Mill lease

[otternorth]

Has anyone here leased a mill on either side of the transaction?
A neighbor wants to buy my mill and I have proposed a lease.
This is a remote off road site. Hauling my mill In was a big deal.
Most of my milling is completed (standing dead spruce) but will continue to mill as additional trees die and are harvested. This will be occasional use.
The neighbor will start milling his dead trees this summer but wants the mill to stay on his site with me being able to use it as I need.
I'm in a quandary.
Opinions?

[luap]

A very similar proposition was made to me once. The other party would buy my mill and He would saw any logs I needed milled. It had two many negatives from my perspective. I would have to haul the logs, it would be on his schedule, and then haul lumber home. Even though I did not use the mill much I still wanted it available and I have used it more as time has passed.

[longtime lurker]

I have vendor financed equipment in the past, both as a buyer and as a seller. It all comes down to two things really:

- does this person look after their equipment? Thats not about having a clean car, or fancy toys its about grease and machinery kept in fair working condition.
- does this person pay their bills? 

If they meet those criteria then its a maybe, if they don't then its a definite no.

[Stuart Caruk]

I learned the hard way to the tune of about $85k once....

If you sell a machine on payments to a customer, and they go bankrupt, the machine is part of the estate, unless you want to pay the estate the equity they contributed before they went bust. Given that I could build another machine for less than paying that and getting a used machine back, I went through the process. At the very end, the IRS stepped in, and all of the combined taxes were more than the assets, so only the government got paid.

Now had I leased the machine, with a $1 buyout, the machine would have been mine and I could have picked it up after their payment was past due.

My lesson was never to sell a machine on a contract, only on a lease, with a serious lease initiation fee.

[otternorth]

Thank you for the replies.
They were helpful in determining not to sell or lease.