Additional Thoughts and Questions

I've gotten a lot of great feedback on these pages, enough to encourage me to add more.
I don't want to change the original steps, though, I think the way the thought process developed and played out for me organically is as important in some ways as fixing, adding, or modifying what I orginally wrote.
Instead I'll add additional information here, to enhance and suplement. This is generated almost completely by one-one correspondence with people in the process of buying an airplane (particularly Mooneys), keep writing to me your feedback, thoughts, and questions will help others in their processes.

Look for an installed upgrade or plan to upgrade post-purchase?
The section on finding the airplane you want spends a good bit of time talking about the particular configuration of airplane you're looking for. However, one gentleman wrote recently and was musing about whether to look for an airplane with long range fuel tanks installed, or buy without and add later.

My gut reaction was "Don't even let that question influence your selection criteria!" Then I had to figure out why I reacted like that, it felt right, but why?

I realized that there are two types (at least two) of upgrades, balanced and unbalanced. A balanced upgrade is weighted equally installed plus repair vs. post-installed, an unbalanced is biased more heavily one way or the other. Balanced upgrades should not factor into your decision very strongly, spend your time on the unbalanced upgrades.

Here are a few examples;

• Long-range fuel tanks on a Mooney are a balanced upgrade. If they're pre-installed, the cost is factored in to the airplane, and even if they are in poor shape (unlikely) the cost to repair them combined with the bump in price just about equals the cost of having them installed after you buy. So you gain no financial bias either way.
• A built in 4 place oxygen system is an unbalanced upgrade. It adds value to the airplane if it's installed, but adding it after you buy would cost a great deal more.

In practical terms, if you wanted an airplane with long-range tanks and an O2 system, you would put the LR tanks low, don't even let them enter (and distract) your thought process, while keeping a keen eye out for the O2 equipped aircraft.

Make sense? Your decisions about the accessories that you care about when picking an airplane have to have weighting also. Some things are trivially easy to make right after the fact and you shouldn't even fret about.

Two more examples;

• Precise Flight speed brakes are a balanced upgrade. If you want speed brakes you can be pretty sure that an airplane that currently has them installed has factored them into the price, and you can also be pretty sure they're in good shape, they have a very good reliability record. It's balanced, though, because installing a pair after purchase is easy, quick, and relatively cheap in the scheme of aircraft things. So if your target aircraft has speed brakes, great, but if it doesn't don't let that bias you away from the aircraft
• Upgrading to a IFR rated GPS is an unbalanced upgrade. If an IFR GPS is installed on your target, it's cost will most certainly be factored into the cost of the airframe. But this is an unbalanced upgrade because, in almost all cases, getting an aircraft that does not have an IFR certified GPS and adding one after pruchase will be at least double to cost that was factored into the aircraft and add some significant down time for the installation. So if you need an IFR certified GPS then, as an unbalanced upgrade, you need to weight that more heavily in the aircraft you look at and potential purchase prices.