Among many truckers, lease-purchase programs have a less-than-stellar reputation. Some programs are easy to enter, offering no-money-down no-credit-check guarantees. But they also can make it hard to achieve the ultimate goal: truck ownership.
“There are some good companies out there with lease-purchase programs that help the driver, but the fail rate with most lease-purchases is very high,” says Allen Smith, founder of Truth About Trucking, a website and Internet broadcast that gives new and prospective drivers an inside look at over-the-road driving.
Smith, a former household-goods-hauling owner-operator who now works as an intrastate company driver in Florida, tried three lease-purchase programs in the early 1990s and never found a way to make them work. His 2011 Truth About Trucking survey showed 77 percent of drivers never complete their lease-purchase agreements.
Some failed because they didn’t understand the nature of the owner-operator business and weren’t prepared for major repairs and other big costs. Others say they couldn’t make the truck payments because their companies reduced their miles near the end of the lease – a common complaint among critics, including Smith: “Most lease-purchases are set up for the driver to fail.”
Unscrupulous practices such as that have earned these programs the unsavory “fleece-purchase” moniker.
Andera Jackson thinks it’s unfair to put all lease-purchase programs under the same umbrella. If you pick the right program with the right carrier, Jackson says, lease-purchase deals don’t have to be financial pits waiting to swallow their next victim. The 42-year-old trucker from Dayton, Ohio, is eight months away from owning a 2007 Freightliner Century financed through a lease-purchase with Chattanooga, Tenn.-based U.S. Xpress.
“You have got to know what you are getting into,” Jackson says. “This is my third lease-purchase. I did two one-year leases before this one. It gave me insights into what’s going on.” He used the first two lease-purchases to trade up, with plans to pay this one off and own the truck outright.
