Picking my own freight baby! My journey to & of being on Schneider choice, the Adventure & Numbers!

It does the job, has no bells or whistles and lacks power. But it gets me thru the lease.

 

So do you pay better than .50 cpm?

 

Impressive. I'm working in getting myself down to $36k a year but I don't think I'll get much lower than that with my hobbies.

Me too. If I knew then what I know now I would've been retired as a millionaire 10 years ago.

 

The effect on consumer costs will be barely noticeable, if at all. Most items, you are looking at pennies when you spread the freight rate increase across the entire shipment of freight.

Shippers/receivers will have to pay more for freight to be delivered, but they won't be absorbing the expense themselves. Brokers will take a hit on loads. Large brokerages will expect agents to handle more freight and work on less profit per load.

I've said many times as well, teams are not the answer to this. What you have is loads that simply cannot be delivered on time. We're not talking about 1500-2000 mile cross country runs, we are talking about 3-400 mile runs that get loaded in the afternoon and are expected to be at the receiving dock by daylight. These loads are backing up right now because the brokers cannot move them. These are the loads I have been getting tons of broker contact from. You won't be able to put teams on these loads without paying them much more, which in term will effect the rate required for companies that are paying these teams to turn a profit. Rate per mile is going to go up, and stay up because of this. Maybe not as high as the spike (which we haven't reached yet), but they are not going back to where they were. Layover and detention are now going to become a serious situation for brokers to have to deal with. The days of drivers just fixing things with their pen ended on December 18th.

 

Won't happen. Every year, the average age of a truck driver gets older. It's now at 55. Minimum wage is getting higher and higher, making this job even less attractive.

 

As for the wage of truck drivers, that number is deceiving. If you have a family, you have the same expenses there that anybody else has. Then, you have to add the expenses of living on the road. Sure, some can live very frugally out of their trucks, but in all honesty, most don't . They get out here, the only way to hang onto their money is to literally live in the truck and eat in the truck, and soon get sick of it and bail for a job at mcdonalds.

I live very cheap in the truck, but the expenses are still ridiculous. I eat mostly in the truck, but I refuse to live on sandwiches, storage of fresh food is very limited, walmart is getting harder and harder to park at, so the cost for me to eat in the truck is almost the same as what it costs for my wife and 3 kids to eat at home.

Long time ago, a man told me that if I can make a living at $600/week in a truck, I can live on $300 at home. This was over 25 years ago, but he was correct. Just the phone bill alone ate me up on a monthly basis (pre cell phones).

 

Id be interested in seeing where this statistic comes from. Just from casual observation i think its off by a couple decades. I'm only 40 and i feel like an old timer out here.

 

I'm just about to turn 48 and the majority I see out here look to be older than me. I'm sure the average age when you combine the mega fleets is much lower, but industry wide, there's alot of old folks out here and the concern is that the age continues to get older.