What's your story?

I couldn't get a job at ups making 160k plus so I bought a truck.

 

I was in the Canadian Armed Forces for six years. While I was in, on holidays I drove to Florida, another trip to California and a third trip to Yukon and Alaska.
So I figured I should get into trucking and get paid for my holidays.
Since then I've been to 9 provinces, 2 territories and 45 states.
Plus on holidays to U.S.Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and drove a camper over 5,000 miles In Australia.

 

I drove a flatbed for a couple of years off and on when I was going to Cleveland State. I knew right away I loved it but other things took my attention away (law enforcement and I.T.) for many years. But I always knew I would be back at it someday and I knew it would be on my own.

So years and years later I was at home playing stay at home Dad and preparing my kids to enter the grind. I took that time and read this forum top to bottom and front to back. I used craigslist and scoured the entire country for a truck capable of what I wanted to do.

I found it in El Paso (it had spent its life in Cali) and flew out and drove it home.

The rest is history in the making.

 

Im a 5th generation trucker and 15th generation caravaner I have pictures going back to the early 20s of our family doing trucks and we have family records going back to the early 1600s where we have always done over land caravan work.

I was going to go to college to do IT work but found out i dispise people in general and dont do well in any enviroment where i need to work with other humans. Trucking is a good job and lifestyle fit for me so i joined in with the rest of my family.

End goal is to build up to 20 trucks and own my own fleet and then sell it and retire with a paid off custom home and hobby farm in a super rural area and restore a full line of every truck my branch of the family has owned just because i can.

 

Nice thread OP! I like reading this stuff too!

 

When I was a kid, my grandparents drove team. Although they stayed out most of the time, they would occasionaly swing through for hometime. They were able to arrange to take me on a few ride-alongs. I absolutely loved it!
Fast forward to adulthood... I had worked for my town public works dept. and gained some experience with heavier trucks, backing trailers, etc. I always seemed to have a knack for it.
In 2013, a local factory I was employed with was in a lull, and it looked like lay-offs were imminent. I was talking about a career change with my wife, and she mentioned trucking.
I liked the idea and started seriously looking into getting my CDL and training for it.
I took a big leap and paid up front to go to a local CDL school(Sage Technical Schools). The schooling was great and I felt like I learned a lot from the instructors. I hired on with a mid-sized OTR company nearby, and had a great mentor for about a month.
After about a year of solo OTR, I started to look for local work. It didn't take long for me to get on with a large LTL carrier in my town.
Today I have almost 6 years in with that company, and I'm pretty satisfied with my job, pay, benefits etc.
Now that I'm into trucking, I honestly can't see myself doing anything else. It just seems to be a great profession with a lot of job security.
Overall I'm very happy that I became a professional driver, and I hope to do this until I retire...

 

I was in lower management in a casino in Las Vegas. It was my first management position and I hated it. It made me start to really dislike people and I quickly became a degenerate drinker and gambler.
I ran across a guy on youtube who was a trucker and started watching. Then I found a few more. Before those first videos I have to admit I didn't think much of truckers. I ended up subscribed to dozens of trucking channels to try and absorb as much as possible about the industry. I even bought the ####ing American Truck Simulator game lol.
I packed the wife and kids up and moved to TN to get away from Vegas and start fresh. I told them I was becoming a truck driver since my experience In a casino would be worthless in TN.
Cut my teeth at Prime in their flatbed division. I loved the trucking but hated the company. While driving with Prime I listened to a lot of news and when this new coronavirus had just started spreading into Europe I assumed things were about to get very bad.
From my degenerate gambling days I knew about trading options. I bought about $2000 in spy put options in mid February 2020. When they hit $40,000 I cashed out. Few months later I quit Prime and used the money from the options and other sources I had coming in to buy my own truck, trailer, insurance, and get my authority.
Trucking since I got away from Prime and got my own authority has been much more work with all the paperwork, load searching, and doing all the maintenance myself.
I would have a very difficult time going to work for someone else now that I've been in business for myself. Trucking changed my life for the better and I can honestly say I love it.

 

I was sort of born into it. My father was a contractor when I was a kid and we always had at least a dump truck and some equipment. I've been around trucks and Equipment my entire life.

Having that kind of a background having my own truck and Authority is not that big of a deal. I've been around all this long enough that I understand that sometimes things break and you have to spend time fixing it and there's paperwork and all of the other extra things that you have to do. I understand that the weekends spent being preventative and taking care of your equipment is just part of it. And where other people cry when they have to put money back into their truck I'm happy to do it because I know that anything I do to my truck will make it more reliable and that's where it's at. My father would always tell me when you have something good that makes you money don't be afraid to put money back into it because that money will come back to you. It is a different mindset than someone who has worked a regular job all of their life and for every hour that they work they've gotten paid. I would be bored out of my mind working somewhere. Not that it is better or worse because there are plenty of people that have great jobs that do better than people with their own truck. But that is not for me.

I was fortunate enough to find the truck that I always wanted and it had a blown engine. So I bought another truck and I parted that one out and I worked over the engine and I put it in and I went over the whole truck from front to back. I couldn't be happier with it.

I am someone who is very fortunate and downright extremely lucky. I see what's going on in this business and I am on the very tail end of being able to do something like that with an older truck. So while I do enjoy doing what I do, I'm looking for the next thing. It's not going to be over this year or next year but this isn't going to last 20 or 30 years, especially not with an older truck with a mechanical engine.

But in the meantime, I have to say I do enjoy being in this business because it truly is a business that you don't have a boss. I don't have customers to answer to. I don't have employees. If I want to take a day off or a week off or a month off that's not a problem. And if I want to work and work and work and work and work and keep working, that's not a problem either.

To me, that has a lot of value.