When I first took sole control of Decisive Flow, I made the very stupid short term decision to rent computers through Flexirent. At the time I was forking out large sums of money in legal fees to extract my ex-business partner and of course, pay him out, so cashflow was key (like how I justify my stupidity??).

However, several years on and those leases are all expiring.

As I’m automatically transitioned into purchasing the equipment (apparently Flexirent has struggled to get in contact with me about the contracts expiring, though funnily enough their spam mail finds my PO Box just fine)… Ive been frantically calling their call-center to try to find anyone within the company to talk to about NOT buying equipment.

Initially it seems that Flexirent is full of hugely optimistic staff, who believe full-heartedly that despite you specifically saying time and time again you want to end contracts, you still DEEP DOWN want to buy from them, and continue to run off that assumption… However, weeks on, I now realise company policy is to trap you into purchasing.

Anyway, in the meantime, doing my sums on upgrading, I realised that I basically signed up with the devil a finance company that was charging me double for the equipment. That’s actually not their fault, I did know that up front.

So a warning for the un-wise… Be very careful when considering leasing equipment. As consumer.org.nz says… It’s pretty worrying but that’s the deal you sign, so you need to be well aware of what you are getting into. I know most small business owners may be a little too overworked to always thoroughly do research, but I guarantee you will be stoked that your hour of research avoided a great deal of self kicking three years on! Especially if you have a good credit rating and a bit of cash, you are in a great position to access finance at a much lower rate that 27%.

One note though, is several phone calls and emails and a bit of negotiation, you can work out a better deal for yourself… Despite walking away with a mild stench of getting ripped off.

The lessons we/I learn!