Choice Program with Schneider, a couple questions

Health insurance is on you ......

 

All insurance - personal and business - is on you.

You apply for sfi/sni at the same time.

If you can't save enough for a down payment as a company driver I highly doubt you will be able to save enough in one year as a Choice driver. There is a 50% one year washout rate. Between learning lanes, learning truck costs, personal health insurance, taxes, and a couple of bonehead errors (it happens to everyone), the likelihood is you will earn the same or less as a company driver.

 

Bobtail, and physical damage (collision) on the tractor......to start.

 

All the plates, registration, ifta, permits and all truck insurance are through Schneider. Of course you can get all of that on your own but no sense except maybe the truck insurance if you want to maybe save a little money over the convenience of just running it through them. They also have OAI (occupational accident insurance) through Schneider. Of course the OSR at Charlotte that ran the orientation was an idiot and he just tried to blow through everything as quickly as possible answering as few questions as possible. When we were going through the truck insurance portion and signing all the documents he’s just like “you either want the coverage or you don’t”. Physical damage/collision insurance ranged from $75-$100 a week. The other ignoramuses in orientation were complaining about the cost so the OSR told us to just decline it. Of course I finally spoke up (which irritated him) and said how can we decline collision coverage if we’re leasing Schneider finances equipment? He didn’t have an answer so I explained to the group that they needed the coverage. Then the white out was brought in and they had to redo their contracts while the OSR was grumbling looking at his watch. So be careful lol

As far as health insurance, they did offer insurance through TrueNorth when I was there a few years ago. Of course you had to set up and handle it yourself, but it was run through and the premiums were automatically deducted and paid to them by Schneider out of the settlement. Not sure if they still offer that or what the cost is now since premiums are skyrocketing but in 2014/15 it was cheap as hell as far as I’m concerned and my out of pocket was low, although I didn’t use it very much at the time. Of course I was single no kids so I have no idea about cost of family plans.

 

True north is paid directly by driver to bank drafts..no more settlement deductions...

 

Are you still in the Choice program? I'm looking at the tanker choice program because they have a terminal about 60 miles from my home that does a lot of tanker work. I don't see a lot of SNI vans around south Louisiana though; what' the freight like in the New Orleans area?

 

I don't know about tankers, but I can tell you that right now is not a good time to go Choice. Van rates are straight up awful.
Personally, I'd wait until the economy get back up and running before I did anything at all for anyone.
Right now is not a good time to jump anywhere.

Good luck

 

Yeah, it's a terrible time, especially in my town, it's oil field dependent and I just got laid off from a great paying 7&7 job, I quite driving 8 years ago. The only job skill I have besides driving experience is only worth anything in the oil field.