The O/O Lifestyle

I wanted to put a post up for maybe those people who wonder what the difference is between an owner operator and a company driver. Disclaimer, this isn't to brag about how much money I made, or how one way is better than the other, but just my experience in the last couple weeks and how I handled the winter weather.

I started at home in Chicago, and I saw that the weather was going to go from 30 to below 0 for weeks, so I decided to book a load to Texas. I found a load going to Dallas and one right after going to corpus christi. Corpus is right on the gulf, and I figure id rather be there than in 0 degree weather.

I delivered the loads, and stayed in corpus for a couple days cause I didn't want to go back to Chicago and it was still cold in the rest of the country. One day I woke up and it was forecasted to snow at the beach, so that was a big red flag, so I dead headed myself to Laredo and found a load to ocala Florida.

Got in front of the storm and made it to ocala, stayed there for a couple of days. Still cold in the rest of the country, so I drove up to the middle of Georgia kinda looking for loads, but not really looking that hard because that's when the weather really went crazy, but was kind of thawing out.

One morning I woke up at 3am and saw that there was a load going to Dallas that was paying about twice as much as it should be so I called the broker and grabbed the load. From Georgia to Dallas you had to go through i20 and there were shut downs and ice everywhere so I went around to Memphis, which was a 2 hour detour but looked a lot safer, plus I had time on the load.

Lastly, on the way to Dallas, I found a load going back up to Chicago, but it wasn't paying hardly anything, but I called the broker and ended up getting a better, but still cheaper than I wanted to get back home now that the weather is more humane than it was.

Did I make a whole ton of money?, no especially from all the sitting. But I don't drive through any snow and I went to places where I generally wanted to go.

That being said, I'm going home because I have to finalize my taxes with my cpa that I paid $800 to do my taxes this year, and also to renew my plates, which costs $1600. All those expenses I have to pay.

If you're in this for the money, stay company. If you want to put up with a lot of crap to have a little more freedom and you can save money then maybe you can consider being an owner.

Cheers and stay safe!

I was out there in the cold and had a bunch of problems with airleaks from our rubber lines, you did the smart thing and routed yourself around headaches.

I always thought I would one day want to be a O/O but I decided I like to keep money in my pocket, seeing all of those out of pocket expenses would make me cry.