How long to get a grasp of income?

Well then your original post is very disturbing. I hope you find a company that will respect you like you dederve. Good luck. Hope all works out.

 

You can drive about 120,000 miles a year. So 120,000x pay per mile.

 

That does not add up unless you are getting #### for miles.. At 1 month insurance deductions havent kicked in.. Per diem? What do you mean lumpers affect gross.. Not if you are a company driver. Lumper fee in lumper fee out is a wash.. Maybe the title should be I am getting #### for miles and also I didnt account for paying federal income tax? Wtf

 

It's hard to make $1,300 every week unless you got a nice dedicated run or some pay guarantee or a really high pay per mile

 

If you are with a company with plenty loads/miles $1300 is easy at 40CPM. That was on the low end for me when I was with Abilene. Stuff like NE mileage bonus, extra stop and detention pay also adds up.

 

The first 3 weeks are not a good indicator. I think I only averaged 350 miles a day my first couple of weeks. Then I got better at trip planning, my hard skills (backing, coupling, etc) took less time, and I started running smart. Pay checks started going up.

Take your time, don't stress about the paychecks for the first 90 days. At that point , reasses.

 

Here's the thing, you have about a month into this career, STARTING AT THE WORST POSSIBLE TIME. I am going to assume, unless you correct me, that you are pulling a dry van. That means you are pulling general freight that is heavily dependent on the retail industry.

The first quarter of the year is always slow. Retail makes 50% of their sales in the fourth quarter. That means BTS (Back To School), Fall, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Holiday sales will start ramping up for trucking as goods start clearing ports of entry in May.

If you are at $0.45 a mile and managed to get $1300 gross pay I would say you are doing well AT THIS TIME OF YEAR. Expect some weeks to be worse than others. Be ready to go balls to the wall when freight heats up. Be ready to survive through the skinny times.

In 2013 I started with Swift at $0.25 a mile. Pitiful right? I made a tad less than $40K gross that first year, as a solo driver. Then moved to a team dedicated fleet that increased pay to $55K. After that I became a trainer and earned about $72K gross. By the time I departed Swift I think I was at $0.38 a mile IIRC.

My advice to you is to hang in there. If you are running OTR for all 48 states, try finding out WHERE freight is hot. At Swift many of the terminals had "bubble maps", a flat screen monitor on the wall with either green bubbles (more freight than trucks) or red bubbles (more trucks than freight). The bigger the bubble the greater the disparity. I paid attention to those maps. Often I had choices about which load I could take and I always chose to go wherever the big green bubbles covered the map.

Another way to game the system, if for example you are stuck with short hauls in a dead zone, is to request home time in a zip code all the way across the country. Once you get that long haul headed to "home time" cancel home time. Now you are under a long load, hopefully headed to lots of available freight, and more work than you can shake a stick at.

 

Your working as a company driver?

Pay outs you make for lumper and other expenses for the company will show up on your settlement. These should show, as both pay out and reimbursement so they zero out. These should also be on separate line items, showing both the expense and reimbursement. Should have no effect on your taxable amount. This is done for accounting reasons. The company needs to track by who and where the money went.

Looks odd, no doubt. Never liked the system. Gets convoluted when a lot of transactions take place.
A reason to start tracking your runs, rates and expenses.

 

Truckers usually start out with lousy because they don't know any better. I made 57,000 my first year and didn't run all that hard. I went HAZMAT tanker.

Google average pay for dry van driver, then for flat bed, and then HAZMAT tanker. That's how I figured where I wanted to start. Do the minimum and you'll be given the minimum, especially starting out. Get some endorsements and handle some freight, and you'll be paid for it if you're with a good company. Pull and dry van trying to have no touch freight, and you'll be among thousands of average beginners want the same deal and be given a lower wage. You'll work into higher pay as the years pass, and if that's what you want to do, it's ok to do it that way. However, there are options to increase your pay starting out in trucking.