Aging Equipment Is Not a Neutral Choice

Firms that push a refresh to the next fiscal year often make the same assumption: that waiting is free. The September read on the equipment finance market suggests otherwise. Aging equipment does not hold still. It gets more expensive to run, harder to support, and less valuable to retire.

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What September's numbers actually said

ELFA's Monthly Confidence Index came in at 62.4 in September, the same as August. Nothing moved, so it is easy to skip past.

The comments from industry leaders are where the real news is. Jim DeFrank, EVP and COO at Isuzu Finance of America, described what has been quietly building:

In other words, a lot of organizations put off buying, and the old equipment they kept running is starting to cost more than it saves. That applies to a firm with 1,200 attorneys on four-year-old hardware just as much as to anyone else.

Waiting is not the same as saving

Inside most firms, pushing a refresh gets recorded as a cost avoided. The capital stays put, the budget holds, and the line item disappears from this year's conversation.

What actually happens is that the cost changes shape:

• Support load rises. Older fleets generate more tickets, more downtime, and more time from a team that was not sized for it.
• Security exposure widens. Aging, loosely tracked equipment is both an obsolescence cost and a security risk, and both compound quietly.
• Resale value falls. Equipment that sits one more cycle is worth less when the firm finally does move.
• The eventual refresh gets bigger. Waves that should have been staged pile into a single, harder approval.

None of that shows up in the year the decision is made. All of it shows up later, usually in a year the firm did not plan for it.

Tariffs are pushing on the cost from three sides

Timing pressure is not only internal. Jeffry Elliott, CLFP and CEO of Elevex Capital, put it plainly in the same September commentary:

He added the piece that explains the hesitation: "Meanwhile buyers hesitate on the large-ticket decisions because they can't underwrite their own input costs."

That is the trap. The same conditions that make a large purchase hard to price are the conditions that make waiting more expensive. A firm caught between them tends to do nothing, and doing nothing is a decision with a price tag.

If you cannot control the cost, control the structure

Acquisition cost and resale value are outside the firm's hands right now. How the acquisition is structured is not. Done well, structure turns a refresh from a budget event into a planned cycle.

• Refresh in waves, not in one big approval. A master lease lets schedules be added over time, so technology stays current without a single large capital request.
• Get an approved line in place before the need arrives. The firm moves at the speed of need rather than the speed of the budget cycle.
• Put the resale risk where it belongs. Under a fair market value structure, CoreTech takes the residual position, so the firm is not left owning and disposing of equipment that has already lost its value.
• Keep the end-of-term decision open. Return, renew, or purchase at fair market value, asset by asset, with real time to decide.

The firm still chooses when to refresh. It just stops paying a premium for the timing.

Where CoreTech fits

CoreTech has been an independent equipment lease and finance business since 2008 and works with more than 100 of the nation's leading law firms. Our leadership is CLFP-credentialed, and we are active in ELFA, ILTA, ABA, and ALA. Every agreement is written to the gold standard, with no hidden fees and no end-of-term traps.

Let's modernize without the CapEx burden.

Source: Equipment Leasing and Finance Association, Monthly Confidence Index for the Equipment Finance Industry, September 2026.