Looking for advice from current owner operators.

What is your gross income now and what do you expect it to be if you are driving your own truck?

 

You have all the numbers to answer your own question to have a rough estimate of how much you can expect to make. With the numbers you provided it looks like you should expect to clear around $60k to $80k (not including truck payment or maintenance) depending on how many weeks you drive and what your fuel mileage is. A general rule of thumb for estimating profit (take home pay) for trucking is take your gross revenue and divide by two. This assumes half of what you make will be expense (including fuel). Another rough estimate is to divide by three to account for income tax. So gross revenue divided by three would be your approximate take home pay after income taxes. However, neither of these two estimates take equipment payments into account. So if you have a truck payment or other equipment payment to make then that will further decrease your earnings for as long as you have that payment.
There may be some resources of interest to you here. Check it out, the first two on the list are free downloads.
Sleepers are covered in 393.76

 

For an old truck I think many people use around 8 to 10 cents per mile for maintenance. I'd plan on around $10,000 to $15,000 per year for maintenance. It's better to budget for it and not use it and end up with unexpected profits then to not budget for it and come up short.

 

Save your money for a new engine!! We had 2 of those 3126 engines, sold one truck and scrapped the other. We got about 350,000 on the one we scrapped, driver got it hot and cracked the block.
No liners in this engine, so if you want to rebuild it has to be sleeved. Cummins 5.9 is the same, my mechanic calls them throw away engines, because you throw them away and get another one.

If you are the only one driving, just be real meticulous on your maintenance. We had 3 different drivers go through the truck we had, and I think that was the major problem.

I think you can get at least 500,000 miles out of it before it needs something major.

Look into the International trucks with the DT466, they have liners just like the big trucks and there are millions of them out there.

You can easily have this truck paid off in a year or less, then I would: #1 sell it #2 trade for Int'l or #3 put a driver in it while you run your new truck.

Good luck and have fun!!