Double Yellow's Company Driver to Independent Thread

You give me hope

 

You light up my light to carry on.

 

Not a bad wrap up for the year, if you ask me.

I need to go back and look at the days out last year too- throw that in with the other figures to see if it was all worth it.

I hear ya on the 'burnt out'. After 3 days away from the house it feels like 3 months. I hate hot sweaty summers in a truck, winter sucks and has the potential to be career ending - I think I need to focus on Spring and Fall, and develop yet another business that sucks cash out of the pockets of hard working drivers without leaving the house.

 

I need my tanks polished...

 

@Skate-Board @Ooops You guys doing the duet.....you mixed the lyrics all up LOL

 

I think Blair would appreciate Little River Band more.

 

This is an interesting part of the discussion. Interest and depreciation are the two things we're talking about. But guys like us (I have a 2001 IH with a rebuilt 12.7) don't have much depreciation, if any at all. Your trailer, some, maybe, but the truck barely depreciates. So if we have $50K tied up, and we use 10% interest, that's only 5K per year. We trade maintenance for that lack of depreciation, but maintenance is a variable cost that stops when the truck stops.

Were we running a new Pete and trailer ($240K), depreciating at 30K per year....... Plus 20K interest? Yeah, that would change the bottom line some.....

 

These numbers are encouraging to say the least. And only with 50k miles ... sounds like a nice part time job. However, I don't quite get that part of 0% return on investment. Are the profits not supposed to be the dividends on the money spend on the equipment?

 

@double yellow I worked a LOT more this year than years past. I did it out of necessity. I'm off for a few weeks right now and dealing with routine truck maintenance. Once that's taken care of I expect 2017 to be my busiest year ever. No more months off at a time for me. The only planned time is a week, maybe two, around the 4th of July and the usual Thanksgiving/Christmas breaks although I do always take weekends off as a rule, that will never change no matter what. If the difficult times of 2015 and 2016 taught me anything it's that I left a LOT of money on the table during 2012-2014 from sheer laziness. When the sun is shining get out there and make hay. Rates were better back then on a more consistent basis but even when they were down there was still opportunity. I can see that clearly now thru the haze and depression of a couple of bad years. As you know I also pull a reefer now and that has opened up a new world of possibilities.

 

DY you ran more mile than me, I did 54,018, you better slow down. I probably did more than 50% empty.