Advice to new owner/operator

[Waterloo]

JimT,

I am not a lease purchase operator, I paid cash for my truck in 2013, $65,000 at the time, set up for hauling propane, pump and lift axle included... Quite the deal at the time, did I say I paid cash? Oil field work, North Dakota, did four years up there and made bank.

And then reality hit, another screw up, wound up paying $38,000 cash for the first in frame about a year into truck purchase, done at a stealership that I thought I could trust only for them to royally screw it up. and then another one $20,000 + fixing all the screw-ups only 80,000 miles later, the following one in Rawze's driveway. I discovered that folks sell trucks when they are toast, I did not know about EPA trucks back then, I figured I had at least 300,000 more before the first in frame... Boy, was I wrong.

more than $50,000 in repairs alone on a truck that is not worth $30k at this point. I had overall more than $110k++ invested now into a bottomless pit that had half a year of down-time on it to boot that I had to try to climb back out of.

Some of it was because of the torture/neglect of emissions trucks by original owners that get sold and I bought into not knowing any better, but much of it was my belief that there could be trust in the dealership OEM side of repairs .. Boy was I mistaken, My eyes are open now though .. you gotta do everything yourself, even your own in-frames in a friends driveways if need be, if you want it to be done right and not to bankrupt you.
-- (my story): http://rawze.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=2972


Been in this racket for over 30 years... You would think I would know better... ;-) Personally I believe myself to be as dumb as a box of rocks for sticking around this long... I am sure others will agree.

To your point, "Rich Truck Driver, Poor Truck Driver" I will not play games ... I'm debt free, and I could not survive on the shi#t Landstar was handing me... At the end of the week the bottom line was this, I got to keep roughly 30% +/- of the gross... THIRTY f$%k/ING PERCENT! Sorry...

The shiny trucks... Take a look at the Landstar fleet... I was there in 1991 when they went public... Sorry, times have changed, and there is nothing there to write home about.

Landstar is a BILLION dollar outfit, and they got there on the backs of their drivers. Excuse me, their BCO's.

I never found the value in the company, it was never there in my book, and I tried to make it work... After their pound of flesh was ripped out of me, there was no reason to stay. I will happily be moving on...