On Saturday, Cardi B and her husband, the recording artist Offset, showed off their new rides on Instagram: two matching Lamborghinis, one Kelly green and one bright blue. “Blessed & Gifted,” the rapper captioned her shot. “Official Lamb owners.”
Some fans scoffed, claiming the musicians must have leased the cars rather than buying them outright and implying that there was so way they could afford two Lamborghinis.
Cardi B responded swiftly by posting a screenshot of her bank account to Twitter. It revealed that she took out a cash deposit of $548,736.97 from her Wells Fargo checking account to pay for the car. She took down the tweet shortly after, but not before followers got screenshots.
Although half a million dollars is far more than the average person can afford to spend on a car, experts do back Cardi B’s decision to buy, not lease. Jay Leno, car aficionado and host of CNBC’s “Jay Leno’s Garage,” advises against leasing. So does financial expert and former CNBC host Suze Orman.
“I always think it’s better to buy a car,” Leno tells CNBC. “Everyone seems to lease now. Everyone thinks you can write off this and write off that, and to a certain extent, you can. But at the end of the lease, you don’t have anything.”
The comedian and former host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show” prefers own assets outright. “I don’t carry debt. I own everything. I own my buildings. I own my cars. That way, if it ends tomorrow, I know what I’ve got,” he says.
Orman calls leasing a car “the most stupid thing I’ve ever done with money.”
Back in 1987, she leased a BMW 750iL in order to show off to the person she was dating. “There was a time that I was in a relationship with a very, very wealthy person and I wanted to impress this person and I didn’t have money yet, so I went out and I leased a car,” she tells CNBC.
But Orman wasn’t spending the money for the right reasons, and the $800 monthly payments ended up being more than she could afford.
“That’s where I came up with this statement, you know: Don’t spend money you don’t have to impress people you don’t even like, because the truth of the matter is later I didn’t even like this person and I’m spending all of this money,” she says.
While lease payments are typically cheaper per month than loan payments, they still add up over time. Once you pay off your auto loan, you eliminate a fixed monthly cost and won’t have to worry about a car payment until you buy again. If you’re still leasing, that’s another check you continue to write every month.
Like going out to eat all the time, small individual payments can become huge annual costs.
If you’re debating which option is best for you, take the time to deliberate and weigh the pros and cons. And before signing up for an expensive lease, consider Orman’s advice and ask yourself, “When do you buy what you can afford versus what you need, when what you need is less than what you can afford?”
This is an updated version of a previously published story.
Don’t miss: Billy Joel’s first big splurge cost $50,000 but was completely ‘worth it’
Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube!
