After looking at rental prices or hiring someone to clear about a quarter acre of land it was going to be $3500 to $7500! I bought a 1989 CAT 436, that needed a little work. I planned to sell it as soon as I was finished that project for a little profit...but it's such a useful powerful tool I can't get myself to get rid of it. There's no way I could afford it (at least make sense to keep it) if I didn't do all of my own work on it tough. Old equipment requires maintenance.
Yea, I've got quite a few projects I could get done. I can rent a machine for around $3,000 per month and might be able to get a lot of my projects done in a couple months, however I'm thinking of buying a +/- $20,000 machine, using it for a couple years, then selling if I'm all done with it. As long as I don't have a big breakdown, cost won't be much different and I will have a lot longer to use it.
Clam shell loader bucket would be real handy for grabbing logs, etc.
Seems like you could buy the machine and have a side business of renting it out (or hiring yourself out as the operator). Would have to consider liability, but I imagine the depreciation on those things is low,
If you're willing to go older (and you'd need to work on your own now and then), I've got a '69 JD 410 for sale. Runs and works, drinks some hydraulic fluid, but nothing extreme. Definitely available for less than renting one for two months.
Ooof, I want a backhoe too, like from the time I could speak, maybe even before that. When I was a kid, my parents asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, and I said that I wanted to be either a fighter pilot or a backhoe driver. We always had to drive by the construction sites slowly so I could watch the big machines work. Somehow I ended up as an engineer, WTF.
I've ALMOST justified buying one by thinking I could make a business out of grading other people's property, but it just isn't going to happen, I don't have the spare time to convert into enough money to see a return on the investment. And the investment is pretty sizable once you factor in getting a vehicle big enough to move it from place to place.
But I would like to have one to clear and grade some land at my place.
Did I mention that I've never driven a backhoe before?