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My opinion on financing (which I stress is just my opinion) is simply in today's used airplane market, financing an old airplane simply guarantees you are going to pay more for it. In the old days, financing actually made sense because for a lot of years, airplanes actually appreciated in value. You could finance a plane, fly it awhile, sell it for equal or more likely more than you bought it for all the while gaining equity.
Now days, old airplanes are not worth much to start with and are only going down. The older they get, the more people are going to drop out of the market. I paid $90,000 cash for my 337G in 2002 with 400 hour Reman engines and 1800TT. The airplane is a little over 1500 on the engines now and 2900TT and Vrefed the other day at $20,000 retail which means maybe I'd get $15,000 for it and it's a nice well cared for airplane. At least that's Vref's opinion. In other words, the best approach in my opinion is to go into it knowing the buy in is gone forever. Plan on never seeing that money again. If that statement is true, the goal on the buy in is to keep that number as small as possible because the maintenance is where the real money goes.
About the only way financing makes sense, is if you are truly a wise active investor and keeping your cash allows you to put it to work and have it earn more than the cost of financing. Otherwise you are simply increasing the cost of the purchase price. And I agree with a previous post in that if you "need" to finance to buy the airplane, you can't afford it!
Ed
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