Advice for an old wannabe...

I know of company drivers hitting $120-$150,000 per year.
I personally don’t know of any owner operators clearing that much. Best I ever did was $108k.
Plus I had to do maintenance and repairs every Saturday.
The company guys just let the company mechanic handle it while they went fishing.

 

Honestly, as an O/O my advice is take your money and go elsewhere. There are tons of companys with decent rigs. And frankly a truck is expensive with a captial MONEY! With emissions rigs being the way they are and how stupid your average driver is both CDL and non alongside the current crunch and new regulations in the pipeline. Its not worth it when your that close to the finish line already. And i say this as someone who LOVES what he does to the point that even with my trucks history (go see some of the #### ive gone through as a perfect case in point of what can go wrong) im perfectly content with my choices in life.

For you. Do you really want to deal with #### like this


On the side of the road with no support structure on christmas bloody eve and lose out half your christmas time with your family?

Because that is the norm. Not the exception. Truck can run great for months. Then a landslide of #### all at once.

 

I don't think driving/owning a truck is a bad idea if it's something you're interested in. You just need to be smart about it and don't do something you might regret. Here are some ideas:

1. Like others have said, you could drive OTR for someone else for a year and see if you like driving a truck.

2. If dump truck driving interests you, you could find a local job running dump truck and see if you like the work. If you do this, just make sure you find a good outfit that takes care of their equipment - you definitely don't want to drive for a company that runs junk.

3. I didn't think your idea of buying a used dump truck and running it was a bad idea if you stayed local/home daily. I wouldn't recommend OTR dump truck like you mentioned. If you looked hard and were picky, I think you could find a nice older factory built dump truck for $50K. There is usually quite a bit of local dump truck work if you look around enough. And if you don't need to make lots of money, you can be somewhat flexible with your schedule. Plus, a nice of dump truck will hold its value if you take care of it. However, others have given you good advice about the money aspect. Running a truck is expensive and you're not going to get rich and it may break you.