Maybe I am being unrealistic.. you tell me

Just so we have a full understanding,
You have six months of truck operations cash available?
Or
You have six months of all expenses cash available.

See these are very different.

The first is only the truck, nothing else. And it will have variable expenses. More miles, higher fuel cost, etc.

The second is all your expenses, not just the truck, it’s all your expenses, car and house payments, power bill groceries, you get the idea.

 

If you are saying you got 6 x 24000 dollars on hand in cash ready to spend right now (Around USD $144K) you are in a good position, however you need to consider also your home and family. 6 months for them as well.

Eventually you add to that for 9 months cash, then 12 months cash then 16 months cash etc etc etc. Sooner or later with a little luck you will be years ahead and who cares of the truck burning up to the ground one day. You can replace it and still have months on hand ready for any problem.

 

Honestly if you have roughly $144k cash on hand, invest it in the market/401k. Way better investment than a truck, safer also.

 

"What i am trying to do is set up a future for my family and I."

How are you going to do this?

 

Also note that you have not put in any income tax for state or federal, do you have any county or city taxes as well? You do list Medicare and Social Security, that is incomplete. What percentage did you use for your calculations. For a self employed person, the numbers are different than a company paid person. Social Security alone is 15.3 percent. Depending on your state, up to 57 percent of your income could be going to pay all your tax liability. Also, you have unemployment listed, what is this?
A separate package, like insurance or is this the state program? Would think that you would only need to pay into that if you had employees.

It may be in your best interest to contact you state trucking association, also consider OOIDA, they have a number of things that will help you plan for a business.
Sure they are going to want you to join, look at it as good help cheap.

 

Are you planning on driving the truck, or having someone else drive it?

I ask because I see unemployment insurance in that list of expenses.

If you are wanting to buy a truck and pay a driver to drive it, I suspect you will get drastically different advice from a lot of people here than someone wanting to solo o/o.

 

Some states require you to pay unemployment insurance. Even on yourself as the only employee. Like Illinois.

 

I'm sure there will be people to really give you expert advice, but here's what I see just on the surface.

The 250 Mi radius depends on where you are located. Some areas of the country are better for that type of radius than others. However, unless you have some kind of a steady situation, I don't know how you're going to always arrange for your driver to run 250 miles and be able to pick up another load and be back the same night. That may work sometimes, but I don't know that that is realistic to figure that for every single day. You would probably have a lot of hauling one way and having him come back empty that you're paying him for. I also don't think averaging 65 miles an hour is realistic and although flatbed is probably better than van, I don't know that everywhere that you go to will load and unload within 2 hours. Delays happen, including traffic.

In my opinion it would be better if you really want to make money to have a driver that you pay on a percentage, and that he runs some kind of a triangle that maybe he could be home every other day or something like that. That way if you had Freight that was a little farther to say 300 miles or 400 miles but it paid extremely well, you could pick up those kind of loads in addition to the short runs and then you could have him go to pick up the next load and not be so concerned about him coming right back.

So for example. If he had to drive one hour to pick up the first load and it took 2 hours to get loaded that's 3 hours. Even if he only drove 4 hours to the destination (7hrs now) and they unloaded him in two hours (9 hrs now) and he drove to the next pick up 1 hour (10 hrs now) and took two hours to get loaded, now that's 12 hours and he has not begun to come back yet, assuming home is at least 4 hours away. And that's assuming everything falls into place. He may have to travel farther than an hour to pick up whatever load. It could be in the opposite direction or not in the direction of Home Base.

If he could pick up a load and drive to the next receiver and wait there overnight, it's more realistic he could pick up another load the next day and be back home that day to deliver for the following day.

I think it is better to pay a percentage and figure a way to give bonuses and incentives along with breakdown pay and detention pay and whatever else rather than pay hourly.

I think it's more realistic if you want someone home every single night to make it a more local mileage, like a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles and at that point maybe you could work out getting another pick up and coming home on the same day. But you still are going to have deadhead times depending on where you are going to pick up.