Taking the plunge. My journey as an O/O.

I was doing decently well until the lovely engine rebuild + 33 days stuck in a hotel at the end of last year.

When I bought the truck I had 20k cash in the bank, and no outstanding debt.

As of today I have about 10k cash in the bank and the truck is about half paid off.

So. Over a 1 year time frame I am down in cash on hand.

In the last year I have had an engine rebuild, several engine leakfixes, a clutch replacement, and bought a full set of drives and a pair of steers. I have also had two oil changes in the transmission and both differentials because I had that work done before 500k miles, and was required to do it again after the aftermarket warranty went live. A full set of batteries, a new inverter, and a decent chunk of money to have the inverter circuit de-tarded so the power to the inverters can actually be disconnected manually. Oil change, filters, lube, etc every @20k miles. New cab marker lights above the windshield, and a new windshield.

Lots of other little things too.

A lot of these things are artifacts of how Crete deferred on interval maintenance when it was a company truck.

What's even better is that I haven't been home since February, so I haven't even seen my tax returns yet, though I got most of my money back due to expenses and perdiem.

My guesstimate is that I made about 20k less last year as an o/o than I did the year before as a company driver. Most of that is explained by an engine rebuild and the associated hotel stay.

The numbers seem to indicate that if I had bought a new truck, I would have made more money.

I need to look at what the payoff is on the truck currently. After the leak fixes a few months back and the new clutch last month, the maintenance account is not going to be very robust right now.

Once the truck payment goes away, income should improve. The maintenance costs for the last 1.5 years has been enormous, and will hopefully be very abnormal moving forward.

 

I didn't create this thread to toot my own horn .

That said, for a first year in business, I don't think I did too badly.

That Q4 2019 was a real ##### though.

 

I definitely do not plan on staying with the current business model forever.

After putting so much money into the truck, jumping out of it would be foolish unless something extremely expensive comes up.

Even if I lose the transmission, the Eaton 10 speed manual is pretty cheap to repair, I have heard.

What that means is that rather than selling the truck after paying it off, I will be looking to change out the fixed position 5th wheel with an adjustable one, and having an APU installed.

At some point I will need to get Hazmat certs so I can lease my truck to Landstar.

Crete is a better starting point for o/o's than most from what I have seen, but they are not the long term plan.