Truck Load Rates Halt 8 Week Slide 2.0

I've been researching the market for the last month on my online business and it's going strong. I've laid out the groundwork for rebuilding my web site and an ad campaign. Once I get out of trucking for good then I'll take the web site and campaign live. I can't be on the road while it's up and going.

I'll keep you in mind for the equipment. I hope to sell the truck and trailer together, but we'll see how it goes.

No Dino, living in California it's just too much of a hassle to start a new company with employees again. It's gotten so darn expensive out here to run a business, it's just not worth it. All of the fees and taxes make it cost prohibitive in an industry with such thin profit margins.

 

How funny!
Some folks pull the plug, some pull the trigger. I feel like some pull pork for dinner...breakfast still.

 

I am jealous of you guys having alternative ways of making a living. Inventive minds always survive.
I tried real estate but that is not my cup of tea, at least not when I am trucking. Yes, there are management companies but they themselves can be a headache.
I stumbled upon a YouTube video showing a guy who runs a thrift shop or something like that ... he buys crap from basic tools and toys to some pieces of art and collectibles and resells them either at the shop or e-bay. I thought it was interesting to watch how he bought an authentic German Wermacht helmet from 1916 for a few hundred. Something which I would have thought as dull and boring appeared to be quite fun.

 

That's basically what I do Joe, buy things then resell them online. You can make a LOT of money doing it if you sell specialty items that are in demand. I use to deal in WWII artifacts and antique guns, but they became too difficult to find after a while. I deal in everything from fossils to Native American artifacts. I was bidding on some furniture for my house at a local auction a few years ago and noticed what the auction house had listed as a stone sculpture. I recognized it as a Woolly Mammoth tooth and bought it for $40. Sold it a couple weeks later on eBay for several thousand bucks. It is fun, but it can cause a lot of headaches as well, just like any business. I use my web site to advertise that I buy things I want to resell. It works really well for people who otherwise have no idea how to sell collectible items and they want to get a decent price for their collectibles.

 

Makes me want to try to sell something on e-bay too...but to sell what?
I am a miserable salesman. As a teenager, I think it was 1989, I got myself talked into traveling to West Berlin on an overcrowded train with two cartons of Marlboro and two bottles of vodka in my back pack - it was an allowable quantity to take over there. But out of four folks going there I was the only one who sold nothing...to the delight of my other three friends.... Suffice to say that the vodka was gone before we arrived back at our station 4 hours later.... Crazy communist times those were.

 

Sounds like this threads title may need edited to “Hanging up the keys, doing something different...”

 

Joe the trick is to find a commodity that you can get fairly easily that other people either can't also get easily, or don't know how to find, and find something small to sell online that minimizes shipping costs like coins or stamps. It's not cheap selling on eBay, and was around 16% when I did it last. If you're selling heavy things that are expensive to ship, people won't pay as much for them because of the additional shipping costs. Of course the only time high shipping costs are worth it is if the item sells for a lot of money.

 

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that Scooter is just a retired guy, who is bored, who created and ran an imaginary trucking business on this forum, but never actually had a truck.
Did anybody else ever think that way?