Goals For Your Career

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?

I had purchased my home before I got into trucking. Along the way, I went from two incomes to one. My wife became disabled and can no longer work. Everything was great until the economy crashed, inflation took off and the company I was with no longer had the miles I needed. I am still digging out of the hole that that perfect storm helped create.

However, life is still good.