I get these loads before they hit the boards most of the time. They all know me and trust I will get it done.
Nothing wrong with that at all. Midwest I can stay in that area no problem. Mountains kick my butt a little with those loads.
Even then I believe you'll pay around $200K total for the truck. 5 years and 500K miles later it will worth $50K. That's 30 cpm. This is not about new vs old truck arguing. Just something to think about when you calculate real cost per mile.
And the only maintenance cost is a set of drive tires, couple of steers and service. I do 5-6 new trucks each year for the last 30 years and trade between 450-500K The last 20 years that's all I've paid. 450K the disk brakes still have 30-40%. Everything else is warranty. The last year i did keep a few well over 500K due to the time frame on new trucks.
And everything is on a back order now, so your new truck will stay at the dealer for at least a month if you're lucky. Meanwhile you'll have to make your monthly payments promptly.
Umm no. If I sell my Pete at 500k I’ll get more than 50k. Also owned it for 2 years and longest thing on back order was a week. If I was worried about not being able to make payments, I should have no business being anything other than a company driver.
If I followed some of the advice here I would have never made it to where I am today. All I hear is this is not the time… There are losers and winners. It’s a choice. Losers are lazy and their planning reflects. Winner’s exploit all avenues to success and rarely spend their time doing anything else. Pretty sure @wichris knows what works for his company. New trucks equal uptime. You can’t keep a customer happy when you tell them their strawberries will be late and not so fresh cause of your downtime on old equipment. Sure you may get away with that with regular brokerage freight… but then you’ll cry about rates and etc
