Looking For Advice From Experienced Drivers

Be patient young man. It's good to know what you what to do. The problem is your age. Insurance companies run the industry and most require you be at least 21& older. If possible while you are waiting you might be able to get into yard jockeying it will help you gain some skills. Some others may add more to your questions. I hope all the best for you and stay encouraged.

 

You learn trucking as a company driver driving whatever they give you or more exactly tell you what you will be driving.

When you learned enough of this industry and still have that dream of a pete you can buy your first pete as a company owner. You will in time with luck and fortune have a thousand petes.

You might discover you have a thousand drivers to hire and cannot find any that shared your love of those things.

What you are too young to understand perhaps is that all dreams are just that. At some point the sunrise must be here. If it motivates you to pursue it? Great. Go learn how to be a trucker, then learn the freight and taxes plus authority, insurance, permits and a thousand other evils that go with it. And go buy your first pete with the money.

Ive had a hundred different trucks. Most of them I don't give a second thought, particularly the ####ty 10 speeds. But there are however a few good trucks out of that lifetime pile of them that I will have learned to love because it will get you there. Wherever it might be. And there are not too many of those.

Dreams are good. Sometimes they die hard and when it does, I hope you have learned to love yourself enough to live through the fallout of such a failed dream and learn to do something else in life. Things change. And will always do.

 

You're 18, so it's next to impossible to insure you.
At 18, you won't be allowed to cross your state line.
Which state do you live in?
Some companies will hire 18 year old cdl drivers, but you can't leave the state.
www.OOIDA.com is a business website for the owner-operator; study it.

 

Unless you get lucky and get hooked up with an intrastate job you'll have plenty of reading material on here.

Forget the O/O part for a while. Your insurance will be 25-30k on the LOW end for a greenhorn even with a spotless record.

Read the threads where company drivers go out and buy a truck. A lot of guys go very in depth with the #s

 

Unless you’re independently wealthy no bank is going to loan you the cash to buy a truck.

 

What part

 

You can't cross state lines till you're 21 it's Federal Law.
Insurance is another ball game.
You maybe able to get a job at a garbage truck company or like Coke or Pepsi distributor I would tell you to go to a beer distributor, but you're age might prohibit that. The reason for the beer distributor is because there usually smaller operations and they are less "corporate" and would probably give you a bit more of a shot I know it's not you're dream job, but it's a start and they'll let you move equipment and stuff out on the yard.

You're going to have to work somewhere first and that might be tricky because of there insurance. If you're 21 and over it's one thing, but 18 unless the place is self insured that might be dicey.

As far as freight and stuff, that's mostly all done through freight brokers so you would decided if you wanted to do dry van, refrigerated, flatbed, tank etc etc.
If you were going to be in the dry van world, Landstar would be my choice of companies to lease on to @Dave_in_AZ knows about them and he's a successful owner operator, but between learning to drive the truck and then the actual job and it's more then just driving down the road after a while the driving ends up being a bi-product so to speak. A big place like Landstar probably wants at least 21 and over and I'm sure has all kinds of requirements that you and you're truck would have to meet. Any big time place like Landstar, or Werner or Schneider those are big serious business that are in the freight moving business they don't play games they are there to move freight and they want to make a lot of money doing it and you play you're cards right you can make a good chunk of money there as well, but those are business and they have rules, operations and procedures.

Although the one exception is farm trucks at least here in Ohio farm trucks do not need CDL's and it seems like they let anyone drive one. I know this takes the fun out of it, but the actual truck you drive doesn't mean as much as if it's reliable and isn't killing you on maintenance. Like a 2010 Volvo with half a million miles on it that's been "fleet maintained" is going to be in the shop a lot, especially when the DEF system starts to go bad.

If I was you I would go down to the local beer distributor sign on as a helper and see if they will let you work you're way up to driver and then get some experience there and learn on there equipment and then if you want go to an OTR company and save some money and work you're way up the ladder that way.

I know James Austin company in Mars, PA was looking for an asset based owner operator to pull loads for them, they had a sign near there sign in sheet a while ago when I was there, that would I guess be like direct freight, but normally it's hard to get direct freight as a one man band, big shippers usually deal with big trucking companies and freight brokers.