Now you’ve decided you want to be a trucker with a trucker job. The next decision you have to make is whether you want to work for an owner or manager who will set up your jobs for you, or if you want to take on the responsibility of owning and managing your own truck and setting up your own shipping jobs.

Before making this important decision, there is a lot to consider. As the owner of your own truck, you will most likely have to take out a loan to purchase your truck. With used big rigs costing up anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 and new even more than that, a loan can be an impossibly substantial investment. And this doesn’t even take into account parts, repairs, and insurance costs, which you might even need another loan for. Insurance costs alone for your own big rig can be astronomical. On top of this, you have to be your own business manager, setting up your own shipping jobs.

For this reason, many truckers choose trucker jobs with large ownership and management shipping companies who maintain a large fleet of trucks. They’ve paid the initial loan on the truck, they pay for the parts and insurance, and they set up the shipping jobs. You are more or less using their trucks to ship their freight or another company’s freight that has hired your shipping company to transport. These management and ownership companies will handle the dispatch as well. You climb in to one of their trucks, and dispatch tells you where to ship the freight.

So if you’re considering a trucker job, you need to weigh the pros and cons of both owning and managing your own truck and being your own boss, or working for one of the many ownership and management shipping companies that maintain a fleet of trucks, including the parts and insurance, freeing you up to enjoy the trucker job itself.