Can you give me an idea of the annual expenses of being an owner/operator?

I work in logistics and I'm trying to troubleshoot some problems for my company. I'll be really honest, I don't know a lot about trucking at all. What would help me is if I had a rough idea of how much it costs to be an owner/operator full-time on an annual basis. Picture someone who drives around 130,000 miles per year and runs a 48 foot flatbed. No need to factor in fuel costs. I'm wondering about typical maintenance costs, fees related to truck insurance (I don't know if these would be substantial, or more like a blip on the radar), and other factors that someone who doesn't drive a truck wouldn't think of. Assuming no major maintenance disasters happen to your truck, how much can a guy spend per year?

If the above paragraph wasn't very clear, here's another way I could say it: How much money does an owner/operator need to make to have a good year? For example if you could get paid $150,000 before factoring in any of your expenses, would that be a good year? A great year? Average? No good at all? If you could tell me for you personally "$xx.xx is what I earn in an average year, $xx.xx is a good year, $xx.xx is the minimum I need to make to put food on the table" that would be very helpful


Hopefully I've given you a good enough idea of the type of information I am looking for. Any input at all would be appreciated. Happy to provide more information and/or clarity if I can.

 

First off, I appreciate everyone's responses so far. I decided I want to share exactly what my company is trying to do and see if I could get a seasoned trucker's perspective and see if anything jumps out

We are a 40+ year old specialty lumber supplier based in Denver. So, we are stable and have a very good idea of what sort of inventory demands we need to fill year after year -- it's not like we don't know what we're doing in that regard. But in the past we haven't spent much time on logistics (aka trucking), we would pretty much have some broker we know set it up for us or occasionally something would fall into our laps, but long story short we imagine that if we spend some time trying to set up our own loads we could save a good amount of money.

Now as you all know Denver is not exactly the center of the trucking universe. When we have set up our own loads in the past we had a hard time finding drivers, at times, since backhauls out of Denver can be tricky. Our 4 suppliers are all within a few hours of each other in Oregon and Washington (but none particularly close to Seattle or Portland unfortunately).

So what would solve all of our problems is if we could find an Owner/Operator located near where we are, or near where our mills are, and have this guy drive back and forth once a week pretty much all year long. It could easily work out that this driver would have every single weekend off to spend with his/her family, or whoever, and leave the driving to Monday through Friday. So we like to think we have a setup that would be appealing to the right person... the reason I came here is because, for the sake of negotiation, I'm not really sure how much we would have to pay a guy to do this so it would be worth his time (on a per mile basis, per load, or whatever - i could calculate it any which way)

I talked to my uncle who is a longtime company driver for his opinion, and he said an O/O is typically satisfied with over $1.00 per mile and pretty thrilled with $1.25 per mile. That sounded fairly low to me, honestly. It seems everyone I talk to has a different opinion. I had a trucker in my office asking for $3.40 per mile which is FAR more expensive than any load I ever had set up through a broker. But like I say I'm not a trucker and I haven't spent much time setting up loads either, so I need to gather some information here.

Bottom line is we figure that if we got an O/O to do this for us we could save some money since we won't have to pay a broker, and the driver could get a fair wage as well as a very consistent and generous work schedule as far as over the road trucking goes. But please let me know if I'm missing something here. Any input is appreciated