Salary
Average Salary: $38,200
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $1,595,000
Trucking dough is good dough, as noted. But, it's also risky, and not just because you might get into an accident.
There's the high risk road in being an independent. Wanna buy your own truck? Try $200,000 and more for the fancy ones. Add another $25,000 for the communications and other tech equipment that many buyers demand. Add insurance and all kinds of other risks and it's…a lotta risk. And independent truckers often don't have totally packed schedules with buyers all over the country, so they'll often have to drive a "dead leg"—where the truck is empty, and they're making no money and just burning gas and tires.
Even the work-for-mega-trucking-company route has few or no guarantees. Truckers who are mega employees must pay union dues and cover many of their own costs, and they're subject to the whims of mechanical failures, weather delays, crabby clients, and other challenges (source). That is, for most drivers, if the truck isn't rolling, the driver isn't paid (much—like, as in twenty bucks a day if they sit around the shop all day waiting for the right part that never arrives to fix that noise in the engine).