Shortly after opening our "brick and mortar" store, we were contacted by a person regarding credit card processing.
Seeing as how not accepting credit cards would have killed our business, we opted to give the company a go.
After a lengthy discussion on how much less expensive it was than other vendors my partner went ahead and signed the lease, unknowingly signing us into a 4 year non-terminating contract to "lease to own" our equipment.
A few years down the road we opted to just go online instead of having the over head that a normal clothing store would have. I contacted the leasing company after a lengthy time trying to find any contact info since we never received a finalized lease or any sort of contact info from CIT Lease Finance group.
They informed me of how this was a non-terminating lease and we could opt to buy out for something along the lines of 3K. After determining that it was much cheaper to just pay the monthly fee for the remainder of the lease we decided to eat it, and they agreed to inform us when the lease had ended.
Fast forward another year and a half.
This past June we realized that our lease should have been finished, and yet we were still being debited the 68.55/mo for a machine we hadn't used in well over a year. So I contact the company again (this time by writing) informing them that we would like to cancel our lease since we were moving from Michigan to New York and they would no longer be able to debit our account.
We didn't hear back from them until July when a man called me to tell me that our lease was terminated and he would be sending us the info on where to send back our equipment (?)
As you should remember from previously, the man we spoke with (as well as the CIT website) states that this is lease to own equipment. But, it is definitely NOT lease to own equipment. You lease it and have an option to buy after you have already paid 3,290.40 for this $300 piece of equipment.
THEN, I contact the company again and discover that our lease ended in DECEMBER and that they decided to just flip us to a month to month lease instead of contacting us as we were told we would have been.
So, now we supposedly owe for July even though we contacted them in writing and told them we wanted to cancel in June. AND we've paid since December an extra $411.30 that had they just contacted us we wouldn't have had to pay. We SHOULDN'T have had to pay that.
So to anyone who feels this is wrong. Let them know at 888-692-7177.
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