I wanna be a trucker come hell or high water! I need some advice (or a lot)

WHEN YA GO OFF TO SCHOOL AND YA COME HOME A TRUCK DRIVER....



Dang


Just do like we did....


Work hard.....

Save ya money.....

INvest well...


Give ya heart to GOD........

 

Did you have any lower back pain when you sat for long periods of time before you had the construction job?

 

Go for it man if thats what you want to do but I guarantee you those number the school told you are wrong. Acctualy only about 20% of drivers who graduate from schools are still driving a truck after a year. Plus with the quality of the companies that hire new peoplw without experience you will get told 40,000 but will be lucky to make 28,000

 

It depended on the seating surface and level of support it offered.

 

Well, $40k does seem high. I'd want know how they came up with that.

Let's say you start at .30/mile. I'm not sure you'd start that high, but let's say 30 cents. And let's say you average 2100 miles a week, week in and week out, for 52 weeks. No breakdowns. No delays. No kinks in the economy. That's a best-case scenario.

.30 X 2100 X 52 = $32,760 before state and federal taxes (unless you live in a state that doesn't have an income tax), medical, whatever. Load/unload pay, detention pay, extra-drop pay will probably add less than $1,000. To get to $40k gross at .30/mile you'd have to hope for enough freight to get you 133,000 miles a year (2564 miles in an average week). I don't care how ambitious a driver is--the freight has to be there for the miles to be there when we're talking about pay-per-mile and OTR.

Bear in mind that that's the first full year after your on-road training time.

Now take a look at starting pay for rookies. I haven't looked lately, but I'll guess that it's less than 30 cents a mile.

 

No! It's not a waste of time! Really.

I'm just saying (not knowing why a school is telling people $40k; they may know something I don't) that, given what pay-per-mile is for most folks starting out in OTR, and given the miles people get (not blaming any carriers here--they can only dispatch the freight they've got), that $40k seems high, IMO. This is complicated. You've got folks who exaggerate their own income (not many people readily reveal their actual earnings to strangers) and carriers that exaggerate what their drivers earn (In 1995 CR England ran ads promising "$65,000 your first year!" while Dan England, in a 1995 Wall Street Journal interview, said his second-year drivers made "about $35,000."). You've got the American Trucking Associations saying drivers earn $45k a year (they're probably including Teamsters in that figure) and the U.S. Department of Labor saying that drivers (all drivers) earn about $37k a year. Only the drivers know what they make.

It sucks. It totally sucks. For everything truck drivers do and for the most part do safely, they should be paid A LOT more.

I drove for ten years (age 45-55) and I freakin' loved it more than anything I'd ever done for money (I don't want to say what-all I did or do now, but it was/is 100% legal!) and the last thing I want to do is discourage anyone from going for it.

Don't bail! Maybe more research will turn up a niche outfit where you could earn more. Run numbers. Ask more questions. At least here at The Truckers Report, you've got lots of helpful people.