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Diane and I have had a good health insurance policy from the first day we started expediting. We would not want to be out here without good coverage. By "good" I mean that we can walk into almost any medical facility anywhere in the country and be treated without payment hassles before, during...

This seems to be a sea-change year in the world of health insurance as Obamacare becomes available to more and more people. What are you seeing with your own health insurance? Will you be getting health insurance that you did not have before? Will you be giving it up? What about costs? Has...

Obamacare is affecting health insurance rates, but I have not heard anything about it affecting truck insurance rates. While some will be tempted to get political in this thread about Obamacare, let's try to keep the focus on truck insurance. Health insurance for expediters merits a topic of its...

Diane and I are in a 40' straight-truck. Checking our insurance costs, we see no change in the last year in unladen liability and work accident insurance. Physical damage insurance went up 4.3 percent.

Mention has been made by expediters in a couple of threads that their insurance costs are rising, and by a lot in come cases. I thought it might be informative if expediters share what is going on with their truck and work accident insurance in a thread on that topic. What are you seeing with...

I can't speak as a produce-transporting reefer operator but in our case when fuel prices spike, we charge more to transport goods so that our profit margin will be retained. Our customers' shipping prices really do increase because we are charging more. What do we do with that extra money? We...

Yes, but it is an interesting discussion just the same. An Expedite Now article is coming to mind on this topic. The title would be "How Much Do You Make and How Do You Know?"

By buying my truck-guarding services, you relieved yourself of the obligation to provide them yourself. That enabled you to go off duty and preserve your log book hours for later use. But you did not buy time, you bought truck-guarding services. If I was to bill you on paper, it would not be for...

Actually, had we made the trade, I would have sold you my truck-guarding services at an agreed-upon price. It is not the time that is sold but the services.

No. My time is not a commodity. I can sell a commodity; something like gasoline or corn for example. But I cannot sell my time. And no one else can either. If you approached someone and said, "Hey, friend, I have a couple of hours to sell you," how would you price those hours? How would you...

In the scenario you present, the profit is exactly the same. You paid zero for your time and I paid zero for mine. There were no other expenses mentioned. Each of us used our time to make $100,000, producing a net gain of $100,000. Profits are not measured in time. They are measured in dollars.

You may be giving yourself another way to look at your profits, but it is not a way that bankers, the IRS and other money people use to measure the actual financial success of a business. More to follow.

I woke up this morning thinking about this thread and the "average miles per shift" indicator that has been proposed. The reason I am so enthusiastic in my critique of this indicator is that I do not want expediter newbies and wannabees getting the idea that pay-per-hour is a meaningful way to...

In that scenario, if I was the one going 500 miles in 10 hours, there is no question; I am the one who made more money for three reasons. (1) You burned more fuel to drive the same amount of miles. Your higher expenses mean I made more money on the run. (2) I don't need to be out of the truck to...

So, a hypothetical expedite team wakes up on Monday morning after laying over at a truck stop over the weekend and they are ready to go to work. They expect load offers to come in today because that is the normal flow for them. Sure enough, a load offer comes in. Being smart business people...

With the information you provide, and with the benefit of hindsight, your question can be answered along the lines you laid out. But as expediters, how realistic is that scenario really? Diane and I have been in the business over ten years and have never once had our choice of three loads at...

You are not alone. The decline of the middle class is one of the themes or our life in America.

I stated an observation but did not express surprise. It does not surprise me a bit that huge companies seek to maximize their profits. That has been the case for more than 33 years.

You are right. It is tricky. In addition to the miles per oil change, you must also factor in the increased cost of the oil and filters. Also add in the environmental fees that are tacked on to oil changes in some states. And if your present truck has four oil filters but your previous ones had...

In this CNN article, Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about using unfamiliar gyms on the road to work out. He's not in a truck like we are but his tips apply to expediters too. Excerpt: "Someone on Reddit asked what it was like for me to train in hotel gyms or other unfamiliar gyms on the road,"...