Several Questions About Becoming A Truck Driver.

You wonder why you can't easily get to $50k by years end? Many factors have to be looked at. Mainly Truck to load ratio. One week there might be 10 loads for every truck and the next week there might 200 loads available and 5000 trucks in that area. If you breakdown you can't turn miles that time. Traffic jams or wrecks causing major slow downs can effect your miles seriously if you are on a tight time schedule and miss you appointment and have to wait the next day to get unloaded and you miss the load you were going to pickup. Holidays can effect your miles. Most shippers/receivers do not work on the holidays so you may end up sitting for and extra day or so.

There are alot of factors that I have not even mentioned but you can get 3000 miles this week and the next only get 1800 miles the following week. The MAIN freight lanes are in certain areas and companies like to keep drivers in that area but if for some reason you have to leave those areas like for home time or a load delivers way outsides those lanes then it might take a trip or two of short runs to get you back to those areas and you have to do two or three 200 and 300 mile trips therefore cutting your miles for that week.

The only guarantee in trucking is that nothing is set in stone. Everything changes in trucking. Case in point. I do a dedicated for Georgia Pacific for JB Hunt. I go the same places every week. Week in and week out. This past week I took my brother with me as a passenger only. It rained everyday. We had a load cancel due to a road flooding and could not get to the GP plant. 5 days later we returned home with only 2400 miles for the week. I normally do 3000 miles every week. Not my fault as I can not control the weather but that is one of the thing that can happen out here.

Okay, since I think I inadvertently got a bunch of folks thinking they're gonna make 50k their first year, I'm going to try and jump in here. While I really do turn those kind of miles I am also staying away from home around five to six weeks at a time, not everybody can do that type of schedule. So when you are out there on the road and you've told your dispatcher that you need to be home on Aug. the 28th (or whatever it is) the week ahead of that scheduled home time your miles are going to drop off simply because they are trying to work out a plan of loads to get you to your destination. Then when you get home for a few days you are making no money during those days off. I'm taking about six days at home right now so I'm going to have a big zero on the following payday.

For most rookies I think you can consider 2300 - 2500 miles per week as doing pretty good. So, if your trying to calculate estimated pay I would use those figures. Every individual is different, and I brought a lot of life experiences into my rookie status with me that have helped me to jump right in here and make things happen. It takes a while to get accustomed to this lifestyle, and you're not the only one making those adjustments. You've got a family, or maybe a wife at home, and it is hard on those people when you are out of the picture. It's a compromise for everyone involved, and you have to do the best you can to balance a lot of things. That first year can really be a brutal awakening.

I was self employed for thirty years before doing this and have been accustomed to working long hard crazily erratic hours for all my life. My wife and children were quite accustomed to me being missing in action. So some of the things that cause rookies to burn out quickly or just make them want to go back to a regular job where they can sleep in their own bed and hold their own wife at night had already been overcome in my situation. There's a romantic appeal to being set free out on the open road with no boss looking over your shoulder that pulls a lot of people in to this industry, but there is also a long list of heart aches, broken homes, and destroyed marriages that testify to the difficulty of being an over the road truck driver.

I don't want to discourage anyone, but I do want you to look at this career honestly. I turn a lot of miles, but I'm being real honest with you when I say there are mornings when my alarm goes off at 3:30 in the morning and I just absolutely don't feel like driving the truck for 11 hours and maybe working an additional 3 or 4 hours on top of that with other duties that I'm responsible for. But, that's why I say my life experiences have helped me considerably make the adjustments necessary for this lifestyle. I was already living a similar lifestyle anyway.

That first year has a lot of stress in it, not only are you just trying to figure everything out, and learn your way with that big rig, you're also trying to adjust, as is your family, to being gone from home. This is why trucking companies are constantly sending people out to recover abandoned trucks. That's how I got assigned my truck, I had to go to Roanoke VA to get a truck that was left there by some new driver who just said "I quit", he even left all his clothes, food, trash, and gear in it. I had to clean the whole thing out before I could take possession.

This is a great career, but it is not for the faint of heart, and it is not going to make you rich. I think if you work hard, and are a fast learner then you might make $35,000 in that first year, but realistically you should expect about 30 - 32k. Don't let that burst your bubble though, it not only gets better after just a few years, it also gets easier. Time and exposure to the ins and outs of the business help you to be wiser and more efficient in the ways of a professional driver. I hope that helps clarify some of the confusion that I really didn't mean to get started.

I stay out weeks at a time, and I'm usually driving every day. I sometimes turn more than 3,000 miles, but sometimes depending on how my hours are unfolding I will take a 34 hour break to re-set my clock. That's another thing about managing your time that helps you to enjoy the places that you are at. Recently, I had to pick up some parking lot light poles in Brenham TX, which is twenty minutes away from where my two oldest daughters live. Well, if I took my 34 hour break that weekend it would let me run wide open all next week, so I did and got to spend the weekend with my daughters. That way it worked out great for me all the way around.

Old School, does our ability to do that change with the new FMCSA reset rules? I suppose I'll learn as I go on that, but it seems that forced reset after 7 days gives us less flexibility.

Thank you Old School. You did clarify a lot. And I know what it is like being gone for long periods. While it is not normal, I have been gone from home as much as 6 weeks. My usual away time is 3 to 7 days, home maybe one day then gone again. That is during our busy season. But yeah, I know the traveling business is hard on families too.

You talk about the "reset rule". I am not familiar with that. That is something that I have not heard of. I guess the motorcoach industry is not involved in that.

I stay out weeks at a time, and I'm usually driving every day. I sometimes turn more than 3,000 miles, but sometimes depending on how my hours are unfolding I will take a 34 hour break to re-set my clock. That's another thing about managing your time that helps you to enjoy the places that you are at. Recently, I had to pick up some parking lot light poles in Brenham TX, which is twenty minutes away from where my two oldest daughters live. Well, if I took my 34 hour break that weekend it would let me run wide open all next week, so I did and got to spend the weekend with my daughters. That way it worked out great for me all the way around.

Old School, does our ability to do that change with the new FMCSA reset rules? I suppose I'll learn as I go on that, but it seems that forced reset after 7 days gives us less flexibility.

Restarts have never been "forced". The restarts have always been an option for us to reset hours but have never been forced. There are many drivers out here,myself included, that have ran off our recaps for weeks on end and never have to do a restart.

Perhaps some of the experienced truckers can elaborate a bit more, but here's a couple observations:

PG brings up an interesting question. If you are turning 3000 miles in a week, how can you NOT be in the $50,000 dollar a year income bracket?

3000 miles per week X .34 cents per mile = $1020.00 X 50 weeks = $51,000 per year. Or 3000 miles per week X .34 cents per mile = $1020.00 X 52 weeks = $53,040 per year.

I wouldn't use 52 weeks in the calculation. You will have a few days off for various things, and you are likely to have hard stops like truck breakdowns or doctor's appointments. I think you'd be better off using 50 weeks or even 48 weeks for projection purposes.

As a new driver with the company I am going to, I'm starting at 29 CPM , 30 CPM after a few months, and I believe 32 CPM by the end of the year. If you are going to get 34 CPM as a new driver, that's pretty good. Check and make sure that is the rate out of the gate.

I really expect to get 2500 miles per week with this company starting out...and it's 70% drop and hook , so little in the way of loading/unloading delays. At least....that is what the recruiter said. :)

Perhaps some of the experienced truckers can elaborate a bit more, but here's a couple observations:

PG brings up an interesting question. If you are turning 3000 miles in a week, how can you NOT be in the $50,000 dollar a year income bracket?

3000 miles per week X .34 cents per mile = $1020.00 X 50 weeks = $51,000 per year. Or 3000 miles per week X .34 cents per mile = $1020.00 X 52 weeks = $53,040 per year.

I wouldn't use 52 weeks in the calculation. You will have a few days off for various things, and you are likely to have hard stops like truck breakdowns or doctor's appointments. I think you'd be better off using 50 weeks or even 48 weeks for projection purposes.

As a new driver with the company I am going to, I'm starting at 29 CPM , 30 CPM after a few months, and I believe 32 CPM by the end of the year. If you are going to get 34 CPM as a new driver, that's pretty good. Check and make sure that is the rate out of the gate.

I really expect to get 2500 miles per week with this company starting out...and it's 70% drop and hook , so little in the way of loading/unloading delays. At least....that is what the recruiter said. :)

Honestly because everything that goes on and all the learning you will have to do AND then doing a good job until your dispatcher can trust you to do on time deliveries,which can take a while, expect to make the first full year you are out here around $30k to 32K .

Because it can take a few years to get you job down where you can do it without thinking and there are pay adjustments don't expect until around your 3rd year to get close to the $40k to 45k range and that is IF you have stayed at one company long enough to start getting the good loads or worked yourself into a good position with your DM/FM.

Yeah Tracy, like Guyjax said, that reset is not "forced" it's something you can do to assist you with having more available hours. I'm not going to go into all the nuances of it here, because it just might make it confusing for new folks reading this, but while you are going through the High Road Training Program you'll find all the information you need about this in the logs section. I think the only difference with the new rules is that you are only allowed one reset during a seven day period.

You don't even have to take a reset, which is something that a lot of rookies don't understand, but after your eighth day of working you get to start working off your "re-cap" hours. When a driver has been pushing all the limits during the previous week he's just about going to have to do a reset anyway because he may have to set a day or two anyway just to get some hours back.

I know this all sounds crazy now, but once you've done the logs section in the "high road" you'll be an expert on it. Time management is a very important asset to a driver, and the "high road" is an excellent tool to help make all this stuff come clear.

One thing I forgot to mention is the company I am going with is going to reimburse me $100 a month for school until I get it all back, which would be four years ($4800).

When I spoke to Swift they were going to payback $150 a month for school, but their CPM was quite a bit lower, and the pay while training in the truck was only $8.25 an hour.

Restarts have never been "forced". The restarts have always been an option for us to reset hours but have never been forced. There are many drivers out here,myself included, that have ran off our recaps for weeks on end and never have to do a restart.

Maybe I'm confused...I thought the new regulations as of 1 July required the reset, and required one every 6/7 days, at the end of the week, no matter what you have done during the week.

Here's a quote from the card handed out at the DOT briefing:

"60/70-Hour On-Duty Limit May not drive after 60/70 hours on duty in 7/8 consecutive days. A driver may restart a 7/8 consecutive day period after taking 34 or more consecutive hours off duty. Must include two periods from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. home terminal time, and may only be used once per week, or 168 hours, measured from the beginning of the previous restart."