How do you take home time with IC

You should have set up a budget, maintenance funds, emergency funds, etc. Your budget should include payments to your truck even if you are not rolling at the time. Money in the pocket will fly out fast unless you set up your budget and pay yourself last.

 

Make enough for the beginning of the week you want to go home so your truck payment and fuel are covered. You should be able to take a Friday through Sunday off.

 

It is a business on your end. Your emergency funds should be in your budget. Just like your personal expenses, you budget those on when to pay and how to pay. Your truck is your business. You set up your budget and set aside monies for emergency funds out of the budget. The company you are leased to will not babysit you. You want to take the big step, then you are taking the responsibility for the business.

 

I've talked to several guys in real life they say the payments are setup four 4 week months and they usually take off a weekend of the months that have 5 weeks in them, hope this idea works for you & good luck in your future endeavors.

 

http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/Trucking-Tax-Center

 

gotta get out of the living paycheck to paycheck mentality. 52 weeks divided by 12 months equals 4.33 weeks in each month on average. The bills come in 52 weeks a year and the IC will work about 40-45 weeks a year.

Take your weekly truck payments and multiply by 4.33 and take your monthly bills and add to them all up and add to that monthly truck payment and you have your total monthly expenditure. Divide that total number back down with 4.33 to come up with a weekly revenue number you need to cover everything. Divide it 7 if you like to come up with a daily number if you like to come up with a daily break-even number of miles. It is easy to work the numbers from daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly.

Have to do it before one signs the lease papers. Some guys have $2500 house payments, $1500 car payments, massive child support and child daycare etc, might not work out with the revenue being an IC would generate.

I have been reading posts on here for years "It's a business, think business, be a business" etc but people need to know how to break their cost of living down to first determine if the 'business' is going to work. For me it was that magic number of 4.33 that was always there but didn't see it like it was invisible all my life. Once I got that number things magically became easier in my life finacially.

 

I wanted to add, taking hometime or truck breaking down, stuff like that should never be a guessing game. Knowing what your 'life' costs either daily, weekly,monthly, quarterly, yearly etc, it is easy to figure out how much hometime to take before going negative.

We know the truck is going to break down for sure so we budget for it. It is never a surprise just like we know the mortgage, rent, car payment, health insurance, IRA retirement plan etc is all factored into our 'life' costs and the money is always in the bank to cover those things.

We know we are going home about 12 weeks a years so therefore we know the truck payment has to be paid and the house bills (Life costs) have to be covered for those 12 weeks with the revenue we made during the 40 working weeks of the year.. No need to spend money on business books or listen to Sirius radio mind control gurus, just know that 52 weeks a year divded by 12 months equals 4.33 equals the magic number that will save your life....