48Packard's alternative view about leasing

This will be a bit lengthy, but I hope it will provide an alternative view on leasing stemming from my own experience. I'm not posting it to change minds, but merely to present my set of circumstances that allowed leasing to work for me and perhaps give someone something to think about.

I started driving in 1996. Always a company driver (mostly dry box, but also a little flatbed and propane tanker in my earlier years), I decided to lease a truck from Schneider in January, 2015. I chose Schneider because as long as I was going to have a monetary stake in that truck, I wanted to dictate where that truck would go. It seemed totally incongruous to have that level of financial involvement in a truck while relying on others for your runs and, worse, miles. I did not want to have to chase miles. Running under a dispatcher for $1.07 a mile plus FSC just had no appeal to me. Plus, I had worked as a company hand for 4 1/2 years for the Pumpkin from '07 til early '12 when I went to Crete, so I was familiar with their modus operandi.

In the interest of simplicity, I'll list the reasons:

1.I did not need to make 90 thousand a year. This is key. I understand the philosophy of "as long as I'm out here, I want to make as much as I can". I get that. But I'm at a different point in my life. My wife has a good job, we have some rental income and additional income annually every December from some family-owned property. I am also on my wife's health insurance. My last two years at Crete immediately prior to leasing, I made right at $61,000. As long as I could get close to that, I'd be fine. My three years of leasing yielded annual settlement totals within $3000 of each other, and close enough to $60k for my needs.

2. Frankly, I had no desire to run 140,000 miles a year. I was 54 when I started the lease, and preferred not to run so hard as to make my self older than I already was. Some guys thrive on getting every mile possible. I did not by this time. I always took a week off at Thanksgiving, another week at Christmas, generally a week or two during the year, and never stayed home fewer than three days, most often 4 or 5 days. I stayed out three to four weeks at a stretch.

3. At the beginning of my lease, my mother-in-law was in the late stages of Alzheimer's, and my wife was one of her caretakers. I wanted to make sure to be able to get home should an immediate need arise. That time came in mid-June of 2015 when my MIL became comatose. Unfortunately, it took her ten days to pass, so I was off two weeks. But I had the money set aside for the down time (a key feature of leasing), so no issues.

4. I am from the L.A. area originally, but have not lived there since 1981 and had not been able to visit as often as I would have liked. My folks were in their middle and late 70s and I wanted the opportunity to get to the left coast a few times a year. My father, now 79, had shoulder-replacement surgery late last year, and I was able to be there for four or five days following the procedure to help out and just spend some time with him.

5. Finally, it was a good way to help me discover whether I wanted to be a true O/O or not. In other words, at lease end, I was going to go full O/O or get out.

Those were the root reasons for doing the lease, and in particular a Schneider CHOICE program lease.

I made about what a company driver would make, but generally ran where and when I wanted to. I drove an average of 107k miles a year. I never took ultra-cheap loads unless I needed to get somewhere specifically for some reason, usually home or Phoenix (where I would park and rent a car to SoCal after SNI closed their Fontana facility).

If I had to make the decision now, I would have opted for a one-year lease for the sole purpose of making a transition to true owner-operator status. I say this because of the decline of the CHOICE program due to SNIs increasing greediness and general attitude toward its contractors. Without going into great detail (the reasons are expanded upon in several other Schneider threads here on TTR), let's just say a once really good program has fallen victim to what I call the Harvard Business School mentality, a disease that is afflicting many businesses these days. I'm not anti-profit, but I am dismayed at the erosion of care for drivers many companies exhibit. But even given this attitude, I still think CHOICE is better than being under the thumb of some dispatcher and making .89 cpm. To me, that is just unfathomable.

I was very fortunate in that during the three years I drove my leased Cascadia, it never left me stranded with the exception of my starter failing in Arkansas two months before my lease expired. I was at a truckstop, it had been giving me issues, and I waited about a day too long to attend to it. I also had a DEF cooler fail at about 210k, but it was replaced under warranty. Never on the hook, and only down for a week after a four-wheeler got stupid in a work zone in TN last April. But even those repairs could wait until I took a week off, so again, nothing lost.

Had the profession not gone to crap with silly regulations, genuinely horrible drivers getting CDLs, and ever-increasing levels of sheer idiocy displayed by the general public, I might have stayed. But the bottom line is I have other things I can do at age 57, my wife and I are almost debt-free, and I need to take better care of myself. There are elements of driving that I'll miss, but when weighed against what I see as numerous problems, it was time to exit.

All those arguing against leasing using the same well-worn reasoning have points, certainly...many of them quite valid. Don't go into one blindly, thinking you're going to "clean up" just because you're "the boss". You have to plan, save, and budget...understand your own goals, the customers, the lanes. Use the tools you are have available. But never lose sight of the fact it is a business and will require your full attention.

I hope this is helpful. I wish you the very best and safe travels.