complete value estimate – and while they did that we could look at new Minis. A win-win situation if ever there was one. As we walked in Chuck said, “You understand they’re going to do the hard sell, right?” I agreed they probably would  – but secretly I was thinking this is a Mini dealer and they really aren’t into the hard sell. So they took our Mini off to get checked out and we looked at new Minis. Both Chuck and I were impressed with the custom Bluetooth and USB/iPod integration. They let us set up my iphone to test the Bluetooth, and it’s all controllable from the steering wheel AND you can have more than one phone paired with the car (though only one phone can use the Bluetooth at a time). the USB/iPod hookup displays all of our iPod’s info on the radio scree so you can select playlists, songs, whatever without ever looking at your iPod. Sweet! And the new Coopers get good gas mileage -close to 30MPG on average. Okay, not a Prius but not bad for a super cool car.

So after about half an hour we got the word on the resale value of our 2006 Mini – $18,000. Not bad! Chuck was even impressed. Then the sales guy started the semi-hard sell, the what-would-it-take stuff. Wellll, we said, if we do anything we’re moving down the food chain to a regular Cooper that doesn’t need all of the trimmings (neither one of us, for instance, care about sunroofs). Bottom line: we could sell them back our 2006 Mini and get a new 2009 for $260/month for 3 years at 1.9% interest. But then we asked about leasing, as it’s pretty clear that three years is about my attention span with cars. For $330/month we could lease the Mini, AND get a check from them for $15,000 (less the various fees, last month payoff, etc). I could see Chuck’s brain going, “Huh?” He had told me that he expected they’d come back with a max offer of $11,000 for the car. Faced with the offer of cash and a new car, it didn’t take much to make him think this was a pretty good deal.

So that did it. We sold them the 2006 Mini and leased the 2009 Mini and got $15,000 for our trouble.