at swift or any other carrier, you will NOT ever see that 36,000 a year, or more. your wife is fooling not only herself. she is also fooling you. she doesn't drive tractor-trailers for a living. what does she know? when you're finally out there with the sharks, you'll eventually wake up and realize you've made a big, big mistake. OTR trucking is a giant venus flytrap, black hole, whirl pool, vortex, etc....once you're in, you're stukt and ***t.
stay with your current job. swift now charges more per weekly advance. it used to be $2.00 or something like that. with a hundred dollar advance every week. that's 5200 dollars a year that goes straight to your pocket. 100 bucks doesn't really last an entire week..if you do shower on a daily basis, and eat semi-decent meals. that 5200 within the year plus the other otr expenses you pay for, and you're looking at well over $11,000 of your gross pay all spent. in 2008, i grossed $33,698. i had very little to nothing to show for it. my road expenses and cash advances took nearly half of it. bills took another good chunk. after it was all said and done, i had something like $5,000 leftover. i still came out more than even. i barely made it, however.
mind you, i will admit to having fudged my logbook here and there in order to do something. unlike dollarshort, i will admit to making flagrant fudges in order to do runs that were impossible otherwise. the payoff was very little. there's really no difference in the legalized and illegal way of running. there's a LOT more to gamble when/if i ever got caught. fortunately i never did.
before i cut this off, i really believe you should spend 18 1/2 minutes to watch a video mackman posted a little while back. it's called sleep when you can. drive when you have to. not a single shred of information is an exaggeration. if you're still convinced you'll make the big dollars, go ahead and wreck any kind of life you once had.