When to take the plunge....

Here's the situation. My wife and I drive team for a decent company and we each make about $170 a day. We have talked with a couple of Landstar bcos hauling the same types of loads we do and they are all making a ton of money doing it, or at least they claim to. We have $55,000 saved in the bank and we both have good credit although my wife had a bankruptcy about a year-and-a-half ago. Should we keep doing what we are doing and save more money or should we go out and get our own truck and sign up with Landstar. We're not doing this for our health, we want to make as much money in as short a time as possible and it would be nice to have the freedom to go home whenever we want to. We also don't want to take the plunge too early and get in over our heads and end up losing our nest egg and having to go back to being company drivers. So I'm asking you, the owner operators, what we should do.

 

I used to flip houses and she used to be a school teacher. I understand about profit and loss. The business plan would be to chase the highest paying freight available. We currently haul Hazmat and are working on getting our secret clearance so we can haul arms and ammunition. The BCOs that we spoke with haul a lot of military loads and make their hugest checks doing that. We have been in the industry about a year-and-a-half and wouldn't even think about doing this for at least another six months. We are doing as much research as we can online and through talking with drivers and the truckers report. There is no school out there that teaches you how to become a successful owner operator unless you believe Kevin Rutherford has all the answers. We are attempting to "do the hard work" without paying him a dime. My understanding is that leasing to Landstar or Mercer would be a good first step. We would not try to get our own authority right out of the gate. Might even lease to our current company as owner operators if the deal is good enough. I have heard they pay 65% of the load to the truck. It seems to me if we were able to find a decent used truck in our price range that didn't give us a lot of trouble we could not help but make more money than we are currently.

 

I did OK flipping houses, probably averaged about $12,000 profit per house over a 21 house career. The problem is you need a lot of money to do that or else you have to borrow money at really high interest rates. I lost most of my money in a divorce and the profit margin isn't great enough to use hard money flipping houses and make a good profit. We don't want to run 6000 miles a week if we don't have to. That is a recipe for poor health and a broken marriage. It's not the number of miles you run its how much you get paid per mile that you do run. Anybody know what a New Cascadia goes for?