Crunching The Numbers, Am I Missing Something?? (newb)

We were in our mid 30’s. I had 2 years experience, I paid for her CDL and we teamed for 10 years.

Primarily ODFL - 7 years.

Paid off all debt, 5 houses and vehicles.

She’s retired now, I have one truck and 2 trailers, leased on to LS.

You could do the same, but buy the big bunk, get DOD clearances and go LS , Bennett, or Bagget. Or TSMT.

Sky is the limit. Good luck.

 

If you are considering power only why not just get your own authority and run under you own numbers so you not attaching to someone and giving a piece of the pie. My husband and I are new authority, well now we are 2 years in, but we started out doing power only working through convoy, coyote, and ch Robinson. Convoy was our go to more often then not. We could pick a load up for them deliver the load then use their trailer for 3 or 4 days no charge. If you keep it longer then they will charge but you work all that out before taking off with the load.
Starting your LLC is simple you do not need attorney fees so I can see a saving on your listing above and you don’t need trailer rental fee so that’s a savings too. If you go to you tube look up steady trucker, or diy trucking, both these channels pretty much walk you through the entire process of stating your trucking business, I’m trying to remember I think opening an LLC was 75.00 online. Ooida is good to join because any questions you may have they will help. You will have monthly expenses of your eld logs, load boards which we pretty much use dat board.
Like I said we started power only now we have bought our own flatbed trailer so we flatbed unless one of our regular customers need us for power only then we park our flatbed and go do the power only for a few select customers.
There is a lot of money to be made out here. I believe our first quarter this year we grossed 85,000 but right now the fuel prices are crazy and the costs of trucks are crazy too, if you buy now your going to pay double if not triple of what the truck should cost. For example we bought our 2016 Pete for 50,000 with 300,000 miles on the truck well looking at truck prices now you’ll pay double that possibly triple. We just increased our value on our truck with insurance for total loss 184,000 so if our truck burnt down or total loss we would get 184,000.
I would recommemd on your 1 st truck not getting the truck of your dreams. Like the living quarters your talking about unless you have a lot of money to put down on something like that. I would recommend not getting yourself into a 3,000 plus truck payment. We worked and saved so we were blessed to have our truck paid for and now we have a flatbed trailer paid for. Just like dry van trailers right now are crazy priced.
I hope this information has helped you. Like I said my husband and I do it, I guess the difference is we both drive, so maybe you should consider getting your cdls too. If we can be of assistance I’d be glad to answer any questions you may have. We don’t know it all and we are learning but will be happy to share our knowledge.

 

Yes and no ol’ hand

The 379 with 120” bunk is 23,500 lbs.

(Half tanks).

With a 53’ combo spread flat I could still scale 44k.

There’s a gig familiar to me that they could do right this minute that is PO and pays easily $15k TTT for 6 days, less than 4,000 miles.

 

Tough nails on this one. I don’t ever suggest O/O to anybody anymore bc three years ago I frequented this restaurant and the owner always tried diggin in to me about being an O/O. I showed him my net numbers, he liked it, sold his restaurant and jumped into to O/Oing. Less than six months later he sold it all and i last saw him doing Uber. It’s a super tough line of work due to NO consistency. It’s up and it’s down all around.

I don’t want to discourage if it’s what y’all want, lesson learned hard either way, but that set up will only limit you in an already inconsistent environment. Imo the only people that’ll float are the ones with paid off equipment. If my truck wasn’t paid off, I’d be forced to work in a way I couldn’t stand to do, and that’s where the hill goes down, fast.

imho, I’d look into you both learning how to trade the stock market. (Options, day trading, NOT long term buy and hold).

 

Lol. It can be challenging, we also have our beagle dog with us. What we try to do is every night for at least 4 hrs we stop the truck and both get some sleep without having to bump on the mattress going down the road. I require more sleep than my husband does so I usually drive anywhere between 5 to 7 hrs a day then we switch up. When I’m driving he is in the bunk resting and vice versa then when we stop the truck for the 4 hours sleep he sleeps in the top bunk and me and dog sleep bottom bunk. We pretty much stay out until we net 10,000 to 14,000 which takes us about 5 to 8 days just depending on the loads we doing. We always go home every week to week and a half because we have to cats at home so we have to go home feed, clean litter and give lovings to our kitty cats.
We pretty much get along. We can tell if we getting on each other nerves so in those cases we may close off the curtain to the sleeper and go about our business.

 

I forgot to mention when we go home we stay 2 to 4 days and then go back out on road again.