HI guys… I’m fixing to get a new plane. All the others have been leases but this time I’m thinking of buying a used plane outright.
I notice with new planes I have 3 payment options- 1) purchase for cash; 2) purchase on a loan; 3) get AS to buy it and lease it out to me.
Do the same 3 options exist for used planes? All I see is a contract with a button at the bottom inviting me to “sign” it but doesn’t tell me if doing so will open another page with the 3 financing options available to a new airplane purchaser or if the entire purchase price of the plane will immediately disappear off my current account. Tried the Wiki… no help and tried searching this forum… and if it’s there I couldn’t find it either.
Can anybody help? Or is finding out "the hard way" part of AS initiation rites?
Used planes on the open market (owned by the [color=#333333][font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=2]Aircraft Trade and Leasing Organization [/size][/font][/color]) are only available for outright purchase with cash. After purchasing a used a/c you will be eligible for a much higher loan due to your increase in real assets. If another player buys an a/c they may lease it out to you.
Used planes can only be bought cash. But you can go to the bank and ask for a loan. That loan will not be tied to the plane you buy, so you don’t get a reduction on the interest rate.
And as Firtree pointed out, once you own one plane the bank will give you higher loans in the future. The more assets you have, the more the bank will trust you.
By the way… if you go to the bank, you can choose the amount of money you want to borrow through a drop down menu. If your airline is fairly new, the maximum may be something like 200.000 dollar. It is however possible that your limit is 400.000 dollar or more. To find out your actual limit, keep borrowing money until the bank says "no more". If you pay the money back within minutes, your interest will be nothing or almost nothing.
Something I have also found is that the amount you are loaned is approximately 3% of your total balance. So if your company has a net worth of 100,000,000 $AS then the amount you can loan is $3,000,000. Although this seems to be true for relatively new company’s, when your company becomes larger it seems that the amount you can borrow becomes much larger. I think it has to do with the amount of assets you have and your credit rating. Essentially the bank is willing to extend a higher percentage of money to a company with a high book value. For example, a company with a 100m value gets to borrow ~3% of its total value but a company worth 4.1b can borrow ~30% because it is a better investment I guess. Not sure at what rater the percentage increases.