Likely for a limited time, it appears Tesla is running a novated lease incentive. The incentive is not currently displaying on the Tesla AU website, however the deal is being promoted by leasing company Smart (https://www.smart.com.au/p/tesla/).
Likely wont update on Tesla AU until tomorrow (when the deal begins). Will update this tomorrow!
Referee gets $350 off Model Y & 3 purchase.
Referrer gets $150 credit toward Supercharging, software upgrades, merchandise, service payments or a new vehicle. Limit of 10 referral benefits per calendar year.
need it for new model Y
Shame my employer doesn’t do NL so I wouldn’t be able to get this deal
Do you have any sway over that stance? Great way to retain staff.
Nah it’s corporate policy we just aren’t setup for it here in Australia (American company)
Righto - hope they are paying you in USD at the moment, that would be better than a lease 😉
I've wondered - If I'm contracting now and my agency offers NL options via one company, what happens if I change jobs or get a permanent role and that company uses a different NL provider? Does the provider not matter as long as the new company offers the NL salary packaging?
New provider might offer a different interest rate/other charges though so it might change the calculation a bit.
Keep waiting the prices will keep dropping
I wait for prices to drop with SSDs too :-P
This discount is offered via Smart Leasing, not Tesla. Smart Leasing offered a similar discount back in Oct too from memory.
The previous $3,000 offer back in December was by Tesla (https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/874298/comments). This offer is currently being advertised by Smart Leasing, but is definitely offered by Tesla. Likely not on their website until tomorrow when the offer begins. Its in the T&C on the Smart Leasing site ("*The offer set out in this campaign is provided by Tesla Motors Australia,…")
Is this for all lease providers or just Smart? My employer uses a different lease provider, anything I can do?
Not clear currently, I think likely all, however likely more clear tomorrow when the incentive is live.
if you have two options 1) get a NL - get $3500 rebate in WA (may be additional $3500 NL incentive as per this post), no GST on purchases and tax savings as a pre tax money.
or 2) claim it under ABN as a business car? - benefit Asset Write-Off. Not aware of other benefits.
which option is better / cheaper?
There is no clear answer as it would also highly depend on what percent you could justify your car as business use, how much and how fast you claim the depreciation of the car, etc.
If you could claim a very high percentage of use as business, then yes it's possible that the asset write off is a better deal still.
Get your accountant to crunch the business scenario for you, and compare it to the spreadsheet for the personal NL scenario.
novated Lease big plus, however not for EV..
Wot?
On Tesla’s website for Model Y, they have a Novated Lease estimator, if I use a value of $180,000 income over 60 months. It mentions the payments $678 /mo est.
Does this figure mean I will be saving $678 in tax per month with a NL? Apologies if this is a dumb question, have never really learnt about NL before.
If so, does this mean a saving of $40,680 on a $69k car?? I feel like I am calculating the wrong thing here. Thanks if anyone could help.
It means that they estimate you'll be paying $678 per month 'post-tax'. The estimated monthly payments are calculated by your tax bracket i.e. the higher tax bracket you are, the more worthwhile a novated lease becomes
I see, so the rest of the car payment will be money that was going to the taxman anyways? Do you know if this $678 proposed figure is including the lease interest rate as well? Thanks so much!
Use my free tool to crunch the numbers for comparison between NL vs cash, or even NL new EV vs keeping old car.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AusFinance/s/VHJ25VpNKu
(Thanks to @ajr5k for posting to the spreadsheet - I like linking people to the Reddit landing page as I provide lots more useful context about NL and how to use the spreadsheet)
Plenty of people have found it useful and more honest than the typical NL calculators as it takes into account all the fees and interests and spits out the final saving figure. It also does a lot of other useful calculations eg whether your HECS or childcare is affected and by how much)
Thanks for the tip, I will start doing the same. Good context and thank you for maintaining the spreadsheet.
Thanks for posting the reddit link, I like your analogy and response about the high end printer which is what I needed to look at the calculator.
Yeah a lot of businesses prey on people’s obsession about “paying less tax” so they hone in this number while distracting them from the fact that “saving 1000 dollars of tax while paying 950 dollars extra” is only net 50 dollars saving, but people are too intoxicated by the 1000 figure without finding out the underlying 950 extra.
sorry can someone explain to me basically how novated lease works.
Does it matter if I have my own business or employee? I tested the calculator
Copying from my response to a similar question:
Typically as an employee, you receive your salary as PAYG i.e. each pay, instead of paying you the full gross pre-tax salary, they withhold a certain amount of tax that you would owe ATO, and give you your post-tax income. And normally when you buy a car / pay a car loan, you would use your post-tax money to pay for it.
Novated lease is an arrangement between three parties - you (employee), your employer and a novated lease company. What NL does is that instead of pretax income > tax withheld > post-tax money > spend on car, they allow some of the pretax income to directly go towards your lease before the tax-withholding process. This is also typically said to be "spending pretax money". This becomes pretax income > some amount spent on car lease > the remaining money has the tax withheld.
If you do all the maths and crunch all the numbers, the net effect is that spending pretax money is the same as getting an X% discount, where X is your marginal tax bracket + 2% Medicare levy. In other words, 30% bracket people gets 32% discount, 37% bracket gets 39% discount, 45% bracket gets 47% discount. Therefore someone on top bracket who is allowed to spend their 1000 dollars pretax is equivalent to spending only 530 dollars.
All that sounds like a great deal - and novated lease has been a thing for many, many decades, however there has always been a catch: Fringe Benefit Tax i.e. FBT. Now FBT is actually a tax on the employer, not the employee. This process of allowing you to spend your pretax money is called a "fringe benefit", and to provide this the employer typically has to pay FBT (with a few exceptions). This is an extra expense most employers would typically want to avoid, but there's a workaround allowed by ATO. If instead of paying for NL with only pretax money, they actually pay part of it with post-tax money, then this FBT will then goes down to zero. The problem is, any amount that you end up paying with post-tax would now lose the "discount effect" discussed above, hence the saving is significantly reduced. And the amount you have to pay with post-tax to reduce FBT to zero is a lot - typically 20% of the car's value per year using the most common calculation method!
Because of the above, while NL sounded nice in theory (i.e fund car with pretax money = save on tax = save money), when you account for this FBT effect and do the calculations carefully, one would often realise that NL had never been as good as a deal as the NL company wanted you to believe.
That is, until FBT exemption came in since November 2022. The government needed a way to boost the take up of low-emission EV and PHEV - and this is the one incentive they decided on. For EV/PHEV below luxury car tax threshold (91,387 this financial year), you can now NL the car without any FBT whatsoever! This is equivalent to a few thousands less per year for any equivalent priced car.
This was a total game changer. Without the encumbrance of FBT, NL became a genuinely good deal. Now NL companies obviously want their cut so many companies would try to get some commission with so called high "effective interest rate", however if you do the calculations carefully, you could conclude that people could save thousands to tens of thousands (I was personally 46,000 dollars better than cash being someone on top bracket).
Now one needs to be careful as to how to compare NL vs cash / car loan. Most novated lease companies' calculator tries to obfuscate the picture - they tell you "you save xx,xxx dollars in tax" but they conveniently don't tell you that you are also paying thousands extra in interest that you wouldn't otherwise have paid. I wrote a spreadsheet that tries to disentangle this whole thing which many people have found helpful; another calculator I have found useful and honest is the Toyota Fleet calculator mentioned at the top level of this comment.
Hope that helped make thing a bit clearer.
The long range 7k it is great price for that car.