Mine's bought, which is all well and good but it's been a hard slog over the years buying cars, trying to get them at the best price to minimise depreciation, trying to pick up any modifications at the right price and often second hand to keep it all (just about) affordable.
When you change your cars fairly frequently, which most of us forum users do owing to the temptation in front of us day after day, then you tend to end up with a newish car that would be really hard to sell privately despite being mint condition; therefore the easiest route tends to be to chop in at the best price you can against something with the best discount you can get and start the vicious old merry go round all over again...
I look back now and think maybe I should have kept my mk6 another six months to a year and waited until the R was released, sold the mk6 privately, as it would have been of an age where that was a more reasonable proposition, and banked the money (or paid it off the mortgage or something) then leased a cheap R for a couple of years (or a GTD more likely as you can get those on cheap leases now and again). Asker does have a very good point about investing in a depreciating asset but it's not an exact science and investing in anything has risks.
I don't really like the R as much as I should, it has more power than torque which is always a sign to me that the power is in the less useable engine ranges (even if it has a LOT of power) so therefore would need a remap to make it feel any better than any other Golf to drive on a day to day basis. And it just looks a bit dull, with a particularly poor colour choice range in my humble opinion. The standard seats look a bit "Meh" and I'm not paying VW's silly prices for half fake leather. Apologies to R fans.
So hindsight is a great thing, and as the MK7 GTI is head and shoulders better as standard than any Golf before it I'm in the unusual position for me of not knowing what to do next.
When I bought the car many were ordering it with the extended warranty (I wonder how many who bought that option have part ex'ed already?!!!) but I thought "I never keep a car more than a couple years so that's a waste of money for me straight away" yet now I'm wondering if actually I'll just end up keeping my GTI for the very long term and leasing a small cheap second car or getting something like a Mii on 0% so that my sons can use it once my battered old second car finally drops to bits.
Leasing can get you something you wouldn't normally be able to afford at a reasonable cost and I think will become increasingly popular with younger people who have grown up with the smart phone contract merry go round, so are used to throwing their money at the shiniest new gadget and moving on as soon as technology moves on, which as we all know is increasingly quickly.
For me the downsides of leasing are the lack of ability to modify (even though my mk7 has been kept standard aside from wheels) and that fact that if you've made a mistake or something you really *must* have in your life comes out you can't just sell up and get something else even shinier...
