Specialty trucks can be extremely helpful, even necessary to many businesses. Specialty trucks can range from monster trucks and sport trucks to low riders or vintage trucks. It even refers to radio-controlled trucks, work trucks, and pickup trucks with a designated purpose.
Some specialty truck leasing companies try to understand your transportation needs, and do their best to provide you with the best truck lease possible. Leasing companies like Mendon serve hundreds of local companies and operate a fleet of thousands of lease and rental vehicles from numerous convenient service locations. These types of truck leases usually provide preventive maintenance programs, fuel, towing services, body shop work, truck washing and storage, driver safety management training programs, mechanical repairs, and tax reporting. These all sound enticing, but the question still remains: is it more advantageous to own or lease?
Leasing versus ownership
Many leasing versus buying comparisons tend to only consider the funding comparison. It is important that you carefully research all aspects of each form before you decide which is best for you or your business. These aspects include administrative, sales tax implications, balance sheet treatment, acquisition cost and vehicle remarketing.
Administration is an important element. Managing a fleet requires that there are resources for ordering new vehicles, selling used trucks, and monitoring maintenance activity. These tasks are a vital element to specialty truck leasing and require excellent skills and resources. If you lease your specialty trucks from a company, they will be able to provide better services in order to handle workflow and to keep up with the company’s fluctuating incentives and growth.
Sales tax implications are also important to the leasing versus ownership comparison because the impact of sales and use tax can vary depending on whether a truck is leased or owned. In thirty-five states, tax is applied to the lease vehicle’s monthly rental payment instead of being a charge against the truck’s cost when it was bought. If you pay taxes on the monthly payment, you reduce the total tax paid and even improve your cash flow.
The resale value is another element that should be considered when you are deciding to commit to specialty truck leasing. Traditional comparisons that look at finances typically assume that they would have the same net resale value of a truck whether it was leased or owned. In order to maximize the resale value of a specialty truck, you’ll need to know and understand which sale outlet to use. It is also necessary that you determine whether the timing of the market is appropriate for a certain truck.
There are benefits to leasing as well as benefits to ownership when it comes to trucks. Either way, it is important that you research both options before you commit to one or the other. It is a big decision and the right option is usually dependent on your own situation and incentive. Specialty truck leasing is a wonderful option that should be strongly considered, especially by those whose budget will be unduly strained by opting to purchase. Whatever decision you end up making regarding the financing of your specialty trucks, you should initially consider all your options.
By Kristin Lockwood