Running with JCT

I can't answer this one since my orientation was before the new lease structure. Any recent JCT orientation guys on here?

In my case, I had the weekly payment and the # of weeks to payoff before making my selection. Since I was looking at it as a rental, I don't think that I even cared about the principal, but I had that number before I signed the lease.

 

The Tale of the Tape

Holy moley, as Larry the Cable Guy would say! Lake Havasu to Ripon, CA. Qualcomm says 509 miles. Mountainous terrain for a couple of hundred miles. A light, quartering headwind in the valley. ScanGauge says 7.9 MPG!


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That's at 74.5 thousands pounds too. I've been averaging 7.0-7.2 this summer, so I guess we really needed that valve job! Very encouraging to say the least.

I met TrukTuff last night at the LH Loves. We chatted for a couple of hours and I pointed his way to this thread. Good to see he made it, lol. There was a JCT T660 there, but I didn't see the driver. There was also one of our problematic ProStars there and when I saw it, I HAD to meet the driver. His was probably the first one that I've seen that had the original driver! He said that he got the truck with 40 miles on it and has one more year to go on the lease. The maintenance on these PornStars is the biggest complaint, and he confirmed that he had made it through a lot of trouble with that truck. He wasn't sure if he was going to stick with it and pay it off, or work out a deal with JCT to trade it in on a new truck. That's an option for some drivers who are upside down in their maintenance accounts.

That contrasts with a ProStar that I saw in Sapulpa that had an "M" after the number. That means that driver "M" is the 14th driver in that truck, lol. Now THAT's the guy I want to meet! I mean, he must be the most confident person on the planet!

The only thing that would have made this day better was if I had a preplan. JCT can get hot and give you plans for every load for a week or two, then they'll start missing and leaving drivers to guess where to head when empty. I usually get a plan within an hour of sending my empty call, but I sure do like preplans. If I was to guess, I would say that they'll deadhead me down to Salinas for a produce load. I'm ready to go long and go north; maybe Michigan? Guess I'll find out tomorrow.

My expected negative settlement info came in yesterday. I was better than I thought, leaving me only $118 in the hole. Next week, I'll get paid for Colton, CA to Ochelata, OK for about 1,425 miles, and a local run I made while I was in the area. That smells like another sub $500 payday. And, for you company drivers interested in this business, if I catch a monster trip, like a Salinas to Miami, FL with a couple of stops, it might miss the deadline next week to add on to this trip. Food for thought. Don't spend your last dime on a bus ticket to Sapulpa, lol. Of course, I have had 9 or 10 days off this month. But I expect to bang out close to 5k more miles by the end of the month. The quarterly safety bonus ($.02/mile) has a minimum of 30k miles to be eligible, and I'll make that easily.

I have to work some budgets out with some new, higher MPGs. Maybe I can buy a boat, lol!

 

Some of you new readers may not want to search through this thread, so I'll repost it. The new lease reduces the interest rate to 10%. The payment is $120/week plus $.18/mile for my 2012 Cascadia, or $.21/mile for a new Cascadia Evolution. The 2014's include the APU and I think that it's a great deal. The benefits of the new lease are lower payments when you take time off, and less going to interest.

These payments are in addition to insurance, maintenance, etc. There's a calculator on the JCT website http://johnchristner.com/?r=drivercareers&drv=whyjct that shows your estimated fixed costs.