New Driver with own authority

I’m pretty sure that $10k per week is gross , before truck payment and maintainence and insurance and fuel and setting aside some money to replace the current truck when it’s worn out .

Probabaly have about $2,500 a week left over as profit , if that .

I had never driven a truck, I got my CDL and bought a used truck and leased it with a small carrier that had their own trailers and freight , and no company drivers .

I did alright , but I’m a decent shade tree mechanic and could fix the small stuff ,
But you also have to be business minded , it’s all about the profit .

I was young , 23, and desperate to earn some decent money .
Which I was able to do , by working 89 hours a week , getting paid $1.20 a mile and fuel was 99 cents a gallon and a decent used tractor was $15-20k


Borrowing and spending a bunch of money Jumping into a business you know absolutely nothing about , is really dumb.

would you spend the same money buying or starting a Restaraunt ? Or a nail salon?
Or a used car dealer? A HVAC service business ?
Or a small apartment building ?

no?

why not ?
You know as much about those businesses as you do about trucking .

trucking is easy to get into but it’s very very risky.
You borrow or spend $75-100k for a rig , and $2000 a month for insurance , run three weeks or three months and blow an engine , that will cost $25-30k to replace , and you’re truck is in the shop for 6-10 weeks with zero income , but you still gotta make those monthly payments on the truck and insurance .

Spending $75-100k jumping into a business you know nothing about is very very risky

I did alright because I stumbled over a carrier that was growing and had tons of freight and needed drivers who owned their own tractors, and the carrier actually had a plan to help the drivers get a truck and get into the business and be successful at it

That company is out of business now .
And to my knowledge there are no companies that have any honesty , they all want to cheat the drivers out of every nickel they can.

 

10,000 is gross but last week we grossed 15 net 11,000. We own the company. We do pay ourself not much and not every week. But the money goes into our business account because if our truck breaks down or saving to buy a newer truck or buy equipment. It’s a very costly business but you can also make a lot of money.

 

Some people have an inheritance, some people have two incomes and they save every penny, some people still have their lunch money from when they were 12, some people take a mortgage out on their home, some people hit the lottery, who knows?

There is no secret. Everyone's situation is different.

Just because you see a shiny truck going down the road doesn't mean next week the owner of that truck isn't going through bankruptcy. You have no idea how many owner-operators put 5% down on a truck and a trailer and pay ginormous amounts of money in insurance and payments just to end up going broke.

This industry has a 90 to 95% failure rate and there's a reason for it.

I'm not sure where you're coming up with the figure having hundreds of thousands of dollars because there are plenty of owner-operators out there that literally have to get an advance on the load they're moving today so that they can pay the bills from last week and hope they can hold off the bills coming next week while they pray their truck holds together.

And there are plenty of people that have good jobs that make more than owner operators make. Being an owner operator is not about money or wealth whatsoever. If that's what you think you need to think again.

The people that succeed have enough money to continue. Most of the people that are owner operators including myself will tell you it cost a hell of a lot more than they probably initially thought that it would.

They succeed because they have enough money behind them and enough experience that they know what the hell they're doing.

If you have enough money you won't fail, you'll just blew through half a million dollars or whatever it is.

But the less experience you have the more money you need because lack of experience will always always always cost you more money.

Here's a quick story. I used to work for this company that the owner was worth probably hundreds of millions of dollars. His kids wanted to go into the trucking business.

So off they go, five brand new Mack trucks all the money in the world let's go to work and get rich!

I got to talking with them one day and we were discussing Trucking in general and I realized they had absolutely no idea what the hell they were talking about or what they were doing.

After five years they sold the trucks, declared a loss, and went back to work for their father.

This is a dangerous business because it looks deceptively simple. There are so many factors that go into this business and every one of them is variable and every one of them is different for each individual person and it is Multiplied over all of the different aspects of this business.

It's about as simple as someone that says wow I'm going to meet a beautiful girl and we'll live on love and ride off into the sunset together. Boy Meets Girl. It's nature. How complicated can that be?

 

Just so that you know, recently this industry has been having the highest rates ever because of covid.

THAT IS ONLY BECAUSE OF COVID. THIS IS TEMPORARY!!!

Those rates are not going to last. So right now get the idea of making that amount of money out of your head. It's not going to happen and it's not going to last and it's not something you can't count on or look forward to.

This right here right now is exactly the problem because just like you are looking it like that there are a whole bunch of other guys looking at it that way financing a whole bunch of equipment thinking they're going to get rich.

When the rates crash all they're going to do is go broke. And ironically they are going to be the ones to drive the rates down so no one is going to be able to make any money.

The rates are already starting to fluctuate and believe me they will go down and whatever you pay for a truck in a year from now it's going to be worth half of it and whatever you pay for a trailer a year from now it's going to be worth half of it. And the worse it gets the less it will be worth.

And that amount of money will drop to $5,000 a week or $4,000 or $2,000 a week or whatever it's going to drop down to. And I'm sure that's working 80 plus hours a week. And that is also the gross number not the net.

Yes it is still a good amount of money but this is temporary. There is almost no limit to how low it can go when it happens.

And by the way while you're dreaming about getting rich, take a minute to look at what an engine rebuild cost, a new transmission cost, a set of rears cost, and what emission related problems cost, and what computer problems cost. Figure how much money you need when your truck breaks down for 3 weeks and you have no money coming in but you have big bills coming in. And then figure working for a few weeks and that happening again and you having say a 20 or $30,000 expense. And give a call to the insurance agent and find out what insurance will cost you because with zero experience you might be looking at thirty or forty thousand or more a year. Yes there are people that get quotes of that kind of money.

In the meantime fuell has gone up, inflation is going up, the cost of maintaining a truck is going up insurance is going up- this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. All of these costs are continuing to rise and the rates are going to crash.

What you SHOULD be looking at is how small of an amount of money can you make and still survive. That's how an intelligent business person looks at this.

I'm not knocking you at all and if this is what you want to do you can. But you have to look at this with an incredibly level head and realize that when times get bad it's going to be bad.

And right now is a completely temporary condition that is not going to last and you cannot make any gigantic Capital Investments based on what is happening right now currently at this moment because you will lose.

You have to look at the overall big picture of this, and be prepared for it.

 

What trucking companies are requiring a worthless vaccine?

If you have experience and can drive a 10 speed, ill give you $2000 a week OTR plus bonus.

 

Sadly, most of those who say here, on a forum like this, how they can piss higher than they can see, especially in times of elevated freight rates , they show up out of the blue and then after a few months of misery, just as quickly disappear...and most likely all the money they were making too.
It would be better if everyone saw how the good times turn bad too to have a complete picture.
On the other hand, only few would admit how much they get paid to haul dog food when the national dry van average is 1.78 per mile.

 

@mkbrower I would not be surprised that at some point, the vaccine can be also mandated for interstate commerce via DOT medical or even CDL renewal. The ruling party is capable of that. If they can't do it from the top, then it can happen from the bottom as some places - shippers/receivers may decide to require vaccination to enter their premises. That's my speculation, but I've seen enough already not to believe it as possible.

 

Your own authority?

#### the 2022 truck.

Go get a 2001 for 50k, Garmin eld, no emissions break downs, and yeah, they break all the time. Bye bye truck payment, and put your repairs at 2000 a month.

 

I think maybe you should look into an outfit that pulls rv’s to start with. That’ll give you a way to determine if this is the type of work you really want to do, lower entry cost but like everything else in transportation right now you should be able to make some decent money. Plus you’ll be leasing on to a company before you shell out thousands of dollars to get started with your own numbers and then realize that it was a mistake to do so.