What is your "below dignity" or insult rate?

I take my job seriously and pay attention to the little details. Shifting gears, scanning mirrors is muscle memory after 2 million+ safe miles in 22 years and I dont take that for granted.

 

$7800 for 2960 miles from home to home, 6 full days of work. Avg. $3.05 per loaded mile. Avg. 13.5% DH. All miles with DH @ $2.63 pm. 5 Trips, one was to Florida, 3 had almost 0 DH. Not too bad, considering.

 

Take this time do get all the work done on your equipment to prep it for the next up cycle and do all the things that make you happy. Enjoy the free time to indulge in life itself. Rest up to be primed and ready for the next boom.

 

Old age may have crept up on us by then. lol jk

 

Uh, I was told there would be no maths...I'm a good driver tho

 

I've dead headed all the way back to Texas from Ureka, MT because the rates were too low. I made it back to Amarillo and found a load that paid enough to justify not taking cheap loads. Too many folks don't know what they are worth and they accept cheap rates. That hurts all of us and I refuse to be the one that hurts this industry.

I base my minimum gross by the month, not by the day. There is a reason certain drivers do well in this industry and many others don't.

I have had the luxury of growing up in the trucking industry from the driver perspective and the repair side of it. I have seen multiple folks go broke and some folks do really well.

The ones who can't seem to get ahead neglect maintenance, have bad health habits, and haul cheap loads. Folks will never get ahead making those choices. It is almost as if they are in a race to go broke and they don't know it.

Another way to put it is you can give two drivers the same starting capital, same equipment, and same load boards and one will succeed and the other will fail. Money discipline, maintenance discipline, personalities, personal habits all play a role.

 

You make an excellent point. I would add that the driver that fails will generally find someone/something else to blame for their failure besides the person in the mirror. When I left a very good Union job with benefits many years ago to be an owner op I lost count at the number of “well intended” fellow company drivers who told me how “you can’t make it as an owner op”. My reply generally was maybe you can’t but I definitely can. I don’t GAF what the average guy does, I care about what I do and I have no desire to be average.

 

It’s true unfortunately. Time will tell.