The best time to know if a Lease-Purchase contract will be profitable for you is before you sign it. The same is true if the contract is so flawed that there is no way on earth you can buy that truck and make a living at the same time. You don’t want to come to that realization six months down the road when you find yourself under emergency financial stress.

This simple calculator has a place for every variable that goes into a small trucking business’s cash flow analysis. Note that as you put in your variables, the bottom line of whether you are making or losing money changes. After you put in the figures that reflects what you think you will do in the coming year, (not what the recruiter blows smoke about) do some additional calculations. Change the miles to a lower and then a higher number and see how mileage affects the bottom line. Then go back to your original best estimate of miles and do some “If/Then” calculations on diesel fuel prices. Put in the highest figure you have ever seen on a fuel pump. Put in the figure between today’s price and the highest price you have seen. Note how little diesel price fluctuations have to be to make thousands of dollars difference in the bottom line. Because fuel is your single biggest cost, go back and check the lease’s handling of fuel surcharges. If there is no fuel surcharge in place, you can easily see with this calculator how a simple hic-up in the fuel price can take you from being a profitable trucker to being a bankrupt trucker in short order.

INSTRUCTIONS: The OOIDA Lease Purchase Survival Calculator is a Microsoft® Excel file. You MUST have Microsoft® Excel installed on your computer to open this page. If you do not have Microsoft® Excel you can view online courtesy of

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OOIDA Lease Purchase Calculator

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OOIDA Lease Purchase Calculator

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