An Easterner (ME) headed West (WA) - to live.

Also depends on what he wants to do. Home daily? Or weekends off? I see he said no OTR. There are so many different things to do. Lots of flatbed companies where you could run the NW only and be home weekends. You could haul wood chips and be home daily. Just depends on what you want to do, how much you want to be home, and if you want to live in the Spokane area or if you want to be in N Idaho.

 

Driving western WA anywhere along the I-5 corridor up to Vancouver Canada and down to, say, middle of Oregon you almost never have to chain and the road is great with few hills. Also, Vancouver WASHINGTON is right on the border of Oregon near Portland and has many trucking companies jobs. Live in Washington and commute over the border where they have no sales tax. Washington sales tax averages about 9% in most places. The real estate values are good from about Centralia (south of Olympia) almost to the Oregon border. Oregon real estate is expensive near Portland. TMI ??

 

OP said in the first post he's looking at the Spokane/North ID area.

 

Thank you for starting this thread. My family wants to move to Spokane in a few years. Probably 2-3 years.

I guess I'm one of those 'nerds' living in California. I'm not from here though. My hippie wife is. We never try to push our ideas onto anyone. We just want to live a happy life. Unfortunately, it is just too expensive here and making a high wage for driving a truck won't get us into a house we own.

Washington, in particular Spokane, seems to have a pretty decent wage for truckers with a lower cost of living. I'd be looking into grocery hauling like Safeway (they are hiring in Indeed). I have also heard that UPS feeders have been hired off the street up there-very different from when I wore a brown uniform. I've seen several LTL companies offer a wage within $1 of what they are offered here. That's insane to me. JJ Williams has a fleet up there for tanker/bulk. I'll be paying attention to this thread for sure. I'll continue to research and I'll be watching yours. Good luck

 

Watch out for JJ Williams. They are pat of Systems / TWT. Have heard many bad things bout them.

 

Home daily and decent money would probably be a tanker. JJ Williams (owned by Systems) has tankers of all sorts, not sure what they offer as far as home daily. Their terminal is on the west side of Spokane. There's also a whole pile of different fuel hauling companies.

There's always forestry-related jobs too, like hauling wood chips. Wages would be lower but you could also live somewhere with a cost of living a lot lower than Spokane.

 

JJ Williams is the tanker division of Systems Transport. Systems also has a refer division--TWT (a real ripoff!), and a flatbed division. The flatbed division offers the best pay but, I think, is OTR. The Tanker division is located in Longview, Washington near the Oregon border. They haul hard core chemicals that require hazmat endorsements, hazmat suits, and sometime inhalers. I worked for them for a while and have other posts about them so I won't duplicate things here.