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Trucking and Other Insurance
Physical damage, other important trucking insurance coverages
The law does not require physical damage insurance, but lenders do. A damage policy will pay no more than the value of the equipment. There's plenty more to consider within a damage policy, and don't neglect other important coverages detailed here.
January 1, 2025
Trucking and Other Insurance
Other ways to save on trucking insurance
Honesty is your best policy in efforts to reduce trucking-insurance premiums. If an insurer cancels your policy over lies or misleading information it follows you like a bad smell after hitting a skunk. No matter how hard you try you can’t get rid of it.
January 1, 2025
Trucking and Other Insurance
Income replacement insurance, disability, downtime claims
The probability of an income-interrupting event over the course of your career trucking is more likely than you might think. Understanding income-replacement insurances as well as post-accident claims processes is critical.
January 1, 2025
Trucking and Other Insurance
Health insurance for owner-operators: Covering personal risks is a cost of doing business
Complicating the difficult health picture for many OTR owner-operators is inadequate health insurance coverage: nearly half of owner-operators do not carry any health insurance at all. There are paths, however, to affordable coverage.
January 1, 2025
Trucking and Other Insurance
Ways to reduce health insurance costs with plan choice, tax-deductible savings in HSAs
The basics of high-deductible plans and Health Savings Accounts, which allow for tax-deductible savings that remain entirely tax-free if used for medical expenses.
January 1, 2025
Trucking and Other Insurance
Understanding Medicare: If you're getting close to 65, it's crucial
How many times have you been led to believe that a Medicare card was tantamount to a ticket to free health care? While it's not that -- you've been paying for it your entire working career -- it can get close if you understand the options.
January 1, 2025
Safety and Compliance
Practicing safety: Resist complacency
It’s as important as ever to resist the tendency to overlook otherwise repetitive tasks necessary for a safe trucking operation on-highway, aka "safety complacency." These are a but a few things that fall on your shoulders to maintain.
January 1, 2025
Safety and Compliance
6 pre- and post-trip inspection myths, and reality
Owner-operators know how important inspections are, but much of the conventional wisdom around inspections is more fiction than fact, which in some cases can lead to OOS violations.
January 1, 2025
Safety and Compliance
Following the rules of the road, and how they follow you: Inspections, violations and safety scores
The cat's long been out of the bag on federal safety scoring within the CSA program. Managing inspection, violation and crash data associated with your business starts with minding the small stuff with respect to maintenance and other rules of the road.
January 1, 2025
Safety and Compliance
Significant hours of service change: FMCSA's 2020 split-sleeper provision changes, explained
Most owner-operators feel professional truckers should be able to "split as they see fit," yet current rules at least allow for ways to get hours of rest during the workday without penalizing yourself on time available to drive.
January 1, 2025
Safety and Compliance
What's appropriate as 'personal conveyance' in the logbook or ELD under the hours rules?
This video, part of the Trucking Law series originally, explains regulatory guidance around "personal conveyance," making clear what is/isn't acceptable off-duty movement of the truck under the hours of service.
January 1, 2025
Safety and Compliance
How to challenge erroneous violation and crash data: FMCSA's DataQs system
Challenging erroneously assigned inspections or crashes, or incorrectly written violations and those tied to citations thrown out in a court of law ... if you're an independent owner-operator with motor carrier authority, it's your responsibility.
January 1, 2025
Safety and Compliance
Preventable or not? When to use DataQs to request crash reviews for preventability
A "nonpreventable" judgment excludes the crash from computation of the CSA scores associated with your business/leasing motor carrier's record in the system, thus ensuring you're not penalized for an accident you had no way of preventing.
January 1, 2025
Business Management
Keen fixed, variable cost understanding key to owner-operator success
Trying to reduce costs, let alone make sense of them, can be a complicated task. Understanding basic principles of operating costs can save you thousands of dollars a year.
January 1, 2025
Business Management
There's much more to earnings than per-mile pay for leased owner-operators: Understanding revenue
The per-mile or percentage figure isn't a cure for every ill. Nor does it mean a big settlement check is coming your way. Per-mile pay or the percentage you're paid for the load always must be considered with other compensation-package elements.
January 1, 2025
Business Management
Bookkeeping: Among the most important tasks for owner-operators to master
While a business services provider can save you time with the task, you should be taking an active role in collecting and recording the information. The more organized and thorough you can be, the better.
January 1, 2025
Business Management
Profit and loss statements: Tracking, analyzing your progress to effectively compete
Building a P&L on a monthly cadence allows you to track progress over time to see if business income is improving. The best, most successful among owner-operators use the P&L religiously to figure out how to adjust for changing conditions.
January 1, 2025
Business Management
Old-school, tried-and-true ways to simplify record-keeping
Creating basic monthly income/expense reports, profit-and-loss statements and filing taxes is accomplished more easily with simplified recordkeeping. This old-school file-folder process can easily be adapted to the digital world.
January 1, 2025
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