How to Make a Big Truck Driver Salary

Stuck in a low salary truck driver job? You're probably being exploited for your company's profit. I had a great conversation with my good buddy and fellow trucker Chip and his awesome wife Louise last night about truck driver salaries. We were discussing the positive impact this website and The Successful Trucker Facebook page could have on so many truckers who are "stuck" in low paying trucking jobs. The more we talked, the more we came to realize that this website and The

Can you support your family on 28 cents per mile truck driver salary? How long would that "fat" $3,000 bonus pay last? As I was finishing my CDL training in May 2015, I came across an ad in Craigslist looking for a truck driver to be paid $0.40 per mile truck driver salary. I knew this was far better than all of the major carriers such as Schneider, Werner, and Con-Way, who were only offering around $0.28 per mile truck driver salary. I answered the ad and met with the owner

If you're a company driver, do you care much about wind direction and speed? Easily overlooked but very important to lease operators and owner operators is the effect of wind on fuel consumption, which affects truck driver salary. How significantly can a headwind affect your load profit? Much more than you think. In a real world example, my 2010 Volvo truck was normally averaging 7.1 miles per gallon. On a blustery mid-March day, I was on an 800-mile trip from Dallas to Denve

To achieve a $100,000 truck driver salary, in a recent post titled What's a Good Load Rate? I talked about calculating your minimum rate per mile. In this post I will discuss a different way of deciding if you should take load to make that big truck driver salary. We have a goal of bringing home a $100,000 salary for the year. We need to break down this goal into smaller sub-goals: monthly and daily so that it will be easier to track progress. In my post, What's a Good Load R

Traffic congestion. Weigh stations. Inspections. Waiting for fuel. Finding parking. Being a truck driver comes with many headaches and hassles that thwart your goal of a $100,000 truck driver salary. All of these problems can be minimized by choosing to drive at night. The result is more time left for driving on your logbook and more money in your pocket to achieve that $100,000 truck driver salary. At night, there are significantly fewer vehicles on the road, which reduces t

By far, your biggest expense as a truck driver will be fuel. This expense eats into your take- home salary. Since fuel costs have such a big impact on your salary and ultimate success as an owner operator, it is important to focus most of your cost cutting efforts here. There are several areas to consider that, when combined, can significantly reduce your fuel expenses, including choice of fuel station, geography, and driving style. Every dollar you save in fuel expenses goes

In this blog post you will learn what's needed as a truck driver to contract a load through a broker. You find the "perfect" load on a load board. You call the number and reach the broker and the information starts to flow. Negotiating tip When discussing the rate, try to get the broker to tell you the offer rate. In many cases you will be ready to accept $1.74 or whatever the spot rate is, but the broker will quote something higher, which you should jump on. I was once pleas

Every hour that your truck isn't rolling with a load is an hour not making a $100,000 truck driver salary. In the world of business, waste is very bad for profitability. In a perfect world, equipment purchased to help generate revenue would be used 24 hours per day, 365 days per year to maximize its use (utility). After all, if the equipment is turned off it's not helping the business. I will illustrate this principle with a trucking example. If I lease a truck for $3,000 per

As a budding owner operator, before you can seriously look for your truck and trailer you need to know how much you can spend. If you have funds set aside to help with the purchase, then you are a step ahead, mainly because financing a truck and trailer usually requires a down payment of between 10-20%. But there are a few options that require little to no money down. You may be thinking “what about leasing?” And my response is flush that idea, and here’s why. It is virtually

Using the best tools will help you achieve a $100,000 truck driver salary. One tool you will need is a load board. There are many load boards available for truckers and finding the best one can be a challenge. The load board I use most often is the DAT load board called Truckers Edge. This load board has become the industry standard and is updated every two minutes with loads from hundreds of brokers. I will write a full review of Truckers Edge in a future blog. Posted loads