And you wonder why i don't give charities money, Rant over.

Buying new cars and then effectly making the worthless is a very expensive business.

Purchasing 2nd hand cars will only introduce risk and repair costs.

Cars are non core to you business so you really need a lease company involved. The average mileage of each car will be reduced <70K to the car still have some value. The has the advantage of reduced capex and should work out cheap the running you own cars.

Much better solution

Chap I knew 20+ years ago had some 80 cars & ran them 3 years and they were worth next to nothing.

Changed to buying ex-day rent cars and running them 2 years and selling them @ 70-80K miles @ roughly 30 months old.

Still under warranty for most of his ownership and sold with a mileage that was under 3 figures and sellable for some money. Not a lot of money but a lot better than the 90-100K 3 year old car.

I would agree on the merits of leasing. The lease companies are masters at buying, forecasting the residuals and managing the servicing garages.

Even allowing for the lease company profit, I'd be surprised if the charity can do better.

Hello Nathan, forget the supplying of any vehicles for your operatives. Pay the HMRC rate for mileage (tax free) and let people use their own vehicles. If for example the average operative travels 5K miles per annum, then you pay them £2225.00 per annum. Problem solved. No capital outlay, no depreciation and no management time spent sourcing, maintaining and selling vehicles. Just a simple monthly expenses claim to pay out. Got to be a winner financially. Our company (large with over 100 vehicles in use) operated this system and everyone was happy with it. Most ran reliable , but cheaper older cars and made tax free money as well.

Cheers Concrete

Hi, this is something that requires a discussion as there are many factors to consider. I would be happy to talk over these with you properly. If you would like a chat please email me cjk@jks-fleet.co.uk and I will make sure we can help as working with charities is important as far as I am concerned

If you buy used cars, try to find companies that offer enormous warranties, Kia has a 7 year scheme i think. Takes away the cost of maintaining older cars.

Inevitably when questions like this are asked, the replies are all about finance: a vital consideration but not the only one.

We don't know what the cars are used for, Nathan, but perhaps you would come back and tell us so that comments can be as informed as possible. As moderator I can see people's E-mail addresses, and it looks as if the charity helps blind ex-service veterans. And you say that the cars do 40,000 miles a year.

I would say that the priorities are reliability and minimum cost of repairs: there is a great advantage in buying new and choosing makes that offer the most generous warranties. There are some that offer unlimited mileage, and some that offer 90,000 or 100,000 miles rather than the usual 60,000. Hyundai, Kia, Toyota and Renault are the most generous I believe.

Edited by Avant on 21/06/2016 at 00:46