We have a novated lease for our car. It's been great. We used it as a salary sacrifice to lower DH's taxable income. It's worked well for us, but when we looked into it and did the sums, it wasn't worth it as a salary sacrifice if you earnt under $60k per year. It's hard to see any savings you make, because it's all on your tax, so you wont see any effect until you have your tax done and your taxable income isn't as high. It does cost a lot per month - we pay $1800 per month for it, which is the car repayment and all running costs for the car included in that - so fuel, rego, insurance, tyres, maintenance etc. You get a fuel card so you charge the fuel back to your lease company. That might seem like a lot, but if you have any funds at the end of the lease period that are not spent, then they give that back to you. If you need new tyres or maintenance done on it, you have to get a purchase order from the company and they pay the account direct, or you pay and then they will reimburse you the money. this also applies for rego and insurance. The only big thing is that you have to nominate a set number of KM's per year that you expect to travel. If you don't reach the target km's, then you will lose any fringe benefits tax saving you might have had. We nominated 25,000kms per year and I currently do about 30,000. So you have to be sure of how many kms you drive on average per year - not much point nominating 40,000km's if you live in a highly urban area and don't travel much. We haven't found it affects FTB at all - it's still counted as part of your taxable income, so you have to tell centrelink how much money you spend per year on fringe benefits - so for us it's just over $20k. One catch is the balloon payment at the end of your lease. Ours is $10,000 for our car and you have to have that money there in a lump sum to pay out your lease and fully own your vehicle at the end of it. Oh and the other thing is that with a leased vehicle, you have to have it registered and insured as a Business vehicle, not private use, so this will increase the cost of your insurance etc.

So while it is good, it's not a huge money saver. This is because when you pay the monthly amount, it takes out all that they need to allocate for all the various things during the year. But if you just got a loan and brought a car yourself, it would be less money per month because you are only paying for the car, not for all the other things like fuel and tyres etc. But it is good knowing that if you do need new tyres or need something fixed, then you don't have to actually have the cash yourself because it is already in the 'kitty' so to speak