Please Help Me With My Situation

From your response to @ dave_in_az I can begin to understand why you have not received a job offer as a college graduate with a high GPA. I think you have an attitude and possibly an anger problem. He offered you solid advice, and BAM your telling a respected member of this forum not to offer his opinion. He and others are questioning why you have not been hired in a professional position, in a field that is definitely one of the best areas for someone with a good education.
If you do have such a problem, trucking is probably not for you. There is more BS in trucking than you could imagine. Between countless rules, and enforcement of every kind, and company rules in you go that way, -and a dispatcher having a bad day, to name just a few of the daily frustrations. One needs to be calm and in control of their emotions at all times. Driving a truck is not for someone who angers quickly. No road rage ever.
Having said that, you’re about $100k shy realistically, of starting out and having success as an OO.
There is a wealth of good advice here if you are willing to listen.
If what I said about you is not true, I apologize in advance.
I’m out.

 

Keep your $15K in the bank. Hit the road trucking, then add as much as possible each payday to that $15K and start buying rental property, plus do some day trading on a laptop when the truck is shut down. Several drivers on this forum do those 2 things for added income. You can manage your money day trading & let a management company take care of the rental property for you so you don't have that headache to deal with while traveling the country trucking.
Have you tried applying with auditing firms? Friend owns an auditing firm and pays his employees $100K salary plus $45.00 a day per diem and a full benefits package. No, he doesn't need any more employees right now. He just filled his last opening with a young woman new graduate from Boston College. I think he created that position for her so he'll have someone in reserve he foresees needing in the near future.

 

I worked with auditors who after 4 years were topping 135k easily. One had a degree in language study but she was very good and the last I heard she heads an office in the LA area for the same company.

 

Found this on a thread about a O/O that won a truck,pretty accurate.

Most truck drivers aspire to become owner-operators like McClerkin. He most certainly started out driving for trucking companies that had him hauling cross-country without being able to get home every week until he was able to save up enough bankroll to become an owner-operator. Now he says he’s making a lucrative income while getting home to his family every night because the majority of his work is hauling gravel, construction, and demolition supplies to local destinations.

What’s so great about being an owner-operator? Truck driving companies own rig fleets and contract with CDL-holders to drive their trucks to deliver hauls. Most usually pay truck drivers around 33 percent of the total freight bill. But if you’re an owner-operator, which means you own and operate your own rig(s), there’s no middle-man so you take home 100 percent of the total freight bill.

But buying your own rig is almost like buying a house – McClerkin’s Peterbilt Model 567 Heritage has a retail value of over $160,000! Sure, there are auto loans and other financing measures available, but you’re still looking at a hefty down payment and monthly payments that most 18 to 21-year old truck drivers simply can’t afford. In fact, there are only about 350,000 owner-operators registered in the U.S..

Most only become owner-operators after having been a truck driver for an average of 26 years. The average age of U.S. owner-operators is 37. Surprisingly, almost 50 percent of owner-operators have attained a college education, which means their schedules are ideal enough to allow for part-time or even full-time college. Even better, almost 70 percent of owner-operators have completely paid off their rigs, which speaks to the great profitability of owning and operating your own rig.

Becoming an owner-operator means you get more freedom and control over your hauls and rates. You can plan your shipments rather than suddenly getting blindsided by a company dispatcher who orders you to change routes to cover for another company truck driver. Instead of being forced to agree to a substellar rate, you can haggle with specific clients and shippers for higher or custom rates depending on factors that may make the haul easier or harder.

But being an owner-operator means you’ll have to do more than just drive a truck. You’ll have to do your own accounting, logistics, self-dispatching, and repairs. It would cut into your profits quite a bit if you didn’t learn to repair your rig for routine mechanical breaks. If you outsource these aspects of your business to field experts, you’ll have to pay them and manage them, which take a cut from both your time and revenue.

You’ll also have to retain your own lawyer to review and draft contracts to make sure they comply with federal regulations. You’ll have to get your own rig insurance, which can cost more than $8,000 a year.

But it’s definitely worth it. Most successful owner-operators make over $100,000 in net income. In comparison, most first-year truck drivers working for a trucking company make about $35,000 to $45,000.

 

I think what you should take away from everything that has been posted here is this. Trucking is hard, VERY hard. Some people (I'm not one of them) think that autonomous trucks will put drivers out of a job within the next 10-20 years. If they are right, do you want to dive into a dying industry? I realize that you feel like there isn't a great job market out there for your business/finance degree, but most people don't wind up in their desired field, rather they find that their education prepared them to work in just about any field. I had a minor in business and advanced degrees in archaeology/anthropology. I wound up owning an insurance business for 30 years with 100 employees, even though I would have much rather been out digging up artifacts. I retired from that at age 55 and now drive a truck for something different to do.

If you truly want to try trucking then follow other drivers advice here and start off with a trucking company to learn the ropes. If you dive into a business arrangement with a guy who knows a guy that says you can make $100k a year driving a straight truck, the odds are extremely high that you're in for a letdown and will most likely fail.

If on the other hand you want to put that expensive education to good use, pick a part of the country that you would like to live in and start marketing yourself in that area. Scour online employment ads and hire a head hunter to look for jobs for you. There is a ton of work out there regardless of what you have been unable to find so far. A business or finance degree doesn't guarantee you a job. Your ability to market yourself as an asset to a company does, and that's where the degree is important as part of the overall package they would get by hiring you.

 

Well hells bells. IMO you should get on out there and get it goin. You’ve definitely got what it takes to succeed as an O/O. Don’t listen to the rest of these guys, none of em know as much as you. My suggestion is get one of those trucks with the double eagle sleeper straight off. The big one. Like 120”. You need lots of room running team. Just jump in with both feet. Don’t worry about failure, it never happens in this industry. Also, any horror stories you hear will just be stories. See, we like to make #### up to scare people away because we like to keep trucking a secret. If everyone knew how great it is, and realized we have all become millionaires in just a few years, and how little work there is to it, well hell, everyone would want to do it. But you, you’re different. You deserve to be let into this little honey hole we call trucking.

 

We had a guy with several years under his belt try to go O /O. He was a good driver but he failed quickly. Not sure what happened. I think the truck he bought ate him up with breakdowns

 

Maybe he didn’t have a degree in business administration. Or if he did, he only had an average GPA..

 

Let's hear an amen for this brother

 

Actually some of us do understand what it's like to start a career out of college. A year before I graduated, my first "career" job was shagging tech support calls on 3rd shift for $12/hr. It was several years before making a six figure income and wearing a suit to work. You have to get in at the bottom and establish your value first, and it's a process that takes years.

That said, you're planning to take a leap into an expensive venture in an industry you know less than nothing about. What could possibly go wrong?

Get your CDL and go to work for a mega for a few months and see if you like it enough to gamble your savings on.

I did it the hard way, albeit with two decades of life experience head start on you. I place the value of no experience in my case at about $50,000. I had the resources and tenacity to work through that. Are you ready to take that kind of gamble?

I'll also point out it never gets easier. However, the same could be said about nearly any other career path. The challenges just get bigger and more complicated as you go along.

I will add just one more thing. I've worked in 4 different industries in my life. I can tell you, without a doubt, that in trucking/transportation you will find 100X more hands trying to empty your pockets than doing anything else. Crooked brokers, incompetent repair shops, government, you name it.