Hire purchase
The lease is a lease in which the tenant has been granted the right by the landlord who rented thing within a certain period unilaterally for sale to acquire.
Germany
According to German law, the later purchase takes place at a previously determined price with full or partial crediting of the rents paid up to that point. Before the declaration, tenancy law applies to the contract , after which it is a purchase contract to which sales law is applied. However, the conditions of the individual providers must be checked on a case-by-case basis. In some cases they differ considerably. Often no option right is agreed, but the transfer of ownership with payment of the final installment is agreed from the start, without the need for a declaration of exercise.
As a rule, the rental price is excessive. The reason for this is on the one hand to induce the tenant to buy. On the other hand, the use of the thing, if it is a new thing, is also associated with a strong loss of value. For the buyer, the incentive to conclude a rental purchase is the easier financing compared to buying it now.
From a tax perspective, hire purchase is not necessarily synonymous with leasing . In the case of a hire purchase, beneficial ownership is immediately transferred to the buyer. This makes it necessary to capitalize on fixed assets . Legal ownership usually passes to the buyer after the last installment has been paid.
Thus, the hire purchase is more comparable to an installment payment than to a classic leasing contract .
In the event of the seller's bankruptcy , the treatment depends on whether retention of title has been agreed. According to Section 107 of the Insolvency Code (InsO), the conditional buyer can demand the fulfillment of the contract even in the event of insolvency. For this, however, it is necessary that the transfer of ownership is already certain when the rental purchase item is handed over.
Hire purchase has been used more often for fraudulent pyramid schemes in the automotive trade for several years . Buyers are given vehicles with unusual discounts of over 30% if they make a large advance payment. The seller can easily finance the vehicles delivered first with the incoming down payments or lease them himself, although he had a higher purchase price. With the hire purchase, the seller has a suitable pretext not to have to present or hand over the vehicle registration document so that the buyer feels safe for a while. The system works as long as there is sufficient growth, but typically collapses after a few years, as the seller either runs out of liquidity or he withdraws with the down payments.
Austria
In contrast to Germany, the Austrian legal hire-purchase model is only an option to ultimately purchase. The normal fee collected during the rental period is not offset against the purchase price in the event of a purchase, and the landlord does not need to state the purchase price when concluding the contract . The tenant can therefore hardly foresee the amount that will ultimately have to be paid, because this is determined on the basis of an expert report according to market value or production costs, taking into account depreciation and value protection. Hire purchase in Austria is fundamentally different from leasing , in which part of the purchase price has already been paid with the leasing installments and only the residual value remains open.
literature
Germany
- Christian Biermann-Ratjen: Hire purchase and consumer protection . In: DNotZ . Vol. 11, pp. 788-795. 2007.
- Udo Cremer: Rent & Hire Purchase . In: Balance & Accounting. Journal of accounting and taxation . Vol. 51, H. 10, 2005, ISSN 0930-0597 , pp. 371-377.
- Stefan Hügel, Christian Salzig: Hire purchase and other forms of land purchase by installment . 2nd Edition. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-56767-4 .
- Philipp Schloßer: Hire purchase - legality of the clause passing on the risk of property and price . In: Monthly for German Law . 57th vol. 1, 2003, pp. 70-72.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Stiftung Warentest: test warns: hire purchase . In: test , issue 11/2012.
- ↑ Hire purchase put to the test. In: Kleine Zeitung of March 25th, 2011, supplement My Home , p. 15.
