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[–]yetanotherone_sigh 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah, kinda depends. In my case, I have a truck. But if I wanted to buy a sheet of drywall and only had a car, I'd drive to Home Depot, park my car, rent their truck, and take the drywall to my house. Then return the truck to Home Depot and pick up my car. That works well if you are buying stuff there. Way better than going to a rental place and having someone drop you off at U-Haul or Penske or whatever. Everybody's going to do what is most convenient / cheap / practical for them at the time. The trick is to find a niche that no other business has filled. Such as: We will pick you up at your house, drive you to Ikea, you pick out your stuff and buy it, we help you load it and drive it to your house. We help you unload it and we will help you with labor to assemble it. We provide a tool box with simple common tools and a cordless drill. That might be a business model.

I think the one I'd stay away from is actually renting the van to other people and they drive it. That seems like you'd need a real business license and real business car insurance and a bunch of stuff. Really hard to fly under the radar when your own liability is on the hook. My wife sold a van to a friend on payments. He is one of those "gig economy" guys who drives 12 hours a day for Amazon deliveries and Uber Eats and Grubhub and stuff like that. He constantly picks stuff up and delivers it. He ended up getting in a wreck and totaling the car. It turns out that he didn't insure it for business use and they won't cover the loss, and he had only made two payments. Yay.

I'm one of those cautious people who constantly says "what can go wrong here?" so that it doesn't bite you.