Current rates are now below fleet operating costs! It's official!

Well you seem to be doing fine and are happy. Did you buy yourself a job with freedom? If so, looks like you accomplished your goal. Most guys would love to be in that position. Hey, it was my honor to help out in the sand box. Thanks for the shout out. I don’t have that much freedom but I get to serve, makes it feel like worth doing. At least it’s what I tell myself.

 

No, I've bought a freedom with my job.
It looks you are jealous.

 

Why is it if a man buys a truck and works it’s called buying a job, but when someone gets a degree and finds a job or even works his way up it’s not looked down upon.

doesn’t a college grad also not buy a job by paying for a degree?

 

At times, absolutely! I started out doing more brokered freight. It was liaise affair. Rates were high on the market. When things tightened I changed tactics. But, it was easy going just with the spot market.

 

That’s true, but somehow I still ended up in a truck! Guilty, had to follow a family tradition. Just something about diesel.

 

So are you running your own numbers?

 

Yep

 

Can you take 6 months off like me with that 500K equipment? I've already took 3 months off this year and I'll take more next month.
Just talking about freedom.

 

It's kind of like hauling a bunch of cheap freight all the time. Which is basically paying "customers" for the privilege of hauling their goods. Because guess who takes paid vacations and has decent health insurance, retirement and who doesn't. Shippers, receivers and brokers have those things. Most o/o's sacrifice those benefits for a job. A lot of owner operators out here actually depend on their wife having a job with benefits so they can cut that cost out.

 

All that time parked will eventually catch up with you. Everybody thinks it won't but it will. Most people aren't really well off enough that they can truly afford that. It's better to, at the very least, cover the cost of sitting than it is to bleed the cash out. But I also know how hard it is to get motivated to go to work when the overall rates hardly eek out anything left over from all the effort put into it.