Profile For Davy A.

Man, I'm sorry to hear that Bob.

Brett, were as busy as can be. I ended up with a day of layover waiting for a load, but that was due to a mix up in the office between regular and after hours. The only thing that limits my miles is taking time off. I'm out 12, in for 2 but lately I've done 3 weeks out and taken 3 or 4. If I do have a light week due to weather or other factors, my DM and I will push hard the next week so it averages 3k a week. I've managed to best my personal record a couple times, pulling 4200 miles in a week.

It's pretty much hopeless without being free of the substances for sufficient amount of time as well.

There's also an element of myth to the trucking industry running round the clock. The drivers typically do, but most of the shippers and recievers don't. Appointments are typically early morning and within business hours. It's difficult enough for a relatively common sleep schedule to get the sleep in but almost impossible for anyone with sleep schedules outside of the norm, especially with our hours of service.

I don't see it being a good fit.

It's good to have long range plans, but it's better to have short range goals fulfilled first.

Most new drivers fail to make it a year in this career. Heck, many fail to make it through training.

I'd recommend setting up your short term strategy like this.

1. Make it through your training peroid with 100 percent of your focus. Your future life depends on you accomplishing this. Accident and incident free.

2. Next, make it through your first 6 months solo, accident and incident free. Soak up every bit of knowledge you can about how to operate your truck safely, on time and efficiently.

3. Make the following 6 months a repeat of the first. Always operate safely, efficiently and on time. Establish a great relationship with your office by being the safest, most reliable driver you can be.

This is a trade. It's going to take you a couple of years to really become effective and efficient. If you're running OTR, once you have learned the mechanics of shoppers, recievers, freight lanes, dispatchers, load planners, hours of service, weather and a host of things other than physically driving, your mileage should easily average 3000 miles per week.

Once you reach that level, or if you reach that level, then revaluate what your effective rate per mile is and where you want to guide your career. Understanding your effective rate per mile is crucial but not right now.

You're looking at things down the road and you need to be gaining the fundamentals. If you do not concentrate 110 percent on the fundamentals of being a safe, productive driver, you're very likely to fail in this industry.

I don't have much time right now, I've written a few articles that got published in the conservative thinker and a few others.

This was something I typed up the other night. Although I'm conservative, I'm a registered independent. The republican party has many pathetic rinos in it, who I find to be worse than leftists in the fact that at least leftists state their bat**** crazy upfront, while the rinos pretend to be against it, all the while stabbing we the people in the back.

We didn't just vote for Trump...

We voted against the radical left agenda.

We voted against censorship

We voted against ridiculous mask mandates.

We voted against big pharma and a deadly drug called the Vax

We voted against 9 years of you labling us fascists and bigots simply because we disagree with your agenda.

We voted against Marxist indoctrination of our children

We voted against your hatred that was so strong that you endorsed two assassination attempts, imprisonment of political dissidents, corruption, and the daily silencing and abuse you gave your fellow humans who dared to disagree with you.

We voted against your insane inept attempts to to control our lives, our faith, our right to believe, disbelieve, or even be ambivalent to a faith in God as we see fit.

You became the very thing you wanted to prevent. This is always the case with far left or right ideologies. The leftist platform is one of tyranny, intolerance and authoritarianism.

Americans are, in general, a patient and tolerant people but you obviously reached the end of our patience. Many of us, about a third, reject the two party system that became a uniparty. We are the independent, the unaffiliated voter.

With the size of the freight market having been reduced to a fraction of what it used to be and the rates accordingly and given that this is probably going to be the way it is for years, possibly even decades to come, is it really wise to try to opperate a school on a quantity basis rather than quality or specialized?

I would think that trying to partner with carriers whom don't want the burden of a school or maybe delving into specialized instruction might be more beneficial.

Due to the stresses of this career, the isolation of long peroids of time on the road, varied sleep schedules and dynamic range of calm and peaceful to extremely stressful that occurs multiple times daily, this is not a career path that works well with bipolar disorder.

Gvwr, is the rating. Meaning what it's capable of. As long as you stay under the towing capacity of your truck as well as the allowable gvw of your truck, you're fine.

Brett, I think we generally agree on most items and I probably eat about 75 percent of your diet.

You mentioned the couch potato and the athlete as an example. I agree that they can all use a steak and eggs meal for fuel. I also agree that they will require different amounts based on their activities. But, and it's not something that your grasping, their genetics will determine how their individual bodies burn the fats, store them, where they store them and how much they synthesize the protien. It will also determine just how much muscle fiber they grow within the context of hypertrophy. The simple fact is that their bodies will process nutrients in different manners and at different rates.

Again, two people doing the same work, same sleep, eating the same foods, the same in all conditions will process foods differently based on their genetics.

It's a technical distinction, but an important one. In general, I concur with you about eating meat and eggs. Breakfast this morning was two eggs over medium and 12 pieces of thick bacon, large glass of milk.

In regards to your assumption of the carbs leading to issues with hypoglycemia, the reactive hypoglycemia is a condition I had since I was a child. Its genetic, i was born with it. The two are unrelated save that if I take in sugar without enough long lasting carbs and protien, my blood sugar will rise slightly to 90 or so and then rapidly fall below the normal range of 70 to 120. It's very easy to keep from happening by eating protien based meals, and staying away from high sugar foods as well as quick burning carbs. Slow burning carbs such as rice and pasta don't adversity effect me. Physical labor and heat can exacerbate the condition as we burn more fuel in those conditions.

Ypu can definitely get hung out to dry on taxes. I'd recommend getting an enrolled agent that has experience with truckers. I'd also recommend you familiarize yourself with LLc formations, vs sole prop, also, I'd get an EIN, set up a business and ultimately het your checks made out to ypur business if you haven't already done so. I don't how prime works, but the carrier I had looked into running as an O/O would have done that.

Right now, all your revenue is going to be counted as income, you'll end up paying not only income tax but owing self employment tax as well. Without having correctly itemized write offs, you have nothing to offset your income.

Also, you'll have no social security contributions, no unemployment insurance, no retirement plan unless your contributing to one as well as no health insurance. Also probably no workers comp.

I don't know if it's possible as an l/p, but in my previous business, I used to pay myself a small salary, I was an employee of my own company, that way I had my benefits, fica, etc all taken care of. I had a payroll service and 15 guys though.

When I began to make the decision to change careers to trucking, there were some far reaching goals that were some of the main reasons I chose trucking.

For decades, I've built and worked on houses that I couldn't afford to purchase in geographic areas I couldn't afford to buy into. Most careers are linked to a geographic area in one way, shape or forum. In new construction for instance, it's usually booming suburbs with bubbled real estate. In manufacturing, it's usually busy areas that are booming as well, in tech, it's high demand areas.

One of the first things I looked at, was that if I was to succeed in this career, I should be able to purchase houses in just about any area as my income would no longer be tied to a specific location. It's one of the underlying reasons of why I enjoy OTR and regional work, the entire country is my zip code. It would open up cheap homes in rural areas that most people can't purchase because there isn't work there.

The next thought down that path was that, slowly over time, I would pick up rentals in specific towns or areas that have certain characteristics. The plan is to diversify and get multiple streams of relatively passive income. No income is truly passive, but there's varying degrees of it.

Ultimately, my over riding long range goal with trucking is to use it to fund my semiretirement plans and be semi retired with it. That may entail purchasing a truck down the road and leasing it on to a carrier if the rates ever come back as well as investments, IRAs and real estate. It's obtainable.

Of course that plan took a backseat to the more pressing ones each step of the way. First it was passing school and getting my CDL, then it was getting through training, then making my first year accident and incident free, so on and so forth.

Just out of curiosity, did/do you have long term plans with trucking? Was it just something you figured you do for a while or was it a tactical and strategic move?