Comments By Bush Country

Travis -

Where is the job located?

Schlumberger, or as they are changing the name, “SLB” is the world’s largest oilfield service company. I’ve not worked for them, but I have worked for other service companies and been in the business for over 40 years.

The advantages I see for the job for a driver are – hourly pay, time off, and full benefits (health, dental, & vision insurance, 401k, etc). There’s also room for promotion – normally a bulk truck driver would move up to cement pump operator, and from that to cementer (service supervisor). For housing, they will probably put you up in a man camp – I’d ask about that to be sure. I’m surprised that SLB is paying for flights for operators, so get that in writing. You will travel on your time, which makes that 6 days off more like 4 depending on your travel schedule.

The hours for your two weeks on duty are long. You will be out in the weather no matter what it is. I work on the frac side, and the only thing we shut down for is lightning since we have so much electronic equipment on location. You will also eventually work every day of the year. Drilling rigs, which you will be delivering to, generally don’t shut down for holidays.

Other companies that should have positions like this are Halliburton, BJ Services, and Nextier. Plus there’s some smaller companies, but I’m not sure which of them are in the cementing side.

There are other driving jobs. Hauling frac sand, fuel delivery, rig moving (specialized trucks for this), hauling drill pipe & casing, and so on. I don’t recommend hauling sand – it’s done by a lot of small companies as third-party contractors, and I suspect that a lot of them are 1099 companies. Fuel delivery, on the other hand, I’ve had every driver I’ve asked say that it is the best driving job they’ve had.

Not to be pedantic, but it is cement, not concrete. Concrete has aggregate in it and is used in construction. Cement is what holds the aggregate together. Oil field cementing does not use aggregate.

Hopes this helps!

This is a photo of a ticket for fuel on the well site I am currently working on. We usually get four loads a day, so we are spending about $100k a day just for fuel. I am not sure how much it is marked up but it is the best I could come up with for the wholesale price of diesel. The dyed diesel is used in our frac pumps and is untaxed. The tax shown is on the clear diesel. We are getting this from a refinery in Big Spring, Texas which is only about 15 miles away. For comparison, the TA at Big Spring is selling diesel for $5.49 a gallon.

Me: " For instance, the S&P 500 has averaged a 10.67% return from 1957 to the end of 2021. That is the 50 year average. "

Dang it. That's 64 years, not 50. I need an embarrassed emoji.

For the record, the S&P 500 actually has 505 stocks in it. The index that became the 500 originally started in 1926 with 90 stocks, and has also returned an average of a little over 10% since then.

Bush Country I appreciate it like I was saying to read the Mustache King cause I'd do a bad bad job of explaining those. if its alright I'd like to run my whole understanding by you though to make sure I've got it square since after all it's about my future. lol

Interest is the wrong term I see that now but the logic behind it was that since me and him are both youngins we could reasonably figure the return on investment would be closer to 10% since we're talking about the stock market as a whole over a few decades, that's why I say average cause its just an example for talking general. now what I mean by interest even if it's not the right term is just the pay off, twenty years down the road with the example numbers I'm giving at 10% you could start taking out the dividend the index fund pays towards that $64k each year and the rest of it set to automatically withdraw into your account, there would be less shares cause you sold some but over a few years the amount the rest will grow back could keep resetting you back to where you were when you started taking money back out. yeah this will all depend on what the stock market is doing at that time but give it a few years and it tends to keep going back up, also why you wanna set an amount higher than what you will live on and also why you take from the index funds before touching the 401k. sorry if I cant explain it better than that but that's kinda the way it goes if I was reading him right? thanks man

Danny K., to be clear, your thought process is correct. I chimed in to hopefully provide some clarity in terminology and the difference in earning interest and market returns. For the sake of discussion, you can use interest = return on investments. As long as you understand the underlying difference – that you are not going to get that 10% every year.

To give a personal example, I calculate my net worth at the end of every quarter. Our investments fell 18.84% between December 31, 2019 and March 31, 2020. That was when Covid hit. It has since come back, although I’m not looking forward to the calculation that I’ll do two days from now.

The point being you have to make allowances for things like that. As you said “yeah this will all depend on what the stock market is doing at that time but give it a few years and it tends to keep going back up”. That is spot on. It’s also the reason you cannot automatically withdraw 10% every year. Because there are some years in there that the market is going to be down over 30%. You can count on it. After significant drops, the market usually comes back fairly quickly. But there have been times that it took six or seven years to get back to where it was previously. The general rule of thumb is the “4% Rule”. This says that, over the course of a 35-year retirement, you should be able to withdraw 4% from your investments and never run out of money. Do a web search for that for a more in-depth explanation.

Here's the link to where I got my information on historic returns:

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average-annual-return-sp-500.asp

Thanks Bush Country - that was well said!

Some of the comments about "interest" were misleading and confusing.

Thank you OS.

Just trying to contribute to the "educate" part of this web site. I may not have much to say about trucking, but I've been investing for almost 40 years. Believe it or not, that response was edited for brevity!

The best advice I can give is to be a Mustachian. see there's this guy Mr. Money Mustache who does a bunch of free advice on his blog about early retirement. the jist of it all is you get yourself in the habit of spending less then you make and you start putting a chunk of that extra money in index funds. I'd do a crappy job of explaining those but search for what he has to say about it. one of the safest ways to invest over the longterm and get good returns and if you start now when you're this young you'll be sitting pretty down the road. I'm putting 10k in at the end of my first year and plan on doing that again each year, maybe 20k if I can start to swing it. so now if your averaging 10% return on investment per year which is how the index funds go and I keep on putting 10k in each year, in 20 years that's $430,000 interest earned. now at that point you got $640k total and if you stop putting money in then you still average $64k interest each year, that's most people's whole salary, but it's free money each year, sacrifices in the short term pay off big in the long run.

I've read some of Mr. Money Mustache as well as some others in the FIRE movement. I also follow the Minimalists. I agree with them both and, in my opinion, people would be much better off financially and emotionally if they could learn to distinguish the difference between wants and needs.

I'm in complete agreement with your method of consistent investing, and index funds are the best way to go for people that don't have the time or interest in spending a lot of effort on investment education & research.

There is a difference between interest earned and average rate of return in the stock market. The statement above, "....you still average $64k interest each year..." is incorrect. It is an average investment return, not interest paid, and to realize that money, one would have to sell part of the asset (index mutual fund).

An investor earns interest on interest bearing cash deposits, like a savings account or certificates of deposit. The initial deposit (principal) is essentially not at risk, and once the interest is paid, it doesn't go away either.

One is NOT earning interest if invested in a stock market index fund. Both the initial investment and any reinvested returns are constantly at risk in the market. For instance, the S&P 500 has averaged a 10.67% return from 1957 to the end of 2021. That is the 50 year average. Between October 2007 and March 2009, the S&P 500, and thus, an S&P 500 Index Fund, fell by 46%. So a $500,000 account in October '07 was worth about $270,000 by March '09. But then a 10 year bull run started and if one had $500,000 in the fund at that point, by the end of 2019 it would have been worth around $1,250,000! The S&P took a 20% hit in 2020 with the C-19 panic ($500k became $400k !).

Mutual funds, whether indexed to something like the S&P 500, or not, lessen an investor's risk. Investing in individual stocks can yield both better returns, as well as higher losses. I've had stocks I made a lot of money on. I've also had stocks that I lost my entire investment!

Frack sand was (is) hauled this way big time as well. There was an outfit trying to break into frack sand using what seemed to be similar to 20' intermodal containers, my brother was talking about that a lot in the last couple of years that he was doing oil field pneumatic hauling. Seemed to be a more efficient method. No real extensive driver down time to load or unload - like picking up a railyard load - the box gets dropped on your chassis and you haul it to the site where they lift it off and give you an empty to haul back.

Frac sand is still hauled in pneumatic trailers as well as the boxes. The boxes are about 10 ft long and 8 ft wide and hold an average of about 42k lbs. The one in the picture is the provider I am currently using on a five well pad in the Permian Basin. Yes, the name of the company is "Sand Box". There are others using this method as well, with slight variations (due to patents) in how they work and capacity. In addition to the pneumatic and boxes, the third method is hauling sand in belly dumps. I immensely prefer the boxes. They produce a lot less dust than pneumatic transfer, and, as Mr. Curmudgeon mentions, there is little downtime to get them offloaded on location. It is done with a (really big) forklift in less than 5 minutes.

Davy, I recently read a comment that there are only 30 to 40 regular contributors here on TT. That negatively amazes me. I’ve recommended this site to dozens of drivers and I don’t know of even one who has become a contributor. It’s very frustrating to me because I’ve learned so much here. It is so valuable to have a place to ask questions and get solid advice and information. I guess much of the general driver population is stubborn and anti/progressive. I want to help other drivers but it seems rare to find anybody who wants continuing education. Human nature is a confusing thing.

Lots more people read things here than those that join, while some do join and never post anything.

Even though I drove for only a short time last year, I still read the threads on here. I often have an opinion but I don't comment because I'm not a driver. Kind of like not wearing my Harley Davidson T-shirts after I sold my bike.

So one opinion I have is that everyone considering a driving career should have a month or so of required reading on here. Especially some of the training diaries such as Davy's epic one. Because of that, I had zero surprises when I went to Knight's school last summer.

Y'all are doing the industry a service by having this web site. I wish that more people would use it.

James,

I don't even have my CDL yet so I highly doubt they'll give me that route. :) Further, I've heard that knight won't hire people that have over a year of being unemployed in the past 3 years, so they wouldn't hire me anyway.

Perhaps it's something I will shoot for in the future. (I'm in California, by the way.)

If you are interested in Knight, talk to a recruiter (I am not one). If they say no, you haven't lost anything. I was unemployed from March 2020 until June 2021 and they hired me.

To anyone watching this thread:

I failed my permit test miserably! i spent 3 hrs trying to get my paperwork in order while dealing with surly DPS bureaucrats. when I got to the testing area, i was all frazzled having been there as long as i had wearing 2 masks and dealing with no less than 6 different people trying to get tested.

I sit down and the first 7-8 questions look nothing like what I have studied so far across three different testing platforms and multiple youtube videos.

I dragged my ass out of there with feeling pretty frustrated, but I will be back!

Have you been back to re-test? If not -

Be sure to download the Texas Commercial Motor Vehicle Drivers Handbook from the DPS. There is an additional chapter (Section 14) that is specific to the Texas test. It is the first section of the test given, and you have to pass it to continue to the other sections. If you did all of your studying for the permit online, even the High Road program, you will not have seen this information.

I failed my written permit test the first time I took it because of this section. I saw it and read it but didn't really study it. Live and learn as they say.