How You Can Reduce Your Income Taxes

Owner-operators can reduce their income taxes in a number of ways, including:

• Claiming all eligible business expenses: Owner-operators can deduct many of the expenses associated with running their business, such as truck maintenance and repairs, fuel, insurance, loan interest, and registration. They can also deduct the cost of meals and incidental expenses when they are away from home overnight on business.

• Taking advantage of the per diem deduction: The per diem deduction is a simplified way for owner-operators to deduct meal and incidental expenses when they are away from home overnight. The IRS sets a daily rate for per diem deductions, which is currently $69 per day in the continental United States.

• Depreciating their truck and trailer: Owner-operators can depreciate their truck and trailer over time, which means they can deduct a portion of the cost of their vehicles each year.

• Setting up a retirement plan: Owner-operators can contribute to a retirement plan, such as a SEP IRA or solo 401(k), and deduct the contributions from their income.

• Filing their taxes as a business: Owner-operators should file their taxes as a business, which means they will use Schedule C to report their income and expenses. This allows them to take advantage of all of the business deductions that are available to them.

Here are some additional tips for owner-operators to reduce their income taxes:

• Keep good records: Owner-operators must keep good records of their income and expenses in order to claim deductions on their tax return. This includes keeping receipts for all business-related purchases, as well as mileage logs and other documentation to support their deductions.

• Use a tax professional: A tax professional can help owner-operators to identify all of the eligible deductions that they can claim and to prepare their tax return accurately.

It is important to note that the tax laws are complex and change frequently. Owner-operators should consult with a tax professional to ensure that they are taking advantage of all of the available tax breaks and to avoid making any costly mistakes. Owner-operators should also consult with a legal professional.

Preparing Semi Trucks for Winter Weather

Winter weather can be especially challenging for truck drivers. Snow, ice, and cold temperatures can make driving more difficult and dangerous. However, there are several things that truck drivers can do to prepare their trucks for winter weather and stay safe on the road.

1. Check the battery and electrical systems. Cold weather can make it harder for batteries to start engines, so it is important to have your battery tested and replaced if necessary. You should also clean the battery terminals and check the electrical connections for signs of corrosion.

2. Look over the fuel filter and water separator. Water in the fuel system can freeze and cause problems in cold weather. It is important to check the fuel filter and water separator regularly and drain them as needed. You may also want to use a fuel additive to help prevent water from freezing in the fuel system.

3. Start using fuel additives. Fuel additives can help to prevent gelling and improve fuel combustion in cold weather. This is especially important if you are using diesel fuel, which is more prone to gelling in cold temperatures.

4. Install an electric block heater. An electric block heater can help to keep your engine warm overnight and make it easier to start in the morning. This is especially important if you park your truck outdoors in cold weather.

5. Inspect the cooling system. Make sure that the coolant is at the proper level and that there are no leaks in the cooling system. You should also check the antifreeze concentration to make sure that it is adequate to protect your engine from freezing.

6. Check the tires. Make sure that the tires have adequate tread depth and that they are properly inflated. You may also want to consider switching to winter tires, which are designed to provide better traction in snow and ice.

7. Inspect the brakes. Make sure that the brakes are in good working order and that the brake pads and rotors have enough life left. You should also check the brake fluid level and make sure that it is at the proper level.

8. Check the lights and reflectors. Make sure that all lights and reflectors on the truck are working properly. This is especially important in winter weather conditions when visibility may be reduced.

9. Pack an emergency kit. In addition to the regular emergency supplies that you keep in your truck, you may also want to pack some additional items for winter weather, such as a blanket, hat, gloves, and a shovel.

By following these tips, truck drivers can help to prepare their trucks for winter weather and stay safe on the road.

Truck Driver Appreciation Week

Happy National Truck Driver Appreciation Week

Thanks For All You Do!

We know truck drivers are among the hardest working people around, taking on one of the toughest– and inarguably most important– jobs in the country. Afterall, logistics touches every industry in one way or another, and we all depend on the reliable and timely transport of goods from place to place to keep society moving forward. So in honor of National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, September 11th-17th, our team at Big Rig Lending wants to say a huge heartfelt “thank you,” to all our drivers.

Some Interesting Stats…

• Truck drivers in the United States drive approximately 125,000 miles each year, and about 3 million miles over the course of their careers.

• Truck drivers spend an average of 240 nights on the road/away from home each year.

• Truck drivers haul 70% of the nation’s freight, or about 10.5 billion tons annually.

A “Thank You” From Our Team at Big Rig

Dear truck drivers, you’re the reason we do what we do. Thank you for your hard work and diligence, and for ensuring that our team can continue to grow and thrive. You’re the real MVPs! We hope you feel celebrated and important not just this week, but always.

Need Funding?

Keeping truck drivers on the road is what we do best. If you or someone you know needs a commercial truck loan for repairs, tires, taxes, insurance, or working capital to ensure you can keep driving, our team can help.

Big Rig Lending Moves Fast. Really, really, really fast.

We are proud to announce Big Rig Lending’s sponsorship of The Warden for the 2021 No Prep Kings race season!

Built by mad scientists at Howe Motorsports and piloted by Jim Howe himself, The Warden is a 1968 Chevrolet Camaro powered by a Whipple supercharged big-block Hemi. After winning the 2019 Limited Drag Radial World Championship, Jim was invited to bring his machine and thirty-plus year of racing experience to drive for Team Kentucky on the 2020 season of STREET OUTLAWS: FASTEST IN AMERICA. In the upcoming season of Fastest in America, Jim led his own team for the first time. You’ll be able to see Big Rig Lending on The Warden for the upcoming season of STREET OUTLAWS: NO PREP KINGS on Discovery Channel in early 2022.

“It only makes sense that one of the fastest commercial truck lenders in the industry would team up with one of the fastest drag racers in the country,” says Chris McCoy, Marketing Manager at Big Rig Lending.

“Just like commercial truck owner-operators, Jim and the Howe Motorsports team know what it’s like to deal with unexpected repairs and downtime as they travel all over America during the race season. It’s BRL’s mission to keep hardworking drivers in their trucks and on the road, so we couldn’t be more excited to help Jim and The Warden keep on screaming down the track.”

The Warden is currently touring with the Street Outlaws Live Shows. If you find yourself near one of these events, make it a point to stop by and check it out. Not only will you get to see the best fender decal in drag racing, but you’re sure to have a blast watching the team put the pedal to the metal.

“We couldn’t be happier to have Big Rig as a partner. We’ve logged hundreds of thousands of miles over the years driving to races all over the country. That means we’ve had our fair share of breakdowns. When you spend that kind of time on the road, you spend a lot of time meeting truck drivers. Truckers are the backbone of this great country, and Big Rig is there to support them in a time of need. That makes everyone at Howe Motorsports proud to be associated with Big Rig Lending,” says Jim Howe, Jr.

ABOUT BIG RIG LENDING

Big Rig Lending loans working capital to owner-operators through their industry-leading 10-4 process. In just 10 minutes and 4 steps, you could get approved for a loan that will get you back on the road. Say you’re 50 miles away from bumpin’ the dock, and your truck breaks down? Or your insurance premium comes due, but you’re short this month? Then there’s the tax bill, which exceeds your estimate, and you need cash. No worries. Offering loans up to $25,000, Big Rig can help you take care of the problem with a commercial truck loan. We’ll keep lending so drivers can keep driving.

ABOUT HOWE MOTORSPORTS

Howe Motorsports, led by Jim Howe, Jr., is an American drag racing team based in Crossville, Tennessee. His drag racing roots started while growing up at Crossville Dragway, once owned by his family. For over thirty years, Jim Howe, Jr. has been drag racing in one form or another. From his early days of racing cars that made a few hundred horsepower to becoming the Limited Drag Radial World Champion. In recent years you can find him competing on the Discovery Channel’s wildly popular television shows Street Outlaws Fastest in America and Street Outlaws No Prep Kings.

For more information or to schedule an interview, please contact:

Brian May
bmay@maycreate.com
423-634-0123

Chattanooga Truck Driver Wins $2 Million Lottery Prize; Wife Thought He Had "Wrecked The Truck"

David Partain scratched off the ticket on the hood of his long haul truck, and he went numb when he saw what it revealed. The ticket he scratched was the third ticket in a string of wins for Mr. Partain playing Mega Millionaire Jumbo Bucks, a game with overall odds of 1:2.91. 

He had already won $25 on the game earlier and used that $25 for another ticket, winning a free ticket. 

The free ticket he scratched in the parking lot of the Eagle Travel Center in Soddy Daisy Sunday turned him into a multi-millionaire instantly, as the numbers revealed the $2 million top prize. 

“I saw it, but I didn’t believe it. I went numb,” said Mr. Partain, a 30-year and third-generation truck driver out of Chattanooga. He called his wife. “I called her and said, ‘I hit it.’ She thought I’d wrecked the truck.”

Mr. Partain’s ticket is the 309th ticket sold worth $1 million or more since the Lottery began on Jan. 20, 2004. His plans for the winnings include buying his wife a house, paying off the loan on his truck, and possibly a car for his 16-year-old daughter.

“It’s just something I enjoy doing,” he said of the Lottery’s instant games. “I just play to have fun.”

Original article via The Chattanoogan

Big Rig Lending Navigates Into New Home

We are excited to announce that Big Rig Lending has recently relocated to its new home in downtown Dalton, Georgia.  Our new mailing address is 220 S. Hamilton St.  Dalton, GA  30720.  We’ve expanded our office size to continue to be able to provide the loan products and service that you have come to love and that you deserve.

Bricks and Steel
Our new digs are not really that new. Our "new" office was actually built in 1940. It has the charm of many older buildings that you find in downtowns all across America, but has been recently remodeled to house our 21st Century online lending company. The exterior of the building is made of up of solid brick adorned with steel awnings, steel window trim, and steel light fixtures. This building, like Big Rig, was built to last. Our nation was built upon a foundation of bricks and steel, and we are honoring that history with our new location.

Asphalt and Concrete
The building is surrounded on three sides by asphalt and concrete. Busy asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks with pedestrians moving about downtown. Downtown Dalton has the kind of energy and pace that goes well with our fast paced company. We love the hustle and bustle in the inside and the outside of the new building. The transportation system in America was also built upon a foundation of asphalt and concrete. Our road system is one of the best in the world, and our nation relies upon these roads and drivers like you to move tons of freight across our country on a daily basis.

Trucks and Trailers
We recognize, however, that the foundation of our business is not our building. It is not just trucks and trailers. It’s you. The Driver. The Owner-Operator. You are what has helped us to grow, and you are what will take us to the next level. Your relationship with Big Rig Lending is what will keep us growing and expanding our business into the future.

At Big Rig Lending, We Lend and You Drive.

How McDonald's is Supporting America's Truck Drivers

As the world continues to address the quickly changing landscape, we are in this together with you, our valued friends in the trucking and transportation industry. Thank you for everything you are doing to keep essential parts of our economy going. We wanted to personally reach out to you and let you know that, to support you in this effort, McDonald’s restaurants are doing their best to remain open to provide hot meals to our customers and employees, as long as local, state, and federal governments continue to allow us to do so.

Due to local regulations and unprecedented business conditions, the majority of our locations are limited to Drive-Thru, Take Out and McDelivery. Our guests are welcome to join us inside the restaurant and take their meal with them. However, at some locations, only Drive-Thru and McDelivery are available. We realize that you can’t bring your rig through the Drive-Thru and for safety reasons, we cannot accept walk up orders at the Drive-Thru window. We recommend you follow these steps to order your favorite McDonald’s menu items:

• Use McDonald’s Mobile Order & Pay app, when you arrive at the restaurant

• Select Curbside Service and walk to the designated Trucker curbside sign on the sidewalk outside our designated door  

• Complete your order by entering the appropriate Trucker curbside number and we’ll bring your order to you at the designated door as soon as it’s ready! 

If you haven’t used the app before, you’ll love it! Beyond making it possible for you to order at this time, you can get the latest deals, place your order ahead of time and select the curbside option. You can also save your favorite orders and re-order at the click of the button, saving you valuable time. Drivers can download the app via from Apple iTunes or the Android Play Store or scan the QR code here.  Feel free to pass this information to your friends and co-workers.

Thank you again for all you’re doing during this uncertain time. Know that we’re doing everything we can to be there for you as long as we can. We’re in this together.
 

Bill Garrett
Senior Vice President, Operations, McDonald’s USA

View original article on mcdonalds.com

Mother of Metal

Thor 24: The most epic big-rig truck ever built

At first glance, Mike Harrah might be mistaken for someone in a ZZ Top tribute band, what with the sunshades, ball cap and of course that full, oh-so-fine beard that ends wherever it damn well pleases.

And just as the Hall of Fame rock band’s most iconic visual, a customized, fire-engine red 1933 Ford coupe, helped catapult it to superstardom via MTV music vids in the 1980s, Harrah’s jaw-dropping creation, Thor 24, a $7 million, 3,974-hp. mother of metal super rig, might be the defining achievement of his life.

Might. Because as founder and president of Caribou Industries, Harrah has designed and built, owned and operated restaurants, shopping malls, luxury condominium towers, golf courses, industrial parks, air-charter services, hotels and marinas, and subdivisions in Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, and California. So he’s had an incredible life already. He also has been a member of the Screen Actors Guild as a helicopter stunt pilot since 1998.

His real passion, though, has always been riding motorcycles, racing Grand National boats, off-road racing, water ski racing, snow skiing, and designing and building exotic cars and big-rig trucks.

Harrah believes he is blessed with an “extraordinary ability to look beyond the ordinary and transport the impossible into a reality.”

Perhaps only such a visionary (and multi-millionaire) could actually deliver Thor 24. It’s named Thor because of its enormous amount of raw power. The ‘24’ is from the V24-71 Detroit Diesel engine.

Currently living in Hawaii and running his multiple businesses from there, Harrah provided American Trucker with email responses to our questions.

How did you decide to design and build Thor 24, and why?
I’ve professionally raced cars, motorcycles and boats, and water, snow and jet skied my entire life. And I always had this vision of taking a huge diesel engine and putting it into a custom-built semi-truck. One day, this guy from San Pedro, California, called me and said he had these two 24-71 Detroit Diesel engines off a 300-foot boat he wanted to sell.

That’s 24 cylinders with 71 cubic inches per cylinder. If someone ever wanted a monster truck engine, this would be it! Wow!

I drove to San Pedro and looked at these two gigantic engines. They were incredible! I was so blown-away I bought them both right then. I brought them to Lake Havasu, Arizona, and they sat in a hangar.

After about a year, I started to envision Thor. I asked myself, “What could I design and build that was unlike anything else in the semi-truck world?” My first thought was to put both engines into one truck, but I didn’t because it was too heavy, with too much torque.

Then I decided the engine needed more power, and so I personally built a blower manifold that houses eight 871 blowers that force pressurized air through a pressure chamber and into four other blowers underneath, for a total of twelve 871 blowers. Then I fed nitrogen into the engine for even more power from top-mounted big and ugly injectors.

I spent about a year designing the manifold and all the systems, and machining the parts necessary out of wood to make wood templates. I then took the templates and turned them into aluminum fabrication that formed the final manifold. I built the entire engine around that manifold.

Almost everyone told me it would never work. That’s when I ran it on a dyno and realized its maximum power, with explosive potential.

I knew then I had to do something with the now-completed massive monster engine, 8-feet tall and 8-feet long overall dimensions. I hired a world-class crew to fabricate and manufacture all the parts for the entire truck, based on my overall design. I had a crew of three to four people. They worked on it every day for seven years to build the most incredible truck in the world—The Holy Mother of Metal I named Thor.

What inspired you?
As a child, [drag racing legend] Tommy Ivo had a four-engine dragster, which I now own, and I always thought it was the most incredible race-car vehicle to have a multi-engine setup.

I built a little model of that and thought it would be incredible to put a 24-71, which literally is four 671s or two V-12 Detroits, nose-to-nose.

What really kept me going was to not fail the great Tommy Ivo legacy, and I was determined to see this project through to the end.

A lot of people wanted me to put the engine in the back, but I was against that because I believed the engine should be in the front, especially with its massive size. And that’s when I designed the 1933 custom-built Ford Grille Tribute.

Every week I would go to our fabrication shop with a lot of different ideas that I thought should go here or there in the truck. I did some of the fabrication myself, and we continued building and adding and meticulously completing every component. There’s nothing in the truck that wasn’t designed or built by our team.

The whole project started as a string hanging from a ceiling, from which we tied the engine to and built everything around it.

Did you have the blueprint for it from the start or did it evolve?
I sketched and designed a blueprint to build the engine, but designed and built the rig as we went along—a process of trial and error.

How do people react when they see Thor 24 coming down the street or at an event?
It’s amazing to watch their faces. Depending on their age, which can be from 8 to 80, everyone sees something different. But what they all have is the wow factor. The massive size, powerful image, chrome, smoke, and bad to the bone. It’s overwhelming and compelling; it’s different from anything they’ve ever seen in the form of any type of vehicle.

How much have you driven it?
I’ve driven down Interstate 40 outside Havasu for about 50 miles and for the Thor sizzle reel on our website (Thor2471.com). It’s a lot to handle, but it runs and handles like a 2018 “Pete.”

The biggest issue in driving Thor isn’t the power; it’s stopping, because of its enormous power and weight. And looking forward from the driver’s seat, there’s a blind spot from the blowers, but we have forward-facing cameras. As you look up in the overhead, you can see perfectly clearly what’s in front of you. It takes a while to get used to, though.

Because of the complexities of driving Thor, and because it has such a tremendous amount of torque and power, you need one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas when you’re in tight quarters, because it wants to move forcefully all the time.

What are some of the unique things about Thor?
I would think that the engine and the original, one-of-a-kind 1979 Peter­bilt 359 crew cab that has been custom-stretched are unique. Oh, and there’s the jet engine that works as the ground power-auxiliary generator.

There’s such an enormous amount of incredible detail in every aspect of this rig. Most people don’t believe until they actually see it in person.

What about the stereo?
It’s a 1,500-watt-per-channel, 110-volt world-class sound system that runs off a 110-volt jet generator (APU). It has an array of speakers that come out of power door panels from each side of the truck.

Have you gotten interest for having Thor in movies?
We want to share it in the trucking industry with people from all walks of life, and we feel as though that would be best served by having it in a full-length movie, putting it into car and truck shows, and taking it to the drags for special exhibit events. And if you just have to own the only world-class, ultimate, badass monster semi-truck, it’s also for sale.

What are you working on now?
We’re about two-thirds complete with another project. I’m calling her Medusa. She has a 24-71 super-charged and turbo-charged mid-engine drivetrain, versus Thor, which has a front engine drivetrain. She will probably be finished in two years. Medusa is a little more streamlined, closer to the ground, and lighter in weight.

Do you keep track of what’s happening in the trucking industry?
I actually started driving a set of doubles when I was 19 years old, from the pineapple fields to the canneries in Maui. I fell in love with driving the big rigs. When I was 25, I bought three trucks and ran produce from the West to the East Coast. I ended up selling those trucks and pursuing my career in the construction industry.

I’ve held a Class A license for a long time. To relax, I’ll smoke a cigar, turn on some great tunes, head east on I-40, and just enjoy the drive. I have “big rig” in my blood.

Original article via American Trucker