Taking the plunge. My journey as an O/O.

Fortune Cookie wisdom...

 

I’m afraid that you might be the first mouse.

 

Ask yourself how long can you survive if your truck goes down. Clutch, radiator, rear end etc. many things can go bad and you might be stuck with thousands of dollars and weeks on end down time.
You can run all the miles in the world, but those miles are killing your truck. Hope u don’t have to do an overhaul at 600-700k. Happened to me last year. Even if nothing major happens that truck will be worthless in 2 years with the miles you’re putting on.
Try to break that mileage mindset and find someone to lease on that pays percentage.
I am a door slammer and there is no way I would pull a load for 1.30. And my truck is payed for

 

Seems like you guys did not get it. Farmer bob takes pride on being stubborn. I’ll say that he just a $&/$(;@
Or he is just playing with your heads . There is not way someone can be that $&)(@&$;$/

 

Okay, so I just went back through and read a lot of your postings.

It's understandable, however, you are all over the place with your projections, real numbers & expenses.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but I think it's beneficial to work through the process and to demonstrate to the hundreds of lurkers who are considering becoming L/O/O/O.

One thing seems clear to me, you showed a year end settlement (somewhere) from Crete showing your gross income in 2018 as a company driver was roughly $76,000 if I remember correctly.

You seem to be indicating that you average roughly 3k miles a week as a lease op?

At a $1.30 a mile average pay, even if you ran 48 full weeks at 3k miles a week (144k miles), which would be pretty tough to do in my opinion, that's gross revenue of $187,200.

Even if you paid yourself the same as you earned last year as a company driver ($76,000 + $7,600 SE Taxes $83,600) that leaves you with $103,600 to operate the truck.

At 144,000 miles that's $0.72 a mile to run that truck. Is that right, or am I missing something?

Can you seriously operate a truck with a payment, insurance, fuel, maintenance, benefits, and all the other the sundry costs that go with operating a truck, for $0.72 a mile?

Even the most ardent owner operators here who have their trucks paid off and do most of the maintenance themselves come in around $0.90 to $1.00 a mile cost to operate their trucks before they pay themselves. Too be honest with you, I even take those numbers with a grain a salt.

Over and out!

 

You guys are just beating the Mercy out of this poor fella.


@Farmerbob1 I wish you the best man.

 

Maybe so but they're also trying to help him. He's had a lot of good advice from some very experienced people.
If a lot of different people tell him basically the same thing, over and over, I think he should pay attention to that.

I don't think that there's any information available on just how many people fail at trucking but the numbers might surprise a lot of people.
I'll spare you the "old guy rant" but every one that I've seen go broke at trucking did so because they had a poor business plan and totally unrealistic expectations.

I've been involved in trucking for fifty-five years. There's a never ending supply of dreamers who think they can buck the odds, ignore good advice, and just plow blindly ahead hoping for the best. They come, they go, but they never last long.