Rob K:
Harry Monk:
I’ve never claimed to have earned a fortune. To boil it down to numbers I probably made around £100 a week more than I would have done in an employed job in the area in which I was living. So over five years, that makes a return of £25,000 on an investment of £40,000, plus Working Tax Credits of around £10,000, as my accountant told me I wasn’t earning very much.So roughly £700-800 per week before tax and taking advantage of a tax loophole in your opinion made it worth your while, and that’s why you recommend doing it to other budding ODs who are thinking of giving it a go. OK then… What could possibly go wrong?
Do you know a bank or building society which pays a return on a five-year bond like that?
Do you have any other apples and oranges you’d like to compare?
I also came out of it with an Operator’s CPC, a driver’s CPC
And? Am I meant to be impressed by this faux superiority you now deem you hold over lower class truck driving minions?
thousands of pounds worth of tools and equipment which now live happily on my narrowboat
Which will collect dust and not see the light of day again until your family discovers them when they’re wrapping up your Estate.
it paid many of the bills at home, many of the costs of running my car, but most importantly of all I enjoyed the experience and lived a happy and equitable life. It was the right thing to do at the time, and then it wasn’t so I went off to do something else instead.
That’s great and I’m pleased you enjoyed the experience, but for the amount of hours you’d have put into it for your extra £100 week you are kidding yourself and everyone else here that it was “worth your while”. It was perhaps worth your while from an experience and enjoyment perspective, but certainly not from a time:money perspective because in real terms you’ve worked longer hours for less money overall once you factor in all the time required on the non-driving aspects of being an OD.
To me, what is sad is that you constantly pop up to pour cold water on other people’s ambitions without ever once having had an ambition of your own greater than being a steering wheel monkey.
You know nothing about me nor my ambitions so that’s just more rhetoric to add to your earlier rhetoric that becoming an OD is “worthwhile”. In the past 3 years I’ve done about 60 days driving a truck which was done purely to acquire the funding I needed at a faster pace so that I could start a new business. I no longer drive for a living and my tacho card has long since expired, so forgive me for finding it amusing how you are trying to belittle me over my apparent lack of ambition(s) while the Master of Ambition himself has packed up his steering wheel monkey gig to go do something ambitious with his life that doesn’t involve being a steering wheel monkey… Oh wait…
Now, why don’t you just jog off back to the Euro drivers forum to let everybody know how superior you are because you’ve never been outside Yorkshire?
Objection! I’ve been to Anglesey and Holy Island, neither of which are on the mainland
. What more do you want man?
Gosh, thank you for devoting so much time and effort to me and apologies for not returning the compliment.