The truth about C.R. England.

<My post was removed by Mastertech because it didn't meet the rules of the forum>

 

Just have to pick up a Truck Trader and any truck stop and compare makes/miles prices to your lease totals ... have lots of Kleenex ...

 

Trucks are expensive. But $138,000 is a bit much. You are payimg a lot for that truck. If you want a truck that bad, use your own credit and cash. If you can't, you'll never make it as an owner operator. You need to spend money to make money.

 

Here's one way to look at it. Swift will lease you a new $106,000 Cascadia for 47 months, with a weekly payment of $525 a week, plus a $49,000 residual. These numbers come directly from their website. That's a total payout of about $155,000.

I don't know what England's deal looks like, but I'd guess it's something similar - most of this stuff is calculated based on market interest rates and tax law, so they're all pretty much working from the same book.

If you calculated a simple loan, instead of a lease, to pay a total of $155,000 for this $106,000 truck over 47 months, it would equate to a loan rate of about 21&#37;.

I don't know what dealer financing costs are for a new truck, but I have a suspicion that it's less than 21%. Of course, a lot of leasees can't qualify for a loan anywhere, which is one of the reasons they get sucked into these deals. That, and there seem to be some who can't do the math.

 

That's pretty much it....In a nutshell.

 

That hardly amounts to "paying twice what the truck is worth", which is what I was responding to. If you don't have good credit and you need a new truck, leasing isn't a bad plan, and it's hardly a ripoff or a "fleece". How many drivers do a halfa* job and lose their truck, causing the company to have to park it and pay for it while it's not moving and losing value? Yet I don't see anyone here whining about getting ripped off by lease-op drivers. Just as with a high interest rate for risk loans, a lease payment includes the cost of the F*ups...it has to, or the company would go broke.

Leasing gives a person a chance to take as much responsibility as he chooses to, and it serves as a bridge to becoming self-employed, if the person chooses to go down that route, a chance to become independent a little at a time and not risk too much. A driver can start out as a lease op and become an independent, or the owner of a small trucking company. It's a place to start, and you pay your dues, just like anywhere else. You get out of the deal what you put into it.

 

The numbers speak for themselves. If you think a 21% loan rate on top of a bunch of other terms and conditions stacked in the carrier's favor is a good deal, run with it. If you want to be in a deal where you're paying for other's screw ups, all power to ya.

If I want to own a truck, I'll buy one. If I want to borrow the money to buy one, I'll borrow it from a bank, not from a bunch of trucking industry shysters. If I couldn't qualify for a loan, I'd have to ask myself how well I'm going to do in a cutthroat low-margin industry.

Cost of money is what it is; coming up with a bunch of reasons why lease-to-own is a good deal is no different than putting lipstick on a pig.

 

Don't know about "half a job" ... but more likely the company will "starve you out" and half way thru.

Don't make the mistake of thinking you're "independent" under these programs - the company calls all your shots, sets your rates, miles and runs ... you are not independent at all - your "paying to play" or renting a job.

What a driver "can do" with a lease, and what they end up doing are usually completely different.

Save 15k and buy a tractor with cash, you'll be "independent" in half the time.

 

Good point there. People who screw up in other businesses, and people who screw up their credit, are not likely to do any better in trucking.

 

First of all, there is no way that I would go on the road in a $15,000 tractor. We have enough maintenance problems with a new one (I consider one breakdown every two years to be a PITA).

My husband and I have a lease, which we are about to pay off. Our carrier gives us one load after another, usually 1500-2800 miles, just as fast as we can drop and hook them. We work for a carrier that currently only has three full (non-training) teams, and being married and unlikely to break up, we're special, and we get the best loads. We do a lot of FedEx, UPS, and other "gotta get there now" freight. We operate 24 hours a day until we run out of hours, then we take a day off in a hotel and do a 34. We typically get 5000-7000 miles per week, paychecks of about $5000, out of which we have to pay fuel and IFTA. We're not getting rich, but we're doing OK, which is better than most small businesses can say right now, and we're building good business credit by buying fuel on our own company credit cards.

When our lease is up, the carrier has offered to talk to the bank and negotiate a good interest rate for the balloon payment. When we get ready to buy another new truck, they are willing to add our truck to their order, and give us the discount price. I can hardly say that we're getting ripped off. The company is helping us get started in the trucking business. I don't know too many lease operators, but the ones I do know are doing well with the plan. Like us, they're getting out of it what they put in.

A single driver on a lease plan can barely afford an apartment and a bologna sandwich, but that is not a business model that I would adopt. If you want a new truck, you have to work it around the clock to pay for it.

We turn down any load we want to (especially loads going to New Jersey), we set our time available out and take time off whenever we want, and if we want to go home and there isn't any freight, we're free to bobtail. They may be setting our rate, by the mile, but they aren't "calling our shots" by any stretch of the imagination. They're giving us all the freight we can take. I just don't have any complaints, don't feel that I've been treated unfairly in any way. Sorry if it didn't work out for others.