I'm always on the lookout for interesting ways to earn a living, ways that you can do things that other people dream about doing for recreation and actually make money at it. One of the things I've considered in the past was being an over-the-road truck driver, especially if you can do it as a couple.

I've read stories about retiring couples that go on the road together and they see the country and they make a lot of money while they're doing it. Well, sadly, I've never had the opportunity to do it. Today I've got Ben and Deb Martinek who have graciously agreed to come on and share with us what it's actually like.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. This is the show where we work hard to give you the ideas and insight and knowledge and skills that you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Yes, we want to get there as quickly as possible and wouldn't it be great if you could take a retirement lifestyle and just do it now? Frankly I think there are tons of these types of opportunities that are out there and truck driving is just one that I've thought would be pretty cool, especially if you do it full time.

But never having done it, I can't give you what it's actually like. So today we're going to talk with Ben and Deb who've actually done it. Guys, I'm sorry I flubbed your name there. It's Martinek, right? Yeah, it's Martinek. Okay, great. So tell me the story. How did you guys wind up – I shouldn't say living in a truck.

I don't think you did that completely. But how did you wind up working together as a co-driving truck driving team? Well, it started – the conversation started before we got married. We both have graduate degrees but in areas that aren't very high paying. And so we knew that we had this mountain of student loan debt from going to graduate school at a private university and we weren't quite sure what to do about it.

And so we knew we wanted to spend time together, make a lot of money to pay off that debt. And the only option that seemed to come forward – I mentioned it just one day to Ben when we were engaged. Well, maybe we should do truck driving. I come from a long line of truck drivers myself and not knowing at the time, but Ben has always had a fascination with large machinery or equipment like that.

So he took me seriously and started looking into it. And the more research we did, the more we realized that you could make a lot of money, especially as a husband-wife team. And so that's what we set our sights on a few months after we got married. Honestly, it was kind of a surprise to me that they even had team truck drivers.

I thought, wow, maybe – I don't know if they'd even let us both drive the truck. I mean, what a novel idea. At least it was when we first started looking into it. But I was really floored to find out that, yeah, it's very common. And actually, husband-wife teams in particular are a very highly-priced commodity in the trucking industry for many reasons.

But yeah, it's probably some of the best-paying work you can get as a truck driver. Let me jump right to the money just because I want to get an idea. How much money could a couple make if they were to pursue this type of work? Well, it would depend on your setup.

I mean, because you have basically either company drivers or you have what are called owner-operators. I mean, are you going to be your own trucking company or run your own truck or are you going to just run somebody else's truck? If you're company drivers, I mean, within nine months from the time we graduated from truck driving school to the time we came out with a second company, we were making $100,000 between the two of us.

And probably, I mean, if we had pushed and done more miles, we could have maybe made it as high as $110,000 as company drivers. That's with folks who don't have any financial responsibility by and large. I mean, everything's covered by the company. The only thing you do is drive the truck and move the freight and go from spot to spot.

As owner-operators, if you take on more financial responsibility, either between the fuel cost, which is a big one, or you're obviously maintaining and keeping the truck, you get a little more liberty in the routes you choose and when you decide to run and when you decide not to. But that does have more promise.

And I mean, it's just like anything. I don't think you could immediately step into this. But once you learn the business, I don't think it's out of the realm to think you can make as much as $125,000 to $150,000 as a team truck operator. And that's probably just as a general average.

I think the more exclusive you get, the more specialized your routes become. And the better either contractors or carriers or shippers you work with, yeah, it could get considerably higher than that. - So the basic idea of the team driving, as I understand it, never driven a truck, so just kind of give the intro and I want you to explain it more deeply.

The basic idea of why a team can be so valuable is by putting two drivers in one truck, you can run much closer to 24 hours a day than one driver because of the federally mandated rest times and the amount of time you're allowed to drive, the number of miles that you can do.

If you've got two people that can drive and you can split out and one can sleep while the other drives, you can put a lot more hours. And so it actually can be a very valuable resource for the company. Is that accurate? - Absolutely. Essentially, you can be driving 22 out of 24 hours in a day.

And our biggest claim to fame as far as our fastest load that we moved was 2,900 miles from Los Angeles to the Washington, D.C. area, I believe, that we did in just 52 hours, the two of us. That was really a lot of fun. We stopped, I think, a collective amount of two hours and 45 minutes.

- That was the truck not moving in that 52-hour period. - That includes our inspections that you have to do and then stopping for fuel and then restroom breaks. So in two and a half days, not even, we only stopped for three hours total. - Wow. So obviously, if you like being together, this gives you just a tremendous amount of time to be together.

What else? Describe to me how you would run. You said you weren't in the truck full time. You would stop and go other places. Describe to me what the lifestyle was like. - Well, again, it's largely going to depend on whether or not you're a company driver or not because if you're an owner/operator, there's a lot more freedom into how you run.

- So which were you guys? - We were company drivers the whole time. And honestly, if I were to do this as a long-term vision, I would eventually go as an owner/operator without question. And towards the end of our time there, I was giving a lot of serious consideration to maybe doing just that.

But as company drivers, I mean, as long as you have the hours, you're expected to run and move freight. And then how busy you are just depends on the company and how well they're doing and how many loads they have available to you. And I think there's a lot of factors that come into it.

I mean, you have both loaded and empty miles. And so you might come to a location and deliver a load, but there might not be a local spot, a nearby spot that has another load going out and you may have to travel a long distance. I mean, we went as far as, one time it's crazy to think about, but we went as far as a thousand miles to pick up a load.

It was from Denver, Colorado up to the Los Angeles area. So depending on the company and their willingness to run you empty to go pick up another load would depend on how regularly busy you would be. But yeah, I mean, I'm trying to forget the question. I'm forgetting the question.

Well, it's kind of a day in the life of what trucking would look like for us. Ben usually took the shift from about 2 a.m. to 2 p.m. And we tried to keep it at not stopping until you've driven about 200 miles. So about every three and a half to four hours, we would stop for a 15 minute break, refill coffee, go to the bathroom, stretch the legs a little bit.

And then once we would switch over, we would take a little bit of a longer break at that time, fueling up, likely getting a bite to eat. And then I would drive from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. roughly. So we basically each take a 12 hour shift. And depending on how hard we had to run, we wouldn't take many breaks.

But if we had a little bit more flexibility or if we had finished with a load and we had several hours before the next one would be ready to be picked up, we'd find a truck stop, take a shower, get a bite to eat, maybe take a walk. You know, if it worked out on Sundays, we'd try to find a church somewhere to go.

Otherwise it was just pretty, I mean, you're at liberty of the schedule of the loads that they give you, but you could find a lot of fun things to do in the meantime, though, too. Yeah. You know, it depends on the locale that you would stop at. I mean, as you got to know the area of the country, because I mean, you really, over time you have to know the country very well.

And so if you knew you had time on a load, you would have a spot in mind of like, oh, we either have friends here or this has a nice truck stop where there would be easy access to other, maybe public transportation. And so we're going to do a long layover here and use this as a chance to go and do some visiting and have some fun.

So, you know, it just depends, I suppose, in terms of your freedom, just how busy of a time of the year it is freight wise. You know, as you move towards Christmas, freight picks up. And so really from Thanksgiving to Christmas, it's really intense as truck drivers, at least over the road.

We would normally run 6,000 to 6,500 miles a week. I mean, almost no time to stop at all. I mean, we were always running freight. But right after that, January, February, March, it'd be really slow. I mean, it was almost like a 50% reduction from in that point in miles.

And so you'd have a lot more freedom then to do some sightseeing if you wanted to. So you're really only paid per mile, whether you're a company driver or an owner operator. Is that correct? Correct. Well, it's really by you're paid by the load. And then they figure out how much to pay you by the load by the miles.

So but yeah, I mean, there's not like a daily calculation where you drove so many miles today, so you get paid. You ran this freight, you finished this load, now you get paid for it. So you said graduated, had a lot of student loan debt. What happened for you financially during this period of time?

We were able to pay off a lot of our student loan debt. That was the main objective. You know, it took us probably seven months or so until we were finally at a spot financially that we weren't hurting so bad. You know, we weren't just making it from month to month.

And we were able to make some progress on the debt that we had. So it was certainly slow going. But that in part was due to the fact that we started in the industry as inexperienced drivers and you need to cut your teeth before you get that pay raise.

When we first started out, jointly, we were probably only making like $38,000 a year between the two of us. It was really bad. But thankfully, after we had enough experience, we were able to get on with a better national company that paid much – the highest rates in the industry actually and that's when we were able to make about $100,000 a year.

When you were doing this work, did you live in the truck full time? Did you maintain a house still that you would go back to and how did you work out that mix of working versus not working? Yeah. So I mean long haul over the road drivers I think pretty commonly are out four to five weeks at a time and then you get a day off for every week that you're out.

So that's called your home time. So we did keep an apartment. We had – we're from the Midwest but Deb had spent some time previously out in Central Oregon and wanted to go back and I figured, "Well, what the heck? You know, we're going to be over the road truck drivers anyhow." So we just up and moved back to Central Oregon and we kept an apartment there throughout that time which actually for tax purposes you need – I mean if you're going to be able to write off the per diem and some of your pay against per diem cost which can be quite substantial.

I mean when we were over the road, I think close to 30 to 40 percent of our income was able to be a tax deduction due to per diem but you have to have a home domicile for that to qualify. So we had to have something of a residence.

Otherwise the IRS would have considered us just permanently transient employees. Explain some of the details of the compensation because – and kind of how much the costs were to maintain the apartment and not because to me, the big opportunity that I see – I know there are some people who want to do this type of lifestyle for their career and if they can do it, great.

I don't see how – I couldn't do it but I could do it for a few years doing something like you've done and I would – I could see ways that I could put it to good use. I think it would be interesting to do for a few years and then move on to something else.

But the financial calculations would seem to me to vary hugely depending on an owner operator versus company and then how the pay is structured and how much your other expenses were. So explain how the compensation is structured and your overall expenses, how much you're able to put away due to the trucking lifestyle.

Yeah. Again, there is a lot of variability there because you could easily spend a lot of money being over the road. So I mean we took cost saving measures in hand. We would – we had a small little mini fridge cooler that we kept in between our seats, just plugged into what do you call it, one of the power points in the truck and we would stop for groceries once a week at a Walmart and fill up on different types of fruit, sandwich meats, milk, those sort of things.

So we did what we could where we purposely kept ourselves to maybe just $10 to $15 a day we would spend on other eating costs. Because again, I mean if you're eating out breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, I mean one, you really don't need to because physical activity wise, at least as over the road truck drivers is very minimal.

So you can easily overeat and start gaining weight and that was something we actually did have to spend a concerted effort to keep our weight in check because we both started gaining some weight. But yeah, I mean if you're thoughtful about it, I mean our data cost for everything was just about $10 a day between the times we would go out to eat and then our coffee.

We would grind up our own coffee and had a metal French press and then a large thermos that we would just top off the thermos with hot water at a truck stop and then we just made our coffee in-house. And that was probably one of our biggest expenses or could have been one of our biggest expenses because it really, the coffee is super helpful.

And I mean it was probably just $0.15 a cup for us versus about $1.50, $1.75 that it normally was at a truck stop. So I'm trying to think of some of the other cost saving measures. I mean we would buy, like other people, we had a membership to Costco.

So we would buy in bulk and try to get a month's supply of food ration wise and we would work our way through that throughout the time that we were over the road. And I'm trying to think if there was anything else, if you have anything else that comes to mind, just I think being thoughtful and considerate to our expenses and trying to keep things low.

Well and then our household expenses too. We still had to pay for the rent at the apartment and utilities and our cell phone and all those things but we actually worked out an agreement with the apartment complex because they needed to keep people in their apartments and we used that as leverage to reduce our rate $100 a month for about a year, which was really nice.

But I'd say those expenses were probably about $7.50 a month and then you add in what we had for our extra meals or fun things. We weren't shy about treating ourselves on the road though either because we were living this nomadic lifestyle for lack of a better term. We wanted to enjoy ourselves and not scrim so much that we were just, everything that we made was going towards the debt.

We wanted to enjoy ourselves too. So we definitely did that. Yeah, there were splurges. I mean when you had the opportunity, I mean the thing is, you didn't always have an opportunity to go out to a nice place to eat. So usually when that arose, it's like, "Oh, let's do this and we need to take advantage of this." I mean, because you have longer layover periods too.

So I mean just in terms of the hours that you have, it's probably worth mentioning, you have, you know, each day you have roughly 14 hours of time clockwise to do up to 11 hours worth of driving. And so whenever you either hit that 11 hour mark of driving or that 14 hour period of on duty time, you have to stop for at least 10 hours before those two clocks will reset and you can start again.

So and again, with that 10 hour period, I mean that was enough that when the other person came on to start their driving, they would do enough work that by the time they were ready to finish, my clock had reset. And then you can do up to 70 hours, I think, in an 80 day period of work, at which point, even as team truck drivers, we'd actually would burn through that.

So you'd come to a point where our total hours for the whole week would be consumed. And then in order to reset that clock, you can either start picking the hours up as the days roll off and roll back on. I mean, that can be a little complicated, but you learn it pretty quick.

Or you just do what's called a 34 hour restart where you have to be stopped for a total of 34 hours of off duty work before you can start driving again. So with a team operation, actually, it's only about 24 hours because 10 hours of one person's clock can be spent in the truck while it's moving down the road.

So you'd have, you know, once a week, roughly a 24 hour period where there wasn't anything going on. And so we would be strategic about like, okay, where do we want to spend our restart at in order to either do some sightseeing or, I don't know, have some fun or this just would be a nice truck stop to relax at or.

Or have a nice meal. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, the meal is having a nice meal was like, I mean, that was like the highlight almost from week to week. Where do we want to get our nice meal at? So. Yeah. Sounds. Sitting in a vehicle driving constantly can be very wearing.

And even if you've got a bed, you can sleep one at a time. I could imagine the anticipation of that day off and having a nice meal or being able to do something really fun. Explain please, Ben, what you were saying about the per diem cost and how that's taxed versus the other aspects of your pay.

Sure. I mean, I know some of the details of this, but it's been a little while since some of them are kind of fuzzy. So I mean, for most people, if you have to, if your work causes you to be away from where you live for an extended period of time, the meals and the lodging expenses of that can be written off up to 50% associated with that as a tax deduction for anyone who's regulated by DOT regulations, the Department of Transportation, it's as high as I think it's 80%.

So as long as you can confirm that your work was taking you away from home, which this would be for 30, 40 days at a time, each of those days, I'm trying to remember what the cap amount was. I mean, I think they allowed it like $150. So like 80%, and this is just typical IRS stuff, is like 80% of $150 or something every day per driver was a tax write off your income.

So how much is a standard mileage rate when you're a top driver at a good company? Well, I mean, this is five years removed. At the time, it was $0.48 a mile is what we were making. I think things have adjusted with inflation. They're probably closer to mid-50s now.

So, yeah. So let's just use $0.55 per mile. And how many miles could you generally do in a day? We would shoot when we were... So you don't necessarily every single day run a load. I mean, it all just depends on how loads line up. But when we were on a load and running, it's probably at least 1,200, 1,250 miles a day is what we would run.

For each of you or... Total. Total. An average of 5,500 miles a week. So that $1,200 would come out... 1,200 miles would come out to $660 earned in a day between the two of you. And then what you're saying is that if you could have, let's say, up to $120, $150 a day, so let's just say half of that would be as a per diem reimbursement, then the idea there is that's not subject to tax.

Subject to income tax. And so you've got about $300 to $400 for that day of work that would be classified as ordinary wages as a company driver. And as ordinary wages, then that's the money that'd be subject to income tax. So even though you might be earning, say, $100,000 in a year, if we just use that with ratios, you're actually going to be reporting income of like $55,000 or $60,000.

Is that accurate? Yep. That's pretty accurate. So yeah, the IRS is presuming that you're spending a large amount of money in both food and lodging costs every day, and that's what they're giving you the tax deduction for. But in reality, I mean, we were spending like 10 bucks a day out of our own pocket to cover the cost.

I mean, lodging was provided by the truck in the sleeper cab. And then, yeah, we weren't spending anywhere near what they were wanting to offer to us as a tax deduction. Are there a lot of team drivers who do this full-time and don't maintain a place to live? You know, I don't know if that's so much the case.

I mean, there are plenty of guys that we came across, older couples. I mean, there's a large number of married couples, one out there, especially I would say most, a good percentage of team truck drivers are married couples. But I mean, I suppose it depends from couple to couple, but I mean, I heard of folks who would be away from home for three to four months at a time.

I mean, they were really, they just lived on the road and then they just came home. Home was like a vacation spot for them. I maybe get a new fresh thing of clothes or something. I mean, I couldn't believe being away. There were a few times where we were gone for as long as 10 weeks from our place.

And that felt like a really long time. I can't imagine being three to four months away from home before coming back. I mean, it'd be like going out to sea or something. How did you know when it was time to quit? Yeah, well, I'll let Deb chime in on that.

Well, I was experiencing some poor health issues that weren't related to trucking, but were kind of exacerbated by it. And so we had weighed our options and realized that if we were going to get off the road, now was the time. It would be better sooner rather than later.

And so we started looking into what our options after life on the road would be. And through a lot of providential design, actually, we came across Bismarck, North Dakota and decided that that seemed to be a very appropriate fit, which seemed really strange because we were, in all of our time on the road, we had often made lists in our minds, you know, like, "Oh, if we ever move from Oregon, this is where we'd want to live," or "This is definitely where we wouldn't want to live." And Bismarck, North Dakota had never been on that list.

Nowhere in North Dakota had been on that list. But then it just seemed to, everything fell into place. And there was a lot of peace about that decision. And so we had decided it was shortly after Thanksgiving one year. And then by Christmas time, we had put a deposit on an apartment and moved to Bismarck in early February and haven't looked back.

So it was really good timing for us to get off the road in a lot of ways. We didn't see it all at the time, obviously, but it's worked out very, very well since then. You stole the next question out of my mouth. I was going to say, in seeing all these areas of the country, what did you learn and what are your perspectives about different areas?

And since you started the answer with Bismarck, what is it about Bismarck that you like compared to all the places that you've been? Well, it's hard to get a real feel for the community when you're out on the road. You can get a feel for just the area driving through.

One of my favorite places to drive, this is often a question that people ask, "Where did you like to drive the most?" And the answer is always Nebraska, always Nebraska. And I ate in Nebraska because there's very few people, even Omaha, a city of over 400,000 people, which may seem really small to some of your listeners, but that's kind of a big deal in the Plains States.

Even in rush hour traffic, you never had to drive below 55 miles per hour. It was just very smooth driving and the rest of the state was just wide open Plains and very easy to drive through. In short, it was easy money. For truck drivers, for us, I know other guys thought it to be boring, but for me, I loved it.

It was just so much money. You could easily listen to other stuff while you're going down the road, listen to books on tape and that sort of thing. We ate going up through the Plains States whenever we could. Other parts of the country, oh my Lord, it's so congested.

You really earned your money. You had to be paying attention and just stay calm and patient and work with traffic. But once we found and settled in Bismarck, there are the stereotypes that people have about North Dakota, that you get that North Dakota nice and people give you the shirt off the back.

We weren't quite sure what to expect. We just thought people talked weird. But once we got here, it's just one of the most amazing communities that I've ever had the privilege of being part of. That's what made us want to stick around. We thought maybe that this would just be kind of a temporary thing for us to finish paying off the last of our student loan debt and then we'd end up moving elsewhere.

It providentially has not worked out that way and we're very thankful for that. Aaron Powell You both had college degrees before working in trucking. I've designed this scenario in my mind as kind of a radical financial plan of using trucking as a base of operations to become educated in an area and to start a business.

I'll just tell you kind of what I've sketched out in my head as what might work and then you feel free to shoot holes in it. But it seemed to me that if somebody went into trucking, a single person with few family connections that they needed to be in a certain place, they could use trucking as a way to become extremely well educated, establish a starting fund to launch their life or to launch a business and to – it's just a really good integrated way.

So if a single person were very flexible and they could not worry with the home base or they could just simply rent a cheap room somewhere and sometimes they go back to that room for their week off. Sometimes they just take a week in a hotel in some other location.

But given those restrictions on the time, the amount of time that you can do on the road, you're going to have some time sitting around where you're not going to be driving and you're not going to be sleeping. I always go into the truck stops. I love to go to truck stops when I travel and I just see so many drivers just sitting there watching TV.

And I'm sure that – I'm sure – and I – you walk around – I walk – I always love to walk around the parking lot if I'm walking my dogs or something at night and it seems like every other truck cab has the TV going. And I just think, "Man, you guys are wasting an opportunity for education." Take some of that time and sit in your truck, get yourself a nice meal and get some books, do some correspondence classes.

With the time that you can spend consuming audio content, you can stream YouTube lectures, you can stream all kinds of things. You could become so well-educated in a few years. You could save a ton of money. And so any young – I guess you need to be 18 to get a CDL or 21.

Do you know? 21. OK. So a young – it doesn't work for a teenager. But somebody who's 21 years old who doesn't have resources could use trucking as a way to earn an income, save a lot of money, keep their expenses low, do it for three or four years, become extremely well-educated in a certain area with being able to read during their time off, buying audio books on tape in their area or using some of the technology now of text-to-speech reading, the Kindle reading, things like that to consume some of the books that don't have audio books, listening to podcasts, lectures.

And then you have time in the evenings or whenever time during the day that you're stopped. You can take a couple hours every day and use that time to study and just really launch in a really intelligent way. Is that possible or am I just delusional? You are 100% accurate.

Ben often made the comment whenever we were really getting into the thick of things with driving and once we had discovered podcasts and iTunes U and all these different things that we could immerse ourselves in education-wise, he would often say, "Man, I don't know why I ever decided to go to college.

I should have just driven in a truck and got my education this way because I wouldn't have all this student loan debt to pay off." So you are very like-minded with Ben and his thoughts there, Joshua. Yeah. I mean, you just take the amount of student loan debt. How much student loan debt total did you guys pay off?

Well, student loan debt plus some of our credit card debt or retail debt, we had about $160,000 total and we paid off a little over $100,000 while we were on the road. Okay. So let's just use that $100,000 number. And how many years were you working together doing this full-time to pay off that $100,000?

Two and a half years. It was, but really the first six months of that, it was just a break even because we were so little paid. So I mean, you'd have to look at this in the first six months. You're not going to make a lot of money, but it starts to pick up after that point.

Which is reasonable. So let's assume that somebody could do what you did. To be able to start and pretend they didn't have the student loan debt, to be able to start with $100,000, $100,000 is enough to buy you a huge measure of financial freedom. It's enough to fund the startup of a business.

It's enough to fund seed capital, to fund various investments. $100,000 is down payments on rental houses. $100,000 is seed company for all kinds of things. $100,000 is enough for anybody who wants to have a freedom fund that they can use and leverage that into just about anything else. So in two and a half years, by cutting the expenses and having the lower expenses associated with the trucking lifestyle and having the income and having the dual use of the time, just about any normal person can learn to drive a truck and have a freedom fund in two and a half years.

Yep. No, that really isn't unrealistic at all, actually. Because Deb and I both hadn't had our master's degrees fully completed either when we were over the road. So I finished my master's thesis while driving and she completed her and prepared for her comprehensive exams while driving. So I mean, it does lend itself to even in-depth study.

I mean, there are limitations. I mean, there are some of the challenges we faced, somebody would face. Life is so varied and jostled. And as much as you try to keep a schedule, there could be so many things that would just mess up your plans. And so you have to have a willingness to be flexible and just kind of let things come as they play out.

Because of that jostling, it would be hard to stay motivated or focused. Sometimes all you wanted to do was just rest or just get out of the truck too, honestly. I mean, it's an eight by eight foot box is all you're staying in. But that said, I mean, I think if you were focused enough, determined enough, and we were pretty, we were able to take advantage of it.

Because even when you have 10 hours off, the other person's driving and you're in the back sleeping, you don't sleep the whole 10 hours. I mean, it was only a handful of times that either one of us conked out and stayed asleep the entire time in the back. A lot of times, at least for me in particular, the time that I ran, I'd just sleep for three or four hours, then I'd be awake for three or four hours.

And that's when I would work on other things. I mean, I'd go back to sleep for another two to three and then get ready to go for my next shift. So. Yeah. So since then, you've gone on and you started a financial planning business. So tell me about kind of this transition and how you actually exited truck driving to do financial planning and how truck driving still plays a role in your current lifestyle.

Right. Well, I mean, I had got interested in finance business investing way back in grad school. A fellow classmate of mine was already running a few businesses. And honestly, I'm not even quite sure why he decided to pursue a master's degree in philosophy, but he did. And he turned me on to some of this stuff.

So it was already in my mind before we started driving truck. But we eventually stumbled upon Dave Ramsey and his radio program and what he had offered. I mean, that was one of the other fun things is you could listen forever. You know, I mean, the podcast weren't quite as prominent as they are like today, but I mean, they were they were around.

But I mean, Dave Ramsey's radio show, we both listened to it for three hours a day. So that really got our interest peaked when it came to finance. That really helped, too, with maintaining our focus and commitment and dedication to what we were doing and getting about gazelle intensity.

Yeah, right. You know, every day, you know, we have Dave telling us, you stay focused, stay focused, stay focused. And I mean, it was good. It was like a coaching for us as we were living day in, day out on the on the road. So he actually was the one who introduced the idea of becoming a CFP.

A few people had inquired about how maybe they could make a career helping others financially. I had no idea even up to that point. I had studied five or six years, a lot of it just for personal reasons as a hobby. But yeah, he he suggested you could become a CFP.

And I had never heard of that before, you know. And so I checked into that. And that's when I started tossing that around as a potential career move once we finished with truck driving, because we always knew it to be a temporary thing. We wanted to do it as well.

We want to do it for a lot of reasons. But one of them, the main reasons was student loan repayment. And the other is you're newly married and we're young and we're like, what the heck? Let's go see the country. This will be fun. We're going to get paid to do this.

So but long term wise, I didn't want to continue truck driving forever. So it's like, well, how are we going to transition? So yeah, I mean, I had considered quite a few options. I had given thought maybe to going back to academia and pursuing a doctorate and maybe resuming a career path, teaching philosophy at a college.

But it just seemed to me, I suppose, to make the most sense to continue on a finance. I saw that as just a better, better alternative. So it's been something that's been in the works in terms of getting this business off the ground for probably five years or better now.

And it's yeah, we're slowly, slowly getting together. We've officially launched last year and we're really catering to the younger generations, folks who are in the XY generation and trying to help them. If you could look at kind of a financial trajectory, it's almost like an air flight. You know, you have your takeoff and then you get up to kind of a cruising altitude and then you go and land.

I think a lot of financial planning is geared towards people who are in that coasting mode. You know, they've reached their high altitude phase and now they're looking maybe eventually to land the plane. Not a lot's being given to the people who are on the front side of things.

And that's where I want to be putting my focus and effort and assistance to for clients. So you're building, your firm is called Bonafide Finance and you're building kind of the model we've talked about many times, the XY planning network model of small practice working with younger couples doing fees that are not just based upon assets under management but based either on an hourly or retainer model.

Is that accurate? Yeah, right. And it's, you know, a fee for service too. So I have some specific selected services that I would offer either kind of a comprehensive plan or a plan broken up in parts and then you're paying for specific parts. So depending on maybe what a client would need or want.

Yeah, you know, giving some, in my opinion, third party objective advice to a person's circumstances and kind of giving them direction and guidance as to where they got to go and what they need to do right now in their finances. What I have found to be really powerful about that is because there isn't any involvement of a product, people really take to heart that when I say you need to, let's say, get long-term disability, they don't bat an eye on it.

They're like, "Oh, okay. I had no idea that that was such an important component to our finances. We're going to look into that right away." You know, I mean, now there's still a question of how much they can afford, maybe what exactly is the right plan for them. But in terms of communicating the urgency to people, it seems to me a very effective way for people to come across and get the message that this is something you need.

With regard to your, you're in the startup phase still, the business, working on it for a couple of years, you're still driving a truck, right? It's a way to part-time produce extra income. Is that right? Yeah. So I mean, one of the things that did bring us out to Bismarck, it's kind of a long story in that regard, but the parent company of one of the child companies that was working out of Central Oregon resides in Bismarck.

And so the idea early on was maybe I would come on over here as a truck driver with a larger company, and then maybe we could find out a way to get relocated back to Central Oregon, just because we liked it there so much. And it's a really, really beautiful area.

I mean, the whole Northwest, people aren't familiar with the Pacific Northwest, they should go and visit. It's gorgeous. But yeah, that initial plan had fallen through. I decided to get on with an insurance company here locally early on and try to make a go of financial planning then. And that was my first introduction in the business and started to see how things were done.

And honestly, some of it was kind of a surprise in terms of what was being done was different from what I was expecting. But when that arrangement didn't fully pan out, I decided to go back to local truck driving. So none of this is over the road, what I currently do.

I work with the part of the business that's called LTL, that's on a full truckload. And I run what's called a dedicated route, in which freight more or less makes its way up to our terminal here in Bismarck. And then I'm the one who delivers it for the customers up into the specific region of the state that has been assigned to me.

So I run that route twice a week and make my deliveries. I go out and I come back in the same day. And honestly, it's really come to be rather enjoyable for me. I like running that route, but it's also given me the flexibility to focus on running the business.

I still get about 30 hours worth of work in those two days. And then I have the other five days of the week to focus and work on the business and meet and work with clients. Do you have a guess of what your hourly rate is running a route like that?

Well, it is paid hourly. So I mean, there's some parts of the LTL business that are paid by the mile. But the work that I do as a pickup and delivery driver is paid hourly. So yeah, right now I'm making $25 an hour. If you wanted to do this from a long term perspective, I mean, there's some other carriers that pay better for sure.

And I know of them to be as much as $27 to $29 an hour. But you know, the exact payout that's just going to be dependent upon local demand for truck drivers and where you're at in the country. Here locally with the oil boom that took place, that really pushed the hourly wages up for drivers.

So I'm really benefiting from the local boom that took place. My wage is I think higher than the average driver for the standard of living that we have. That's great. The reason why I point that out, I think a lot of people often would see doing something like you're doing as a negative thing.

They say, "Well, you're a financial planner but you're a truck driver. Like these things don't usually go well together." But to me, I see it as a positive because it allows you to do a couple of things. I've done the same thing with Radical Personal Finance, working on the side.

If you have to put all of the pressure on a new business to make you income in the short term, it can be very challenging to get a business from nothing to profitable enough to run your lifestyle in a short period of time, especially if you're trying to not sacrifice your integrity or not sacrifice your principles or if you're trying something new.

So having a side job can be really, really valuable. Working as a truck driver is almost the perfect type of side job to have where you are in some ways your commodity. You're just a driver. You show up. You do your job. Once your job is done and the load is there and the truck is parked back at the depot, you're done.

There's nothing about the job that follows you home. You don't have to deal with any stress of those things. You're just working while you're working and when you're not working, you're not working. Because there's licensing requirements and professional experience requirements, that raises your hourly wage substantially and it can be a great way to spend and take a couple of days and make some money to make it worth it.

That allows you to buy your independence because you wouldn't be able to start without that. It would be very difficult to start a financial planning firm from scratch where everything is on you and be able to do it profitably from the beginning without burning through a tremendous amount of savings.

So I point it out as a positive benefit because it allows you to keep your independence. It allows you to keep your business model pure. You don't have to sacrifice anything that's important to you in order to gain enough money from some other aspect. I think that is something that many people should seriously always consider looking for is the type of thing that you're doing where you can gain income without being emotionally committed to the future of the side job.

>> Sean Esterly: Right. I can't say it's a perfect setup that I have right now. I don't know if I could have dreamt up an even better setup. And some of it comes to the company that I work for. It's a local outfit that's headquartered out of Fargo here.

They're mostly an upper Midwest company. But what's kind of a typical saying you might hear, they're large enough to make it work but small enough to care. They have still kind of a mom and pop family atmosphere to them even though they're probably 750 employees large or something. And so I know the managers directly.

We all know each other very well. And so they know exactly what I'm up to. They know that I'm trying to get this business going. They're happy to see me try to do it. They think it's great of me. And they're kind of willing to help me succeed. They want to work with me.

But at the same time, I'm also doing a route that a lot of other drivers don't want to run. And to be honest, I don't understand why it is. The route that I have, it takes about three hours to get up there. And then depending on just the freight we have for the day, when the deliveries are at and potential holdups that you might have with each of the deliveries, it'll take anywhere between four to six hours to get unloaded.

And then it's three hours back and then maybe some dock work. So the days tend to be long. I mean, it's usually about 14 hours. They've been as long as 16 hours for me. But I mean, I've got three hours of driving, six hours total coming and going to be able to listen to podcasts, to do other things, to think or just take a break and enjoy the prairie, honestly.

I live in a really beautiful part of the country and it's quiet. It's easy driving. I mean, short of the winters that can be tough, sledding, you know, use that expression. But not every day is that way. Even during the wintertime, I have a lot of freedom to just kind of do what I need to do and pursue that.

And the company I have, again, is supportive. They think it's kind of great that I'm doing this too and I'm not going to just be a truck driver. That's great. I'm with you. I like driving. If someone would pay me $25 an hour to go out and drive two days a week, I don't know.

I'd be tempted by that because I enjoy it. I like driving. It's one of my things. I enjoy it. I like being out on the road. One of my happiest places is being behind a wheel with the interstate in front of me. Well, and honestly, once you add the gears, I mean, it's a 10-speed transmission.

So you just get used to it. You're shifting and you got air brakes and the whole bit. I mean, there's a lot I love about driving. I feel like a man. I know. Well, I've got a beard now to go with it. I feel like I'm the truck driver.

You put on your flannel shirt and someday soon, you'll probably start chewing tobacco to fit in. I'm going to put a stop somewhere. I might interfere with the wife. Indeed. Indeed. Well, awesome. Ben, Deb, this has been really fun. Is there anything else or any words of wisdom, even speaking to truck drivers, anything else that you'd love to share with my audience about ways to really use this idea or other ideas to capitalize and improve their own financial lives?

I would just say that you have to be open and realistic that life demands sacrifice, no matter how you look at it, no matter what your end game is. You need to sacrifice sometimes in little ways, sometimes in big ways, but that can really give you a big payoff.

I mean, when we first started off trucking, I certainly never thought we'd be and ended up living in North Dakota with the life that we have now, live now, but we never would have gotten here had we not taken the steps we did and drove all those miles we did and had that experience of truck driving.

So it was a lot of fun, but it was also a sacrifice in a lot of ways. I mean, we kind of glorify it a little bit in our memory, I think, but you deal with a lot of frustration. And so there is some hardship that comes with it, but it's worth every bit of sacrifice, not only with over-the-road truck driving, but also with the driving that Ben is doing now in the midst of working on his business.

But it's so worthwhile. You see the end game in sight, and you've got to charge through sometimes to get to that point, but it's worth it every single time. Right. Well, and then, honestly, truck driving is not a bad career. In terms of blue-collar work, it's probably some of the best work you can get out there.

I mean, right now, I do LTL work, so I actually move the freight. So I mean, it's a little more labor-intensive, which I actually kind of enjoy. I mean, my workout twice a week is my job. I don't have to pay any extra for it. And I mean, some of my pallets, I move up to 3,000 to 4,000 pounds.

I mean, that's not common, but they do get that heavy. And yeah, I mean, you build some bulk to be able to do the job. But I mean, I don't know, even just over-the-road truck driving, if you're willing to pursue some of the more special lines of hauling, it can pay very well for you.

I mean, because things you may not think about, but I mean, like a museum art exhibit that has to be moved around from the country has to be hauled by a truck driver. And so a lot of times, they're responsible, too, for the loading and unloading the freight. You can step into that.

Baseball teams, concerts, I'm trying to think of some of the other more special lines, you know, oversize, over-length, those sort of loads, which require a good bit of experience to get into. But once you get into that, that can be a very good paying line of work, even on a long-term basis.

I have to be honest, every now and again, I'm tempted. I'm like, well, maybe I'm at a point now where I've driven enough, I have a clean up enough of a record, it's sometimes tempting, like maybe I should just pursue that, you know, that would be a nice, could be a nice career path.

The work isn't that intensive for once it is, once you learn it. And it pays well for the amount of time it took you to become a truck driver. I would also certainly, just as kind of a closing thought here, recommend for those that are nearing retirement age, we've often talked that once we hit that, or once our daughter or any possible future children are out of the house, that we would like to go back to trucking just because it was such an enjoyable time, and you get paid for it.

So what's not to love about that? You get to see the country, you get a lot of great experiences, eat some great food and get paid very well. You reminded me of one other thing, though, that I need to ask you about real quick. Because in closing up, and just one comment on what you said.

Trucking is a great career, I'll phrase it in the form of a question. Obviously you've seen, trucking would be a great career with the exception of if you have a family, right? I mean, I just see some of these men especially who are out on the road, like you said, when you're on the road weeks at a time, even if you can just call home and talk to your family every night or every day, that's still nothing like being there.

And so it would seem to me that, yeah, husband and wife couple out together, that could be really good, but I would have a very difficult time recommending over the road trucking as a career to anyone with a family. Am I accurate in that? - Absolutely. - Yeah, that is definitely accurate.

And it is the thing to keep in mind. I mean, the industry is aware of this. I mean, right now there's a shortage of drivers, so I mean, they know they need to be doing more to try to make it more appealing to folks to try to step up and do this.

It's an older generation, older, I don't remember what the average age is for drivers, but I know it's higher than what the industry would like it to be. But it's because of those challenges of how can we make this work where we need a driver who's flexible and can be anywhere and go anywhere at any time, but who's also able to support a family and actually be at home.

Because I met plenty of guys who were trying to do that, and it was just, it was the pits for them because you'd get home for three to four days and you would just want to use those time, that time just to rest yourself, to kind of recuperate from the jostled schedule that you have as a truck driver.

And then there'd be this long hunting to-do list that you'd like to get to, but by the time you finally got somewhat acquainted and to schedule it back home, it was time to go back on the road. And so, I don't know, it definitely is not the life for someone who's got a young family especially, but really a family at all.

It's better suited if you're either single or, well, you're an older couple who is wanting to retire. Honestly, if you're looking to retire, I couldn't recommend it enough. I do think it would be a great, it does have its takeaways and there are plenty of stuff to learn and things to do and not to do.

But yeah, I think if you're an older couple and you wanted to use truck driving as a retirement plan, it wouldn't be a bad idea at all. - So the other question I was going to ask is, there are other methods or ways that you could get into driving as an income source that doesn't necessarily involve a semi-truck.

So for example, I've spent some time sometimes poking around the expediter forums online reading about these guys and they're driving a van and they're doing expedited freight, hauling a couple of pallets in a big white van from one destination to another. Could you just touch briefly on some of the other business models if somebody wanted to pursue something like this but they didn't necessarily want to drive an 18-wheeler and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of those models?

- Right, I mean that's not something I'm as familiar with but towards the end of our time, we were certainly giving serious consideration becoming owner-operators. Because again, I haven't gone into the detail of that. There was one driver I came across, one of the big reasons for why I started considering is we happened to talk to a guy from the Northeast and we met up with him in Portland, Oregon at a truck stop watching a baseball or a football game.

And he hauled veneer panels from the Northeast out to Central Oregon to have them applied to plywood so that they could then be shipped back out to Chicago. So some of this stuff is nuts too. First of all, the routes, you have to get something all the way from the Northeast out to the West Coast, they only go back East.

But he got paid just for that one shipment from the Northeast out to Central Oregon. It took him about four days as a solo driver and he got paid about eight grand to cover all this cost, more or less per week to do that. And then he would have freight already set up to take him back.

And so he had in his own particular circumstance, I mean, he only had to work about nine months out of the year, he had great flexibility. And he was making about 100 grand, I think. I mean, this was netting each year for that nine months worth of work and really opened up the doors for him to do a lot of other activities.

So I mean, I was like, wow, owner-operator, this could be kind of sweet. There's a lot of good pay potentially there and flexibility. So one of the aspects then of trucking is called custom critical or the expedited side of the business where folks need something that's either highly secure or highly time sensitive and needs to go with great urgency.

And you don't have to necessarily haul an 18-wheeler, although there are custom critical 18-wheeler divisions, but a lot of them are just straight vans with a very nice sleeper. They tend to have a much nicer sleeper than you have in your typical semi. And people just go around in a straight truck moving freight.

It's kind of like an ambulance-like setup. Once you get the call for the freight to be moved, you have to stop and drop everything you do and move. But yeah, the pay in that sort of circumstances is pretty good. So if you didn't want to drive an 18-wheeler and that would be intimidating to you, although I have to say after doing it for as long as I do, I mean, I feel like it's just a big SUV to me anymore.

I mean, I'm really used to them. But if you found an 18-wheeler to be too intimidating, there are other smaller versions of over the road life that you could pursue in many ways to pay just as well as an 18-wheeler if not better. Yeah. And there are other ways to get into the business as a part-time thing or with less financial risk than buying a multi-hundred thousand dollar semi truck.

So I see guys, I talk to the guys that are running a one-ton pickup truck hauling three or four cars. You can haul cars. You can drive the van and do expedited freight. There's all kinds of little niches just like any business and you can find something that fits you and your personality and your goals.

I talk to some of the expediters. You just spot them in a white van usually sitting at a truck stop and just talk to them. And some of them really love that lifestyle because they have more free time and they don't mind just being at the call of the – they don't mind being all of a sudden sent from here to there because they have more free time than perhaps you might as a company driver.

So there are different ways just like with anything. Well, awesome. Ben, tell us about – you have your website for your business in case anybody would like to connect with you for your financial planning expertise and also do you want to publish the blog that you guys wrote when you were on the road actively?

Yeah, sure. I mean that would be fun. My wife was the main person to write on that. I really – we were just looking through some of her posts yesterday. She has such a nice style I think in terms of writing. It captures a lot of just the moods that we had in terms of driving and different things.

So it's been a good memoir of sorts. So that blog, I'll let Deb chime in on that because she knows it better than I do. The web address is trucku42, all spelled out, dot blogspot.com. So T-R-U-C-K-Y-O-U-F-O-R-T-W-O dot blogspot.com and then for all the trucking posts, it's just a backslash trucking and that will hold up or pull up all of the posts that we had for trucking.

So it's a really fun memoir to go back through there and read all of the fun times and the exasperating times because there certainly were lots of those too. Yeah. And then the business is bonafidefinance.com. So it's bonafide finance but I have a Latin background. I had a minor in Latin and Greek and so it's bonafidefinance.com.

You're one of those snobs. I still keep up on it actually. It's not as much as it used to be but I can still read Latin. That's awesome. Well, thank you guys both very much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you, Joshua. So my friends, that's it for today's show.

Here's my encouragement to you as we go. If you're interested in trucking, use some of the information that Ben and Deb have shared with us on today's show. I think it's a legitimate opportunity for a short period of time. I meant to ask them if truckers are paying attention to the fact that they're going to be completely out of a career in probably, I guess, a decade with self-driving trucks.

But who knows? That's something you can research yourself. But I should at least just mention, I don't think trucking has a long-term career. They already have the technology. Go online if you're not familiar with it. They already have the technology for self-driving trucks. Once they get the regulatory environment figured out, the industry will be pressed toward efficiency and many truck drivers will be out of work.

A lot of hurdles to it still but many truck drivers will be out of work. However, it is still an opportunity in today's world that many people, many of you might want to pursue. Or take something like this and think about your life goals and think about if there's another opportunity that's near to you that would fit your goals.

Is there a way to use something like being an over-the-road truck driver wherein you're provided with housing, you're provided with food, you have lower expenses and you can work hard, work a lot and make a lot of money in a short period of time due to a lot of hard work.

Whether you're working on an oil rig up in Bismarck, North Dakota, whether you're driving a truck, whether you're fishing during the summer in Alaska doing salmon fishing or whether you're crewing on a freighter somewhere or whatever that type of approach is, you can take some of these blue-collar jobs that don't require a lot of experience or a lot of education that have some basic entry requirements and you can get into some of these things where they allow you to save a substantial amount of money in a short period of time.

Because of that ability to save a lot of money in a short period of time, that fund essentially becomes your freedom fund. Like from Ben and Deb's experience, if they hadn't spent that time paying off their student loans, just imagine two and a half years of work and you come out the other end with $100,000 in the bank.

That's really compelling. And $100,000 in the bank is enough to take the experience and knowledge that you learned from other things and apply it to your own financial freedom. Take these ideas and run with them. That's it for my show. If you enjoy and appreciate these concepts, please consider supporting Radical Personal Finance on Patreon.

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