Matt Paulson bought a private jet with $10-15k monthly payments over 25 years, using tax incentives to deduct much of the purchase price upfront. Maintenance and upgrades cost $600-800k total, with repainting alone at $150k. From Sioux Falls, where commercial flights are limited, the jet made financial sense.
So Matt, I've been following you on Twitter for a bit and then, you know, there's been a lot of these like, you know, tweets or things on LinkedIn, like we are so back, right? So you do this, we are so back. It's a picture of a private jet with the MarketBeat logo on it, which is your company. And so I just, yeah, I sent this to James and I said, what the fuck? You know, like how do you have a jet? So I gotta hear the story of how and why and, Wow.
Yeah, I bought the plane about a year ago, which was kind of the perfect time to buy one because up until the end of last year, you could take the full purchase price of a private jet and kind of deduct it all in kind of the first year. Let's say you have a $4 million jet just for sake of numbers. You know, last year you got 37% of that back as, you know, a tax deduction. So, you know, the down payment was maybe, you know, $800,000. So you get You know, your, your tax deduction covers your down payment and then some, which is pretty cool. The other thing I learned about private jets is you can finance them on like a 25-year amortization. So my payments on it are like, you know, $10,000, $15,000 a month at most. So it's very, very manageable to own. And yeah, I mean, the only thing that really sucks about it is maintenance because, you know, if a coffee pot is in your office, it costs, you know, a couple hundred bucks to replace. If your coffee pot is on your jet and it breaks and needs to be replaced, it's like $6,000. So.
What's it cost, Matt, to fire that puppy up and get it going? Like, is it like a, like a trip is a certain amount? It's like minimum, you know, certain amount.
Yeah. I mean, obviously it all depends on like the length, cause that's how much jet fuel you use, which, you know, is expensive, but not a big thing about it. Like what kills you is just the long-term maintenance stuff. You know, pilots are $1,000 a day or so, you know, you're going somewhere, they stay wherever you're staying. So you got to give them a per diem and. Yeah, it's the maintenance stuff that kills you. Like, we repainted the plane. That was $150 grand. We did the interior to make it like nice and new and, you know, put in a new internet module because the old one was end of life. That was another $100 grand. And all in, I think it was probably $600,000. No, it's probably $700,000 or $800,000. It just kind of stuff to get the plane up to where I wanted it to be with the paint job and all that stuff. But I kind of knew what I was buying, the work needed to be done. But, you know, it's obviously not a small expense to do that. The other thing, like, you know, I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There's no, we don't have a lot of direct flights here. So like the value of flying private is much higher than if you're in a hub city. Like I can get to like Dallas or Atlanta or Denver, but like I don't have a direct to New York City. I don't have a direct to LA most days. Um, you know, so for me there is a lot, a lot of value in that. So JL, when's the lemon squeezy jet coming?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I don't know if it's going to be a bit, but I, yeah, that's, That's impressive. I guess bringing it back down to like us peasants, let's talk about, let's talk about you, Matt. Like we just ended, you know, with you getting the jet. So what's the early days of Matt, the very beginnings?
You know, I was a kid of the '80s and early '90s and my mom was a school librarian. So they had some technology that most people didn't have and they had fast internet through the state network. And so I would have to, you know, hang out in the library after school while my mom was working and finishing up for the day. So I'd play on the computers there and learn what I could learn. And then eventually we got, got one at home. And like in 1996 or '97 or '98 or something like that, we were one of the first families in our city to get cable internet. So had a computer, had fast internet when nobody else had it, and kind of taught myself HTML and made a little website about some video games I played at the time, like SimCity 2000, and had like cheat codes and save games and stuff like that. And I signed up for an ad network account on some ad network that doesn't exist anymore. And like the offer, it was like an affiliate offer for a free web hosting account and it paid like $1.50 whenever somebody signed up for a free web hosting account. So I told all my friends like, hey, go to my website, click on the link and you can make a website too. And I was making $25, $50 a month doing that.
