Hire Purchase/Rent to Buy/Lease etc of Equipment for a Small Business

Hi All :)

I'm looking for some advice, please, on the best/fairest deferred-payment type purchase options, for a new MacBook Pro.

Personally, I try to avoid anything that involves credit like the plague, because I was raised with the ethos that "if you can't afford it, you can't buy it" (other than a mortgage, of course).

That said, I currently work for a very small company and it was in a bit of struggle-town towards the end of last year. Apparently it always happens; influx of cash, dry spell, influx of cash, dry spell etc. We had a small win pre-Christmas, that took the books from very red to slightly black, and now one of our team members' MacBook Pro has started dying (running super hot, loud fan, apps crashing or taking a full 5 mins to open etc) which is understandable because its super old, and I know that we are going to have to replace it in a couple of days- to a week, tops (my old one, bought around the same time only recently died and had to be replaced).

The business could easily get an influx of cash again in the next week or so, or it could be a couple of months. Either way, once that happens, the boss will be fine to pay it off outright, but he just doesn't want to push us back into red right now, if he can avoid it.

He's asked me to look into different purchase options, and I don't want us to get sucked into something that has heaps of hidden traps or fees- I remember a friend (years ago, mind you) bought a car on hire purchase and she thought it was a great idea until about 3/4 the way through, she realised that at the end of the hire-purchase period she was going to need to find the $$ to fund a massive balloon payment. And the fees for early payout, or extra repayments, were ridiculous.

Any suggestions or ideas would be hugely appreciated… If there's anyone out there who would have a budget solution for this, it'd have to be one of you mob :)

TIA, very very much!