Putting my head down and charging into the unknown.

Agreed. OP should not put the cart before the horse. Let your career path take it's course and you'll see exactly where you want to be in time.

 

You have to have money to be an o/o. Try starting with a few bucks for insurance and your repair fund before you even haul your first load. Then think hard about what it costs to actually check trucks out to buy them, figure just a grand in the testing, not to mention travel expenses. Oh and let's not forget getting a loan to buy the thing, it isn't like buying a car where they just hand you the keys and your off and running down the road.

There is this big lie about being an owner operator, too many people think it is instant success and you are going to make big bucks but the truth seems to be that out of 100 newly minted o/o, 64 of them are out of business in the first year, another 20 or so fail by the end of the second year and another three or four linger on for maybe three years before they become so unprofitable that they give up, those numbers are from the lending companies themselves.

So let's start with the first thing, you get your cdl, then think about a five year strategy working for a carrier and then see where it leads, becuase you have a one in three chance of getting your cdl as it sits, you could be washed out during training or that super hard .... make that the super super hard road test.