I can tell you flat out that you will not make $1000 net per week in a van. You might some weeks, but as an average, it'll be more like $600 a week, $700 maybe. It depends on your costs, and how well you control your expenses. Expenses are more than 50%. Honestly, when you figure in insurance, truck wash, van payments, fuel, QC, tolls, maintenance, tires, telephone, the list goes on, you're probably looking at a cost of operation being somewhere in the neighborhood of $.60 per mile.
I'm on with Panther, at %.77 per mile. I pay myself $.32 per loaded mile, plus accessorials like hand unload, border crossing, detention stop off. Everything else goes to the truck, and the truck pays for everything else, like fuel, tolls, insurance, QC, maintenance. Stuff to do with the living side of the van, creature comforts, I pay for those. At the end of a year the truck account has some extra built up in it, and I either take is as extra pay, or I put it into the van.
Plan on driving an additional 30% deadhead over the loaded miles, as a general rule. Those who deadhead home to Michigan for the weekend from Texas will see higher deadhead rates.
For some ball park figuring, if I average .15 FSC, added to .77, that's .92 per loaded mile. Total cost of operation of .60, plus my pay at .32 per mile equals, ta da, .92 per mile. But right there, 60 divided by 92 is 65% expenses, 35% net to you.
At 80,000 loaded miles, that's $73,000 gross. At .32 per mile my pay would be $25,600.
If you can average 1500 miles per week over the course of a 52 week year, you're looking at 78,000 loaded miles a year. Last year I had 98,000 loaded miles. Including FSC but not including accessorials, I grossed about $94,000. Expenses were about 60% at $56,000, and my pay at .32 was $31,000, which left a surplus net of $7000 (these are very rounded numbers). Some of that $7000 went to outfitting this new Sprinter, so I didn't take much of it at all for myself (other than the fact that it went mostly for creature comforts). The rest stays in the bank for unplanned emergencies.
My goal is 2500 miles per week over 48 weeks, 120,000 miles per year. It's very difficult to average 2500 miles a week, week in and week out. When I work, I usually get right around that mark, but there are always gonna be slow weeks that cut into it. You can have a week where you can be stuck for a day or two, get a short load, and then be stuck in another bad spot for another day or two. Or you take a day or two off to go home and it turns into a week, or you take a week off and it turns into two. Or you have to take a week off to wait on a repair part. It all adds up.
So realistically, you can't plan on much more than 80,000 miles in a year, and that's if you go out and stay out and run reasonably hard. Figure pay and expenses accordingly, and there ya go. About $25,000 a year to the driver, plus whatever extra chunk you as the owner wants to take out as the truck account builds up its nest egg.
The important thing it to keep your pay and expenses and the truck's pay and expenses separate.
