Lift Ownership

sweetwater

sweetwater

New member
PUtting this under Accounting, as its purely a $$$ question for me. How many folks own, or have owned their own lift? I have the opportunity to buy a retired utility truck with a lift for a ridiculously low price. Low hours and miles, but older model.

Was adding up the invoices and this year I have spent over 10K on lift rental. Can buy this piece of equipment for about half that price.

Are there pitfalls I am not considering when making this purchase? Is it easier to rent than own?

I figure this truck will be parked 90% of the time.
 
Depends on the type of work you do. If the lift would regularly suite your type of work being done it's a no brainer. We use a variety of different lifts so it makes more sense for us to rent. Lift rental is a 100% write off as well where as you may need to depreciate the purchase of one. I could see a truck lift good if your doing a lot of commercial. Residential would be limited around here due to all of the landscaping.
 
I prefer rentals as I mark them up and make some money off the "responsibility" of operating them. I personally don't use them often enough to justify the expense especially since 90% of the time it is a 60 foot unit that is used.
 
Buy it! You can still write it all off this year without depreciating it.

Maintaining the truck will be more difficult than maintaining the lift especially if it is PTO driven.

Plus, it makes a good platform for viewing races!!! lol

DSCN0099-1-2.jpg
 
I would buy it, I am sure that once you have it you will find more reasons to use it. in todays world 5k isnt that much. you can charge for it and it will pay for itself.

thats a weird looking truck Tony,
 
Buy it, you can charge a lift fee, because it does not take much intelligence to realize that a lift is more expensive to maintain.
 
sweetwater said:
PUtting this under Accounting, as its purely a $$$ question for me. How many folks own, or have owned their own lift? I have the opportunity to buy a retired utility truck with a lift for a ridiculously low price. Low hours and miles, but older model.

Was adding up the invoices and this year I have spent over 10K on lift rental. Can buy this piece of equipment for about half that price.

Are there pitfalls I am not considering when making this purchase? Is it easier to rent than own?

I figure this truck will be parked 90% of the time.
Click to expand...


If you decide that you don't want it please let me know.....I'll buy it......thanks
 
Buy it Ray..... I know if I had one, I could also rent it out to a bunch of other guys I know here in my area... Tree guys, painters, gutter clean out guys etc.... Instead of it sitting 90% of the time, have it generate revenue for you!
 
Bob Keenan said:
Buy it Ray..... I know if I had one, I could also rent it out to a bunch of other guys I know here in my area... Tree guys, painters, gutter clean out guys etc.... Instead of it sitting 90% of the time, have it generate revenue for you!
Click to expand...

I agree. Excellent idea
 
This is just my opinion, but for us I don't think it would be worth the liability. If I'm going up in an 80' lift I want to know that a professional has been taking care of that thing! And it hasn't been just sitting around waiting for me to use it.

Yeah, I see where you could pay for it in a short amount of time and start putting that extra charge to the customer in your pocket.

Another thing for us would be the fact that we've bid on jobs this year that would require anything from a 60' to 120'.

It would be cool to have one though.
 
Insurance for ours was the same as the F450. Full coverage for the trailer lift adds about $80/mo for 50k coverage.

These things aren't rocket science and require far less repair than a pressure washer. Even if hoses pop they don't just fall out of the sky.

Other than batteries I have spent a grand total of about $1200 in seven years on two units.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2
 
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