Need some advise and wisdom

welcome to the star!!! lol.. you pay them allot. Your not figuring wrong.

I will tell yout this though. Those are the loads that are sitting on the board whenever she happens to pull them up. Most of that crap will sit there untill it expires. When you work the landstar board you have to sit there and constantly refresh it every minute. Most the good loads never hit the board and are given directly to drivers the agents know, the good ones that do hit the board only last a few inutes so you got to be FAST!! thee is 8k other guys looking for that good load too

 

the other thing I see is that you live in PA. Nothing off the east coast pays anything. Your doing good to get $1.20mi gross. The only good thing is that most the loads going into the eats coast pay much better. they have to because half the time you end up deadheading out

 

So it seems to me just on these ROUGH numbers by a novice that it would take somewhere around 1.80 to make a living doing this.

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To make a good living with those high fees u will need atleast that. But if thats all u can get then u take it or get out. I was looking at van rates yesterday and all I can say is im glad I have a flat. Do landstars fees include what u have to pay for their trailer or does that cost extra?

 

You could always try getting a better cpm by going aftermarket and improving your fuel economy. Bully Dog does a chip i think, like their light duty stuff. If you could even get 5% better fuel consumption then it would atleast help you make a profit after texas taxes.

 

Based on what I've heard about Landstar, I thought the loads posted on their board showed the compensation for the load 'after' Landstar takes their cut. In other words, what shows on the board would go 100% to the driver. I would check with them to make sure.

 

Wrong, what is shown on the board is the line haul(gross money).
You only get a % of that.
When I had my truck and step deck on over there it was 67% of the line haul and I got an extra 8% of the linehaul for having my own trailer.So I would get 75% of 98% of the linehaul (they keep that other 2% for admon fees or something like that.).Sometime the linehaul will have the fsc included you need to ask them what the fsc is on the load then have them break it out of the line haul for you to get 100% of the fsc otherwise there are agents that will leave it in there and you get screwed.
Same with the tarp pay and permit pay.....etc.....

 

they always break out the FSC. worst problem I have run into is a few agents wanting to only give you a small portion of the FSC saying "the customer doesn't like paying fsc" Which is usually BS. Landstar agents are caped at a certain percentage of the load they can keep. However the fsc and any extra pay like detentin etc is all fair game for them to keep whatever you let them keep. This week the FSC is like $.23

right now I'm paying like $170 a week for insurance, plates, permits, escrow etc.. but the plates, permits and escrow are only for a short time, you don't pay them al year long.

if you need $.35 for a maintenance fund then I wish I was your mechanic. That's well more then double what most keep but it also depends on your truck. old truck with no payment means high maintenace. newer truck with payment is lower.

my truck payment is $.10mi, (based on 10k miles a month) you need to work on fuel milage because at 5.5 you are behind the curve on the FSC which is figured at 6mpg. so the higher fuel goes the more you loose. I'm averagein 6.5 approx mow so the higher fuel goes, the more I make, because I'm ahead of the curve.

My pete was gettin 4 to 4.5. I had to scrape every penny of my allowed advance PLUS run about 60mph just t make sure I had enough money JUST for fuel.

My first load with this new truck was 900 miles. pay was low (always is getting out of TX) and I still had almost $200 left of my advance after buying fuel.

big difference