Adam; what kind of payments are you looking for?
I would like to be able to own any plane I buy outright, but have thought about financing as well. But that's a whole other ball of wax. Maybe for another thread, but here's the reality of financing:
Spoken to a few lenders in the past. Dorr, Air1st, AOPA and a few others when I was looking years back. Dorr was the most responsive, but after awhile it was clear that most aircraft lenders you see are only brokers - so is Dorr. Very few of them actually carry your loan. They're selling them on as soon as they're approved, and therefore they need to be conforming loans. So the only thing you're going to get out of brokers are vanilla loans. What I mean by that is they'll look at your tax return and cash flow and that's it. They don't care if you own real estate outright, if you are multimillionaire in assets, or if you own an aircraft, care very little if your company is profitable etc.
They only care about your personal 1040's. And you will have to personally guarantee the loan, even if your corp buys the plane. If you want someone to see the bigger picture, or take other assets into account, you need to find a bank that actually carries the loan themselves. Bank of Montana is one such, but there are a few others.
Again, just an exercise in calculation: to be able to fit a $795K (let's say with 20% down) plane on your 1040, with a debt-to-income ratio of max 40% (which is where they max out), you're looking at an income of about $200K if you have no other loans whatsoever. Most of us have a house payment and a car payment on top of that, so in reality are looking at $400-500K/year on your 1040. I don't know about other self employed people, but very few people I know pull that kind of money out on paper, even the really successful ones. The ones I know find ways to keep that in the company and not tax it all away.
Maybe the bigger corporations have access to capital etc that I don't know about. But all the lenders I spoke to want max 40% DTI ratio and to personally guarantee the loan (even if your corporation buys the plane). Feels to me that if you can pull out $500K on paper on your tax return, you can probably also afford to pay $795K in cash. So not sure who these airplane loans are made for or who actually gets them...
So, only thing left to hope for is my Bitcoins to shoot through the roof!