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

It's just a simple EIN number. Can you even form a LLC without a EIN?

 

I don’t even know how you pay a 2290 without one

 

EIN is also needed when you choose to file taxes as an S-corporation. The purpose of S- corp is to have ability to do your own payroll and opportunity to save on taxes. You can elect S- Corp regardless of whether your business entity is a corporation or LLC.
The saving formula consists in splitting your business income into payroll portion and dividend portion. The smaller the payroll portion, the lesser taxes. However, payroll must be reasonably high, commensurate to the industry standards.
For example, if your one truck business operation generates net income of $100 000 on 100 000 miles (let's say from $210 000 gross revenue) then you have to pay yourself for the workload of 100 000 miles. You choose to decide what the reasonable is but IRS may or may not disagree later, during an audit. I'd say that, in this example, paying yourself more than $60 000 is very reasonable but $20 000 is asking for trouble from IRS.
Asset and liability separation is meaningless for the purpose of providing protection against legal risks, if you are the only person who performs all the business duties. It does protect your personal assets and liabilities when the harm is done by not you but someone else in your buisness e.g. partnered, associated or hired (driver, dispatcher, receptionist).
I think that when it is said that an owner operator runs his truck as business it also means to separate personal aspects from business on the financial and legal level. So forming LLC or corporation is the right move imo. It creates a good legal foundation and perspective in case you want to expand in size or grow and evolve in operations.

 

@TallJoe gave you some good advice. Don't forget that you can still take per diem off of the $60,000. Instead of figuring cents per mile you can do it the old way of $60 something a day.