Please Help Me With My Situation

Take your money to Vegas, odds are better.

 

I agree the story smells, I also happen to know with that degree he could be on the trading floors in Chicago or New York in no time.

 

Company FIRST. (No offense. But drive company FIRST.)

Learn the industry from the bottom up. You cannot make good ownership decisions on something that was preventable and expensive enough to put you completely out of the owner operator business.

Grow that 15k into 100K, then two and three hundred and so on. After a half mil which should be about 10 years or so if you make it that long, you will be more than ready to buy trucks free and clear.

And maybe through the grace of god dont kill yourself, lose your freedom, get badly injured disabled or run out of the industry scraping a news paper box trying to turn right in a city...

You want to be a OO from the beginning? HA. The moment that 15K is gone, something costing 20K will come up to fix now. If you cannot have or get capital, you are out of the business before you barely learned anything. Trucking fails all the time for a variety of very good reasons around the USA very quickly.

Generations of truckers tell you the fastest way to make a small fortune in trucking is to start spending 2 million dollars. Pretty soon in 6 months you will be down to your small fortune of 200K.

 

Sweet Jesus. They should have an entire class labeled 'if it sounds too good to be true it very nearly always is' in business school apparently. Your buddy has heard things second hand and all he needs is for you to pony up the money so that you guys can go make easy money in the trucking game.

Dude I get that you came here hoping we'd tell you it's a bed of roses and of course this is a good idea... but this is a really awful idea.

If you really want to get into the industry every 3PL in the country is hiring. You don't even have to claim to have a fake degree to get them to hire you. I didn't even graduate from college (I quit in the last semester to go to the brokerage job I got) and a few short years later I do quite well. Honestly though your level of gullibility probably makes you a pretty terrible fit for the role.

 

Sage advice has been handed to you by these drivers. I retired an o-4 from the army, I had decided to take the money I had saved and purchase a truck. 1 year later I was broke and in debt , ashamed to have failed. You will have expensive repairs, down time without pay, you will make rookie mistakes that could cost thousands, and sometimes you don't get paid and have to chase down that money for several months. Go, learn the ropes on someone else's dime.

 

That sounds high for a FedEx or Panther contract driver. Panther advertises heavily for drivers and contractors, and in my experience any company that spends a fortune on recruiting isn't a very good company to work for. Good companies don't need to pay for recruiting. Panther says on their own web site: "Because the company is owner operator based, the sky is the limit when it comes to earnings. And there are quite a few drivers that are grossing $100,000 or more per year." Translation, there aren't many drivers making that much, and it's a lot less than $10k a month. Notice they also say "grossing" $100k or more.

Here is a link to their recruiting page.

Panther Trucking Pay

Sounds to me like you have your answer. Don't blow your money on a venture with a partner that really doesn't know much about being an O/O.

 

Nick name stuck after a particularly raucous weekend in the French countryside. Drunken reasoning said it would be a hoot to make the French call me Mr. Jack Hole . Everytime they'd call out for me with that heavy French accented English, we would just out laughing and of course more drinking was required each time.

 

Just get a cdl privately and go work for a really good company and go from there. That is just plain and simple.

I have a BS in Psychology and 30 something hours on my Masters . I gave trucking a go and gave it 2 years as a company driver. Now I am fulfilling a goal of mine to start my own business. It has nothing to do with trucking.

I just hang around here for kicks now.