Matt Paulson breaks down when private jet ownership makes financial sense: you need to fly roughly 100 hours per year to justify buying instead of chartering. Below 50 hours, fractional programs like NetJets work better. Ownership means running a separate business with pilots and management overhead, so only those with substantial discretionary cash should consider it.
Okay, last question. At what revenue or net worth does it make sense to buy a private jet just for the thrill of it rather than the cliché time investment argument?
Whether or not you should buy a jet, like, yeah, you need to have a lot of money to do it, but it really depends on how much you fly. Like, unless you're going to fly like 100 hours a year, which is more than you think, that, I mean, that would be Say it takes 3 hours to fly across the country, then back would be another 6. So unless you're doing like 16 or 17 cross-country trips a year, it's like you don't fly enough to really justify owning your own jet. At that point, you should charter or you should do NetJets or JetLynx or any of those. If you're flying 50 hours a year, JetLynx, NetJets, one of those is a better solution. Like, if you're going to own a jet like I do, you're basically running a business, the business of the jet, in terms of like, you're going to— your jet's going to have its own company, and it's got its own accounting, and it's got employees that are pilots, and you've got somebody to manage the plane. And it's like this whole other thing to manage. And if you just do the charter thing or the NetJets thing, it's a lot easier to manage. So even though you might pay a little bit more doing that, You save yourself a lot of headaches by not having to manage the business of a jet.
But would you say there's a certain revenue or cash flow point where it makes sense? Let's say you really want a jet, you've always wanted it, and let's say you don't need to travel a lot, but at what point do you have FU money and you're kind of just like—
Well, you know, a decent starter jet's probably $4 million, so you, you probably need $1 million down $3 million on a loan, and then you probably got to be prepared to eat a quarter million a year in just expenses. If you're going to fly your plane, it still costs money. There's still time on the engines, there's still fuel, there's still pilots. It's going to cost you more to fly your own plane than it is to charter somebody else's plane. So if you got a million bucks for down payment, You can find a management company, and then you got to be prepared to eat some losses every year. Like, that's probably when I think I started flying private, like, as a charter, you know, when I was about $2 million a year in revenue. And then it wasn't until MarketBeat was at like $30 million a year in revenue that I bought my own plane.
