Here we go... finally a lease-operator!

Thanks for posting your financial data! I am hopeful to be doing the same thing next year, so I will be following you!

Thanks again!

 

I don't know how much accounting you do but you might want to take a look into breaking down your maintenance bills into a rate-per-kilometer/mile, however you track it. One of the industry rags I ran across had a good article on using your maint-per-mile to give you an inkling on when to prepare to send your truck off to the parking lot in the sky. Basically it said if your maint. on a weekly basis is running more than $.10 (usd)/mile (and that was on the high end), you should consider sending the truck down the road. Basically it ends up that at that cost, anything you are saving in truck payments are just being sucked back up into maintenance. The cost of downtime added in and you see that the decision to buy a newer, better truck is all that much clearer.

dumping $20k into a $13k truck sounds a bit painful but it sounds like you're making it work - all the better.

 

Well it looks to me that a lot of O/O that are leased onto a company have Maintenance Accounts. Including the OP whom my question was directed to, not you. But thanks for chiming in.

 

What's the big deal about a separate account ? You either have the money or you don't....so if your maintenance account won't cover the cost of a repair you have to pull it out of somewhere....

As I stated, those 'maintenance accounts' usually refer to fleece/purchase plans and are a good way to screw the clueless lease/operator out of his hard earned money. Many times the $$$ goes in and never goes out.... when a guy cancels his lease he can't get his money back. OOIDA has won a few lawsuits dealing with companies stealing from their L/O's...

Open a savings account and call it whatever you want....

 

Talk about arguing for the sake of argument!


I have a "maintenance account" and that's just what it is...I keep not less than $20,000 in it. ( I do this thing where I consider $20,000 to be a zero balance )
If someone wants to call it a "maintenance account", So what? I was calling mine a "maintenance account" long before there were "Fleece Operators" and company held "maintenance accounts".

If you're an O/O and don't keep your business accounts seperate from your houshold accounts...You're a bad business man. (That's as nice a term as I could come up with)

 

I always keep 'em separate... I pay myself every week and the rest goes into the account.

 

if ya have 20 grand in the back account, you don't need to drive any more, get a boring job at the factory for 8 hours a days and be home every day and let your neighbors drive you crazey

 

Ok, so I'm home for the evening and thought I might as well update this. The Fort Lauderdale load fell through, so I wound up going to Jacksonville instead with a load of frozen lobster... I don't know the total to me on that load yet, but it's in the $1.90/mile range.

Got into Jacksonville last Friday afternoon on time, and was very quickly told that the good news was they had a reload for me about an hour away in Live Oak. The bad news was it didn't load until Monday morning. No problem, figure I'l just enjoy the downtime, maybe see some sights.

Unfortunately, my A/C clutch gave up near Baldwin. The T/A there may appear really run down and crappy, but they understand the meaning of customer service. The replacement A/C clutch was $153, and the install was 1 hour. Total $277.47. Coulda been a LOT worse.

Monday, reloaded with bulk sweet potatoes loaded on the floor. I hate those because if they don't load you right, there's usually no chance of getting your axle weights right. My gross weight was only 72,480, but to get my drives legal I had to slide the tandems to the very front.

I dropped that load in the yard because it doesn't deliver 20 miles away until the 21st, so they found me another load heading out tomorrow morning for Sacramento, PA, to deliver Saturday morning. It's only spuds, but that's usually around $1.50 or so per mile. After that, I have no idea, but I'm not supposed to be home until Thursday. We'll see.....

To the folks commenting about my maintenace account or lack thereof, I was in the process of building it nicely when I had the killer combo of a very slack month (my own fault, took too much time off on vacation) and about $4k in repairs. When I say the account is tapped, I mean it's quite a bit lower than where I want it right now.

 

You can pick up and deliver in the US?

I cannot pick up and deliver in Canada.

 

Of course. We take a load from Canada to the US, reload in the US, and head back to Canada.

So when you take a load to Canada, you have to run empty back to the US? That doesn't sound right...