Leasing from Swift - Advantages and Disadvantages. CURRENT L/O'S ONLY PLEASE

It's good info for anyone thinking about leasing, most don't ask the question you did, and jump in both feet.

OK we talked about the truck costing $100 bucks a day overhead. I wanted to show how to arrive at a total daily or weekly or monthly mileage goal to cover all expenses (you may already know, but maybe someone could learn from this).

So the driver should add up all their bills at home-- mortgage, rent, car payment, insurance, water, sewer, garbage, phone, utilities, food-- everything they pay out for the month. There is a formula to break all this down into a weekly overhead expense or even daily so one could decide if the mileage needed to cover everything is enough realistically before signing and finding out later that the revenue produced by the truck is not enough.

There are 365.25 days in the year (every 4th year is a day longer), divide that by 12 months to arrive at 30.4 days in the month, divide that by 7 days in the week to arrive at 4.34 weeks every month on average.

So I take all my bills added up for the month that I have to pay, including truck overhead, and divide by 4.34 to arrive at a $dollar amount that I need to earn every week to eat and pay bills. I can further divide that number by 7 to know how many dollars per day I need to be earning.

500 miles in a day at $1.39 earns $695 bucks minus fuel, guessing 7 mpg comes out to $410 grossed for the day. So if the driver's total bills works out to $200 bucks a day, he's doing OK with 500 miles per day. But remember there are a lot of forces that prevent producing 500 miles a day, day in and day out-- bad freight areas, storms, hometime, 34 to 64 hour breaks etc.

A company driver moving up to lease really needs to be thinking like a businessperson to be successful. Crunch lots of numbers with your calculator, talk to owner operators about their revenue. $700 bucks a day is insulting and embarrassing to a lot of owner ops. It pays the bills, and puts food in the tummy but does not leave any left over to replace the equipment which will breakdown eventually.