If you had $70K to start on your own would you buy outright or finance?

If you have a place to work on a truck and you have a friend that is a mechanic that has a shop the question really is just if you want to have your own truck.

Myself I would recommend to you in your situation to find a pre emissions truck this from an owner operator that's retiring.

When you buy that kind of a truck you're going to have pages and pages and pages and pages of recent repairs. Hopefully a new in frame a new transmission and clutch and that type of thing will have been done not long ago.

Whatever that cost don't be afraid of it because anything that you buy on a lot or you buy from an auction you basically have whatever is sitting in front of you that you see and that's it.

My two cents to you is that if you are mechanical and you have a place to work on it and a friend that's a diesel mechanic why would you buy some truck that has crazy emissions that's going to cost you a fortune? Even great stupidity like variable turbochargers are outrageously expensive compared to a regular truck.

Those older trucks you can work on yourself and your buddy can help you and you'll be fine.

But believe me when I tell you it is infinitely easier to start with something that is really good that somebody kept up with that you just basically need to keep up with it. Whatever that cost it's worth it.

Believe me when I tell you that you would never believe the amount of trucks that are out there on the road that have such a serious lack of Maintenance and if you buy that truck it's going to cost you in time money labor headaches and everything else.

That is the best advice that I can give you.

 

A good family friend who is a farmer once told me if he won the lottery he would keep on farming till he pissed it all away.
I think the moral to the story is, when your ready to lay 70g down don't ask for the special sauce that makes it work. Just make #### sure you love what you do.

 

Yep I know where your coming from Dino. I really enjoy driving but to be honest the Liability factor scares the Krap out of me Too with all the attorneys begging for 4 wheelers to set a case on their Lap.

My dad had always been an entrepreneur and my brothers the same, as all my friends and I .

The truck is a curiosity I would like to play with and modify and hopefully make some money with it while trying to take plenty of time off to enjoy life.

This OTR is not for a married man much less one with kids unless you can get a ton of time off when your off the road.

If I was smart I would buy a piece of land off 75 in Tennessee and build a 4 bay garage with a paint booth in one of them

Only work on or rebuild older equipment.

Semi Paint and body work pays well compared to doing car insurance repairs.

Slide a couple big boat paint jobs thru every once in a while since I have a large paint booth.

Get some machinery to do line boring and start rebuilding motor cores

And old offshore racing buddy of mine that owns a engine machine shop down here in Naples is letting me work in it this fall while I rebuild my buddies 454 boat engine that took a Krap in his 40 foot cruiser.

Really sparked my interest in maybe getting into doing it and possibly buying his shop being he is 78 and is getting a little worn out though he is there everyday still slinging heads and blocks around. All gas engines though

I don’t know about anything with this Covid Krap going on though.

Best to wait until the first of the year and see what it brings.

As my old dad always told me. Day by day son. Best laid plans and goals. But day by day

 

I used to work on a farm when I was a teenager.

Every kid out there should have to since we don’t have mandatory military service.

They would realize 9-5 m-f is a myth.

I know many people that are Owned by their businesses. If they didn’t absolutely give it a 150% they would lose it all.

I have a buddy down here that is 60 years old

He took over the 3 Ethan Allen furniture stores his dad has owned for 40 years and became too old to manage anymore

Well many problems with that these days.

1st off the Ethan Allen crowd is passing 2nd is amazon is killing the furniture business, believe it or not.

Now he is left with one store open and 2 huge buildings that they own but are too large for but the largest renter.

Besides commercial real estate is going down the toilet as it has been heading for years.

As my dad used to ask me all the time up until He died.

If I gave you a million dollars today what would you invest it in?

Last few years of his life he couldn’t even give me a idea where he would put it, this coming from a man who had made and had millions

 

If I had your mechanical ability I would take your truck and gross another 1.5 million out of it while eating catfish and BBQ in the south, and taking winter's off drinking beer in Naples. Got to love it to pull it off though. I skipped a few pages Tommy. Lol

 

With all the old-farts on this forum there will be plenty of one or two owner w900’s and 379’s coming up for auction at ESTATE SALES Stay where you are and keep saving this occurrence!

 

That's because Uncle Sam bailed you out.

 

How did he do that? I never even wasted the time to fill out the forms for either the EIDL or the PPP. I had this weird thing called a savings account. And when I parked my truck in April I had to find someone to pull my trailer because our food grade stuff was still busy. So go on and tell me more about how it’s impossible to make money and everyone should be a company driver.

Oh wait, you are right. I did get that $1200 from Trump and man that was a lifesaver.

 

Ah man, Uncle Sam did bail me out. He did away with the hours of service so I did have a solid month of running food grade gang busters before I parked. I forgot about that. That did bring some extra revenue so I guess that must be a bail out even though I had to put in a lot of extra hours to get it the money wouldn’t have been possible without the government. That must be what you were referring to.