For the second quarter in a row, we brought in $100,000 from our YouTube channel and other related income streams! Yes, it still feels just as crazy as it did last quarter. However, it hasn’t always been this way. If this is your first time ever reading one of our income and expense reports, I suggest starting with the first one we ever published in July of 2016 (our total income was $603.26)

Now that we’re making what feels like a crazy amount of money from this business, I feel like it’s important to tell you why we started writing these reports in the first place – and why I am continuing to write them (at least until we hit our goal of 100 countries).

When we first made these reports in our 6th month of full-time travel, the goal was to make enough money to cover our travel expenses so we could continue traveling. The purpose was to document that journey. We thought that if we were successful, maybe we could inspire some other people along the way to go after a crazy dream of their own.

When Kara and I used to tell people we traveled full-time, we’d almost always get the same response: “I wish I could do that.” At that point in the conversation, I would usually just bite my tongue. I realize that, for some, full-time travel truly isn’t possible. But for most of the people who say, “I wish I could do that,” they could if they really wanted to. Yes, some people would have to work harder than others, but most people could make it happen if they were willing to make travel a priority.

One of the selfish reasons we started these reports was to show people that we weren’t trust fund kids, and to prove to them that travel doesn’t have to be expensive. We were sharing the exact numbers behind how 2 normal people could travel the world for a year for $35,000. The hope was that, down the road, we could also show how it was possible to start a business while traveling that would continue to fund our travels, but it was just a dream at that point.

Fast forward 3 years, and we can’t believe where that dream has taken us!

Because of this path we’ve found ourselves on, I feel like the purpose of these income and expense reports have shifted. When we started, I felt like the numbers we were sharing were very relatable to the average person who wanted to go and travel. We were writing as 2 broke newlyweds, and the reports proved that you didn’t need a lot of money to go travel.

Now, I feel like these reports have become much less relatable from a travel expense standpoint, and they aren’t serving their original purpose. For a long time, I went back and forth on whether or not to continue publishing these reports, but I ultimately realized that they are now serving a different purpose that I never intended them to serve.

Based on the feedback I’ve started receiving, these reports are inspiring others outside of the realm of travel to pursue whatever they’re passionate about. This is really special to me. I’ve known from the beginning that it’s not everyone’s dream to travel (I have family and friends who would hate living a week in our shoes). That’s why I’ve never wanted to preach “everyone should travel full-time or you aren’t living life to the fullest.”

I don’t believe that, but I do believe far too many people get swept up in the current of life and just end up wherever it takes them. Then, they look up one day and wonder how they got there. If I can inspire people to at least think about what they really want in life, and encourage them to start pursuing it some way, I consider that a success.

So I am going to continue writing these reports (at least until we hit 100 countries) to show people a real-life case study about two people who went against the grain to pursue something they were really passionate about. And it worked out better than they ever could have imagined.

I think most people believe you have to make a choice between pursuing your passion or making money. We’re proof that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. We didn’t go into this thinking we were going to start a successful business. We just wanted to have enough money to continue traveling. But because we started doing what we really enjoyed and worked really hard at it, we’ve found ourselves somewhere we never dreamed of being.

Thoughts on Quarter 1 of 2019

During Q4 of last year, our YouTube channel experienced a ton of growth, and our revenue shot up in areas we weren’t expecting at the beginning of the quarter. For example, we went from making $15,000 in YouTube ad revenue to $45,000 in ad revenue (due to the holidays). Then, at the last minute, we decided to offer a Black Friday discount on our online courses, and we did a surprising $15,000 in sales in 3 days.

All of this to say, we had some extreme things happen during Q4 that led us to $100,000 in revenue. Looking forward to Q1 of this year, I didn’t see how we could possibly top Q4. But once again, to my surprise, we did it.

As expected, we saw a large drop in YouTube ad revenue and course sales, but a few unexpected sponsorship opportunities and steady growth in affiliate income made up the difference. Let’s dive into the report, and I’ll explain in more detail.

Income Report

1. YouTube Ad Revenue – $31,649.68 (Change from Q4 -13,999.32)

During Q4 of last year there was a perfect storm that took our ad revenue to $45,000. We had a video go semi-viral in early November, and we gained a lot of new subscribers. Plus, advertisers were increasing their ad rates around the holidays so this lead to a huge increase in ad revenue. However, by the end of the quarter, our new subscribers were starting to level out again, and ad rates started dropping the day after Christmas. We knew we’d need something crazy to happen to maintain a similar level of ad revenue in Q1.

Unfortunately, nothing crazy happened during Q1, and our ad revenue dropped by almost $14,000. However, you can see from the chart above that our ad revenue was consistent throughout the quarter. So while it always hurts to see a decrease in revenue of any income stream, we are both very happy with where it has leveled out.

2. Patreon & PayPal – $10,285.51 (Change from Q4 -$1,285.15)

It’s scary to build a business on top of a platform that you don’t own (if you read the section above, $14,000 can be given or taken away pretty much overnight). So much of our success/failure is tied to the growth of our YouTube channel, and we have very little control over that growth. This is why we’re so grateful for our patrons! Thanks to their support, we know that no matter what YouTube decides, this is one consistent source of income that we can count on every month!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Patreon, it’s an online platform that allows you to support the work of your favorite creators giving them a chance to continue working on their creations without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from!

CLICK HERE to learn more about becoming a patron!

3. Course Sales – $9,758 (Change from Q4 -$13,153)

As I said in the introduction, last month our Black Friday Sale brought in $15,000 in 3 days. During Q1, we didn’t do any promotions for our courses outside of including the links in our videos and on our website. Due to the lack of intentional advertising, the drop in revenue was expected.

If you don’t know what online courses I’m talking about… We’ve each created a course to teach others the subjects where we have the most expertise. For me, that’s travel hacking, and for Kara, it’s video editing.

1. 30 Days to Becoming a Travel hacker is a course I created to teach others the strategies I use to save thousands of dollars on flights and hotels.
2. Kara’s Behind the Scenes Guide to Creating a Vlog is the course Kara created to let you watch over her shoulder and learn the exact methods she uses to create one of our travel vlogs.

4. Affiliate Income – $21,530.62  (Change from Q4 +$6,779.03)

• Amazon – $1,566.69
• Epidemic Sound – $3,660
• Creditcards.com – $16,303.93
• Audible – $90
• ConvertKit – $44.10
• Adobe – $205.17
• TubeBuddy – $22.80

The majority of our affiliate income comes from the ongoing promotion of companies and products we love such as Amazon, banks with awesome travel credit cards, and Epidemic Sound. It’s an awesome feeling to get rewarded for doing something we are already doing for free: recommending products we use and love.

The major driver of our affiliate income this quarter was credit card referrals. This was our first full quarter offering free credit card consultations and consistently publishing our “Top 10” blog post every month. Based on the feedback we’ve received, people are getting a lot of value out of these personal consultations. So it’s awesome that we’re able to offer this time-consuming service for free thanks to the commissions we receive from the banks.

If you’d like help figuring out which travel credit card(s) to sign up for to maximize your rewards and savings, you can request a FREE consultation by clicking the button below!

Request a Free Credit Card Consultation

Or you can check out our Top 10 Travel Credit Cards post that we update every month!

Our second largest source of affiliate income is Epidemic Sound. We get all the music for our YouTube videos through this service. It’s hard to find good music for YouTube videos. Kara used to waste hours of her life searching for music, and now she has a huge library of royalty-free songs to choose from! She loves this service, promotes it at the end of all of our videos, and we get paid anytime someone signs up for a free trial.

If you need music for YouTube videos, click here to check out Epidemic Sound!

Last but not least, Amazon also brought in a decent amount of affiliate income. The majority of our Amazon affiliate income is generated by people who visit the following pages where we recommend gear we use and love.

Our Vlogging Gear
Our Packing List
Keep Us on the Road

5. Sponsored Content – $42,670 (Change from Q4 +$33,670)

As our channel grows, we’re getting more and more opportunities to include sponsors in our videos. It seems like every day someone sends me an email asking us to review their product on our channel. We turn down the majority of these offers, but if the product/company meets our 3 criteria, then we entertain the idea of adding them as a sponsor:

1. Can we get genuinely excited about the product/company?
2. Is this something we think our viewers would be interested in knowing more about?
3. Does the company value our platform, and are they willing to pay us enough money?

This is where we saw a major growth in our income this quarter! Normally when a company wants to work with us, they will reach out and ask how much we would charge for _ (fill in the blank). This quarter, we were approached by a couple of companies with upfront offers that were bigger than any we had ever received. These offers allowed us to see that we had been undervaluing ourselves in sponsorship deals in the past.

We did a few more sponsorships than usual this quarter because a couple were too good to turn down. However, we expected to see a sustained increase in revenue in this category by increasing our rates and still keeping our sponsored videos to a minimum.

Total Q1 Income – $115,893.81 (Change from Q4 +$12,011.56)

The pie chart above gives you a quick breakdown of how each revenue stream is contributing to our total income.

Expense Report

Transportation Expenses – $1,984.79

Normally, we save money on our transportation expenses using miles and points that we’ve saved up by applying for the best travel credit cards. However, this quarter, the majority of our savings were thanks to sponsored trips.

For as much as we bounced around the globe this quarter, we spent surprisingly little on flights. During Q1 of this year, we traveled to 15 different countries, but we spent what most couples would for round trip flights to from the U.S. to Europe. This is because we planned our travel around a few key sponsorships in order to make sure most of our long-haul flights were covered. We also visited 5 of the 15 countries on a cruise ship, so that helped cut down our “transportation” costs as well.

Accommodation Expenses – $4,357.51

In the past, we have saved a lot of money on accommodations thanks to Airbnb credits that we have accumulated through people signing up for the service through our link. However, in the last report, I told you we had abruptly stopped receiving credits from Airbnb. We reached out to Airbnb about our links not working, but they said everything looked fine.

After a lot of internet research, I finally learned that Airbnb has a $5,000 credit limit cap. Since we had received $5,000 in credits, they quit giving us additional credits even though we were still referring new members. That alone is frustrating enough, but it’s even more frustrating that they didn’t tell us about the cap when we reached out, and instead told us our link seemed to be working fine. I digress.

To get around the cap, we have created a new account that is still offering you the same savings as our old account. So, if you’ve never signed up for Airbnb, and you want to save $40+, help us save money on our accommodations in the future by signing-up using our link below:

CLICK HERE to save $40+ on your first Airbnb

Destination Expenses – $4,135.79

This category is the money we spent while on the ground at each destination. This includes things like food, local transportation, and entertainment.

Business Expenses – $8,402.70

Each month we pay for several online subscriptions and other things to keep the vlog, blog, online courses, and email list running smoothly. We have also hired a few independent contractors to make sure we can keep things running smoothly as our channel and business continue to grow and evolve.

Travel Hacking Wingman -$3,297.50
If you submitted a credit card consultation or signed up for my travel hacking course, you probably know Benji. He helps manage our travel hacking Facebook group for the students of my 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker Course. He also helps me write travel hacking blog posts and give credit card consultations. I tried to do this alone for a long time, but I realized I needed help to ensure that we could help as many people as possible travel cheaper using my travel hacking strategies. So, I’m super thankful I’ve found a fellow travel hacker I trust to help me with the mission.

Video Editor – $2,290
At the moment we have two different editors who split time to help rough cut our footage. This is supposed to be saving Kara time and increasing the quality of our videos, but in all honesty, we’re still perfecting this process. It’s been a challenge to figure out how to transfer huge files around the world, coordinate schedules, and still be able to determine if this is actually saving us time. With that said, I think we’re getting close to a good process.

Convert Kit – $911.83
The great email platform that we use to send emails to our list of 50,000+ people. It’s great!

Teachable – $297
The platform where we host our courses – 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker and Kara’s Behind the Scenes Guide to Editing a Vlog.

Premiere Pro – $123.41
The program Kara uses to edit our videos.

Google Service – $59.70
This is the money we pay Google for our email address every month so that we can look semi-professional.

Touchnote Postcard – $179.95
This is the service we’re using to send postcards to our patrons!

Epidemic Sound – $45
This is where we get all of our royalty free music for our YouTube videos!

TubeBuddy – $57
This service allows us to bulk edit the cards and end screens across all of our videos on YouTube. Basically, we pay $19 to avoid spending hours of our lives monotonously changing small details on our channel.

Godaddy – $107.67
This is the service we use to pay for our website, hosting, and SSL certificates. Plus, all of the other domains I buy when I think of a good business idea 😉

Gleam.io – $49
This is the service we used to host our 500k Giveaway.

Click Funnels – $291
“I’m trying to get more sophisticated with our landing pages and sales funnels, but so far I’m just wasting money with this complicated service.” I wrote this in last quarter, but it’s still true.

Shipping – $56.66
We couldn’t take the drone to Cuba so we had to ship it to St. Maarten.

StoryBlocks – $117
We were really excited to start including more stock video in our vlogs to help tell a better story, but so far we’ve been disappointed with the selection.

Motion Array – $87
This was a service we tried out for animated text and maps. It didn’t work out.

Misc – $11.98
This was a charge on my credit card… I was pretty sure it was business related, but I didn’t know what it was.

OptinMonster – $197
If you’ve been to our website, you may recognize we have a few popups on different pages. This is the service we’re using to generate more email subscribers.

WeTransfer – $24
This is the service we used to allow everyone to send in videos for Kara’s birthday surprise.

Accountant – $200

New Camera Gear – $7,623.16

We upgraded almost all of gear this quarter! If you watched our video from Turkey, you know we struggled with the decision. However, after using the gear for a few months, we are very happy with the investment we made this quarter. The new drone and the new camera set up have lead to a noticeable difference in our video quality (in our opinion).

• Sony a7iii
• Sony G-Master F2.8 16-35
• DJI Ronin S
• DJI Mavic 2 Pro + Fly More Combo

Fixed Costs – $663.02

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $220.07

Google Fi – $221.19

Kara stuck with the T-Mobile Unlimited International plan because she can’t give up her iPhone. However, I decided to switch to Google Fi because it’s a lot faster than T-Mobile’s international service. Having separate carriers is increasing our overall phone bill, but neither of us are willing to budge from our position.

Health Insurance – $221.76

We switched to a new international health insurance plan this year: it’s called Safety Wing. It’s cheaper, but we haven’t actually had to use it, so I can’t tell you whether or not we recommend it.

Miscellaneous – $1040.31

This category is made up of expenses that didn’t fit into any of the categories above. Some little things like Spotify and Netflix, and a few bigger things like credit card annual fees.

Total Q4 Expenses – $28,207.28

Summary

That’s a wrap for our Quarter 1 income and expense report. These numbers continue to surprise us every quarter when I type them into the computer. If you find it hard to believe that we’re making this much money while traveling the world, you’re not alone. We pinch ourselves from time to time!

Thank you for all of your support. We couldn’t do it without you. I’d love to hear what you think about this report in the comments below!

In Q4 of this year, we brought in over $100,000 from our YouTube channel and other related income streams! Yes, that feels as crazy for me to type as it does for you to read. However, it hasn’t always been this way. If this is your first time ever reading one of our income and expense reports, I suggest starting with the first one we ever published in July of 2016 (our total income was $603.26)

Now that we’re making what feels like a crazy amount of money from this business, I feel like it’s important to tell you why we started writing these reports in the first place and why I am continuing to write them (at least until we hit our goal of 100 countries).

When we first made these reports in our 6th month of full-time travel, the goal was to make enough money to cover our travel expenses so we could continue traveling. The purpose was to document that journey. We thought that if we were successful, maybe we could inspire some other people along the way to go after a crazy dream of their own.

When Kara and I used to tell people we traveled full-time, we’d almost always get the same response: “I wish I could do that.” At that point in the conversation, I would usually just bite my tongue. I realize that for some, full-time travel truly isn’t possible. But for most of the people who say “I wish I could do that,” they could if they really wanted to. Yes, some people would have to work harder than others, but most people could make it happen if they were willing to make travel a priority.

One of the selfish reasons we started these reports was to show people that we weren’t trust fund kids and to prove to them that travel doesn’t have to be expensive. We were sharing the exact numbers behind how 2 people could travel the world for a year for $35,000. The hope was that, down the road, we could also show how it was possible to start a business while traveling that would continue to fund our travels, but it was just a dream at that point.

Fast forward 3 years, and we can’t believe where that dream has taken us!

And because of this path we’ve found ourselves on, I feel like the purpose of these income and expense reports have shifted. When we started, I felt like the numbers we were sharing were very relatable to the average person who wanted to go and travel. We were writing as 2 broke newlyweds, and the reports proved that you didn’t need a lot of money to go travel.

Now, I feel like these reports have become much less relatable from a travel expense standpoint, and they aren’t serving their original purpose. I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not to continue publishing, and I’ve almost quit a couple of times. However, I’ve recently realized that these reports are now serving a different purpose that I never intended them to serve.

Based on the feedback I’ve received from the last few reports, these reports are inspiring others outside of the realm of travel to pursue whatever they’re passionate about. This is really special to me. I’ve known from the beginning that it’s not everyone’s dream to travel (I have family and friends who would hate living a week in our shoes). That’s why I’ve never wanted to preach “everyone should travel full-time or you aren’t living life to the fullest.”

I don’t believe that, but I do believe far too many people get swept up in the current of life and just end up wherever it takes them. Then, they look up one day and wonder how they got there. If I can inspire people to at least think about what they really want in life and encourage them to start pursuing it some way, I consider that a success.

So I am going to continue writing these reports (at least until we hit 100 countries) to show people a real-life case study about two people who went against the grain to pursue something they were really passionate about, and it worked out better than they ever could have imagined.

I think most people think you have to make a choice between pursuing your passion or making money. We’re proof that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. We didn’t go into this thinking we were going to start a successful business. We just wanted to have enough money to continue traveling. But because we started doing what we really enjoyed, and worked really hard at it, we’ve found ourselves somewhere we never dreamed of being.

This introduction has become much longer than I intended. So, in summary, I now hope these reports inspire people to work hard at pursuing their passion because you never know where it will lead.

So without further ado, let’s jump into the Q4 Income and Expense Report.

Thoughts on Quarter 4 of 2018

Wow! Last quarter we made really good money from our Vespa Tour, and I didn’t think we’d get anywhere close to our Q3 profit numbers any time soon. But somehow our Q4 profits got dangerously close to the profits we posted in Q3. Chalk this one up as another report that I write in disbelief.

This quarter we made more money from YouTube ad revenue than I ever dreamed possible. To put it into perspective for you, we had never made more than $5,000 in one month from ad revenue. In the month of December, we made over $20,000. It was a crazy feeling watching our ad revenue skyrocket when it felt like we were doing the exact same thing we always do… uploading videos.

It really was the perfect storm in the best sense of the phrase. Ad rates drastically increased around the holidays because all of the advertisers are competing for your attention. At the same time, our channel was growing faster than ever due to a semi-viral video of us riding a train. These two things collided at the perfect time to quadruple our ad revenue.

Spoiler Alert: I’m writing this in February 2019, and I can tell you that the phrase “easy come, easy go” is very accurate when describing our future ad revenue after this quarter 🙁

The other biggest contributor to this quarter’s financial success was Black Friday. We almost let it go by without a thought, but I had some free time on Friday morning so I decided to send out an email offering a discount on both of our online courses. A couple of hours later, I opened my inbox in disbelief. We had sold more courses than we had in months in a couple of hours. It seemed like every time I refreshed my inbox, there would be another sell. By the end of the weekend when the sale ended, we had sold over $16,000 in courses in 4 days making Black Friday my new favorite holiday.

In all seriousness, thank you so much to everyone who trusted us enough to purchase one of our courses. We worked really hard putting them together, and we hope you’re getting a ton of value out of them.

Those were the two biggest factors that led to the big growth in our income. Everything pretty much increased proportionally with our channel growth. That tends to be how it goes. When our channel is growing, so do our other income streams. When our channel growth is slow, all of our other income streams go down.

It’s a bit of a scary position to be in with YouTube. They have so much control, but we’re very thankful that they’ve liked us a lot over the last 3 months.

Ok, let’s dive into the details of the Q4 report!

Income Report

1. YouTube Ad Revenue – $45,649 (Change from Q3 +31,701.41)

As I said in the intro, there was a perfect storm that took our ad revenue to levels we never expected. As you can see from the spike in the chart, we had a video go semi-viral in early November. That video led to a lot of overall channel growth which allowed us to maintain ad revenue above $500 per day for most of November. Part of this was due to our channel growth, and part was due to advertisers increasing their ad rates around the holidays. It was a fun ride, but as you can see these rates weren’t sustainable. You can already see them dropping off as soon as the Christmas season ended.

2. Patreon & PayPal – $11,570.66 (Change from Q3 +$5,997.14)

Our Patreon revenue is directly tied to the number of videos we upload. When you set up a page on Patreon, you can choose to charge your patrons monthly or per video. We choose “per video” for this very reason.  We didn’t want our patrons to pay us anything if we weren’t creating new content. For example, we didn’t upload a video in July, so we didn’t make any money from Patreon that month.

It’s scary to build a business on top of a platform that you don’t own. So much of our success/failure is tied to the growth of our YouTube channel, and we have very little control over that growth. This is why we’re so grateful for our patrons! Thanks to their support, we know that no matter what YouTube decides, this is one consistent source of income that we can count on every month!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Patreon, it’s an online platform that allows you to support the work of your favorite creators giving them a chance to continue working on their creations without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from!

CLICK HERE to learn more about becoming a patron!

3. Course Sales – $22,911 (Change from Q3 +$11,453)

Without looking at the dates at the bottom, can you guess when we launched our Black Friday sale? (Haha).

I didn’t expect it to go so well, but looking back I think I know why we were able to sell so many. Our channel was going through a big growth period, and I think we had a lot of new subscribers who had never heard of our courses before. We don’t talk about these very often, so I think people learning that they exist + a generous Black Friday discount ended up being the perfect combination.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about… We’ve each created an online course to teach others the subjects where we have the most expertise. For me, that’s travel hacking, and for Kara, it’s video editing.

1. 30 Days to Becoming a Travel hacker is a course I created to teach others the strategies I use to save thousands of dollars on flights and hotels.
2. Kara’s Behind the Scenes Guide to Creating a Vlog is the course Kara created to let you watch over her shoulder and learn the exact methods she uses to create one of our travel vlogs.

4. Affiliate Income – $14,751.59  (Change from Q3 +$78.41)

• Amazon – $1,159.61
• Epidemic Sound – $3,000
• Creditcards.com – $10,110.85
• Audible – $210
• ConvertKit – $44.10
• Adobe – $227.03

The majority of our affiliate income comes from the ongoing promotion of companies we love such as Amazon, banks with awesome travel credit cards, and Epidemic Sound. It’s an awesome feeling to get rewarded for doing something we are already doing for free, recommending products we use and love.

The really exciting part about our affiliate income this quarter is that it should all be reoccurring. We didn’t do any special promotion this quarter. We just went about business as usual using the systems we already have in place, and we earned over $14,000. This income isn’t completely passive, but it’s really close.

I’m personally really excited about how well the credit card affiliate program is going. I have been teaching people how to use credit cards to travel for less for years now, and it’s awesome to be making good money from something I was already doing for free!

If you’d like help figuring out which travel credit card(s) to sign up for to maximize your rewards and savings, you can request a FREE consultation by clicking the button below!

Request a Free Credit Card Consultation

Or you can check out our Top 10 Travel Credit Cards post that we update every month!

Our second largest source of affiliate income is Epidemic Sound. We get all the music for our YouTube videos through this service. It’s hard to find good music for YouTube videos. Kara used to waste hours of her life searching for music, and now she has a huge library of royalty-free songs to choose from! She loves this service, promotes it at the end of all of our videos, and we get paid anytime someone signs up for a free trial.

If you need music for YouTube videos, click here to check out Epidemic Sound!

Last but not least, Amazon also brought in a decent amount of affiliate income. The majority of our Amazon affiliate income is generated by people who visit the following pages where we recommend gear we use and love.

Our Vlogging Gear
Our Packing List
Keep Us on the Road

5. Sponsored Content – $9,000 (Change from Q3 +$500)

As our channel grows, we’re getting more and more opportunities to include sponsors in our videos. It seems like every day someone sends me an email asking us to review their product on our channel. We turn down the majority of these offers, but if the product/company meets our 3 criteria, then we entertain the idea of adding them as a sponsor.

1. Can we get genuinely excited about the product/company?
2. Is this something we think our viewers would be interested in knowing more about?
3. Does the company value our platform, and are they willing to pay us enough money?

This quarter we published 37 vlogs, and only 4 of those videos were sponsored. We included one advertisement for Trade at the beginning of a video and one advertisement for Quip at the beginning of a video. The other 2 videos that were sponsored by PADI. The great thing about the PADI videos is that we would have filmed those anyway, and partnering with them allowed us to make even better content (at least that’s our opinion).

Total Q3 Income – $103,882.25 (Change from Q3 -64,450.56)

The pie chart above gives you a quick breakdown of how each revenue stream is contributing to our total income.

Expense Report

Transportation Expenses – $2,822.39

Normally, we save money on our transportation expenses using miles and points that we’ve saved up by applying for the best travel credit cards. However, this quarter we ended up paying for a lot of flights out of pocket for a couple different reasons.

First, I got a little lazy with the planning and ended up having to book a couple of last-minute flights around the holidays. At this point, award flights weren’t available, and flights were expensive, so it was a double whammy.

Second, we are normally flexible with our travel plans. We can choose to fly when award flights are available or when the flights are really cheap. However, there were a few times this month where we had to be certain places on exact days. So if award flights weren’t available, we just had to suck it up and pay for the flights that were available that day.

With that said, we did spend 5 weeks in Chiang Mai, so we didn’t move as much as usual. This helped keep our transportation costs around what we normally spend in quarter.

Accommodation Expenses – $2,977.38

For the past 2 quarters, our accommodation expenses haven’t been over $500 which is crazy! This has mainly been due to Airbnb credits that we had accumulated through people signing up for the service through our link. Unfortunately, about halfway through the year, we stopped receiving credits from Airbnb and they eventually dried, which is one of the reasons our accommodation expenses are higher than normal. We reached out to Airbnb about our links not working, but they said everything looked fine. I just have a hard time believing that we went from getting multiple referrals per week to 0 referrals ever. I digress.

If you’ve never signed up for Airbnb, and you want to help me test my theory, you can sign-up at the link below.

CLICK HERE to save $40 on your first Airbnb

Another thing that increased the expense of our accommodations was the 5 weeks we took off to work in Chaing Mai and another 3 weeks in Mexico. Normally, if we’re going to take this much time off we go home, but we couldn’t this year for tax reasons.

Destination Expenses – $3,572.89

This category is the money we spent while on the ground at each destination. This includes things like food, local transportation, and entertainment.

Business Expenses – $8,806.56

Each month we pay for several online subscriptions and other things to keep the vlog, blog, online courses, and email list running smoothly. I look at most of these expenses as “investments” instead of expenses because most of them are tools that enable us to make money. With that said, I may have gotten a little over zealous this quarter. Having 8 work weeks gave me plenty of time to brain storm new ideas and new strategies, and I bought online courses and softwares with the hope of implementing a few new things in the future.

Travel Hacking Wingman -$2,002.68
Benji used to be our partnerships manager, but his role has morphed into being my travel hacking wingman. Benji helps manage our travel hacking Facebook group for the students of my 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker Course. He also helps me write travel hacking blog posts and give credit card consultations. I want to help as many people as possible travel cheaper using my travel hacking strategies, but I didn’t have enough time. So, I’m super thankful I’ve found a fellow travel hacker I trust to help me with the mission.

Video Editor – $397.83
After only publishing 20 videos in Q3, we knew something had to change. So we hired my sister to help rough cut videos. The goal was to save Kara some time in the editing process so that she could publish more videos. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working out as planned so we gave up pretty quickly. Even though my sister was doing a good job rough cutting the videos, by the time Kara watched the clips and got familiar with video, she didn’t end up saving much time.

Convert Kit – $2,849.50
The great email platform that we use to send emails to our list of 50,000+ people. Every year around black Friday, they offer a big discount for paying for the next year in full. Since we know the email list won’t be going anywhere, I went ahead and paid for it up front to save hundreds of dollars.

Teachable – $297
The platform where we host our courses – 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker and Kara’s Behind the Scenes Guide to Editing a Vlog.

Premiere Pro – $98.28
The program Kara uses to edit our videos.

Google Service – $55.14
This is the money we pay Google for our email address every month so that we can look semi-professional.

Touchnote Postcard – $749.75
This is the service we’re using to send postcards to our patrons!

Epidemic Sound – $45
This is where we get all of our royalty free music for our YouTube videos!

TubeBuddy – $57
This service allows us to bulk edit the cards and end cards across all of our videos on YouTube. Basically, we pay $19 to avoid spending hours of our lives monotonously changing cards on our channel.

Godaddy – $386.47
This is the service we use to pay for our website, hosting, and SSL certificates. Plus, all of the other domains I buy when I think of a good business idea 😉

Equipment– $440.51
We bought the new GoPro Hero 7 for our diving trip in the Dominican Republic, and it’s the first GoPro we’ve ever enjoyed using.

Gleam.io – $49
This is the service we used to host our 400k Giveaway.

Fiverr – $42
I wrote a travel hacking ebook in November, and I used Fiverr to get 6 different cover options designed.

Facebook Ads – $48.87
I think there’s a huge opportunity to increase our business with Facebook ads so I was just running a few tests.

Click Funnels – $194
I’m trying to get more sophisticated with our landing pages and sales funnels, but so far I’m just wasting money with this complicated service.

Webinar Jam – $497
I had a grand idea to start hosting more webinars this year. So far I’ve hosted 0. I’m hoping since I paid so much for a webinar software it will motivate me to follow through we the idea sooner rather than later.

Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course – $169
I bought this course thinking I’d learn a lot about affiliate marketing, but as I should know by now, there’s no magic formula. You have to spend a lot of time putting in the work. I’m not saying the information in this course wasn’t good, it just wasn’t life-changing.

Giveaway Prizes – $294
This is the money we spent buying the prizes for the 400k Giveaway winner.

Shipping – $94.53
We couldn’t take the drone to Cuba so we had to ship it to St. Maarten.

StoryBlocks – $39
We were really excited to start including more stock video in our vlogs that helped tell a better story, but so far we’ve been disappointed with the selection.

Fixed Costs – $880.67

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $220.07

Health Insurance – $372

Google Fi – $288.60

It would be irresponsible to travel without health insurance, so we pay what feels like too much money for an international health insurance plan every month. We used the T-Mobile Unlimited International plan for the first 2 years of our travels. However, at the beginning of this year, I decided to switch to the Google Pixel 2XL and try out Google’s phone service called Google Fi. It’s a lot faster than T-Mobile’s international service, but having separate carriers is increasing our overall phone bill. So I either need to convince Kara to come to the Android dark side or jump back on the T-Mobile train with Kara. We’re currently at a stand still.

Miscellaneous – $472.29

This category is made up of expenses that didn’t fit into any of the categories above. Some little things like Spotify and Netflix and a few bigger things like credit card annual fees and birthday presents for friends and family.

Total Q4 Expenses – $19,527.18

Summary

That’s a wrap for our Quarter 4 income and expense report. These reports are getting more and more unbelievable. If you find it hard to believe that we’re making this much money while traveling the world, you’re not alone. We’re having a hard time believing it too! Thank you for all of your support. We couldn’t do it without you. I’d love to hear what you think about this report in the comments below!

In Q3 of this year, we brought in over $168,000 from our YouTube channel and other related income streams! Yes, that feels as crazy for me to type as it does for you to read. However, it hasn’t always been this way. If this is your first time ever reading one of our income and expense reports, I suggest starting with the first one we ever published in July of 2016 (our total income was $603.26)

Now that we’re making what feels like a crazy amount of money from this business, I feel like it’s important to tell you why we started writing these reports in the first place. It is NOT to brag about how much money we’re making. Trust me, when we first started sending out these reports, we were actually losing a lot of money!

There are three major reasons we started sending out these income and expense reports:

1. I (Nate) am a business nerd! I always wonder how much money people are making and exactly how they’re making it. I wish more people would transparently share their entrepreneurial journey; so that’s why I do it! When other people do it, I find it inspiring and incredibly interesting! So I hope you’re inspired or at least entertained when you read these.

2. When Kara and I tell people that we travel full-time, the response we get the majority of the time is, “I wish I could do that.” At this point in the conversation I usually just bite my tongue. I realize that, for some, full-time travel truly isn’t possible. But for most of the people who say “I wish I could do that,” they could if they really wanted to. Yes, some people would have to work harder than others, but most people could make it happen if they were willing to make travel a priority.

A couple of years ago, Kara and I made travel our top priority. We saved up money for over a year, we moved out of our apartment, we sold our cars, and we quit our jobs. Now we put in the work (almost) every day to be able to afford to continue traveling. We hope that by sharing this report each month, it will inspire some of you to go from “I wish I could” to “How could I.”

3. We’re not special, and we want you to remember that, no matter where this journey takes us. I feel like once people become “successful” it’s easy to think they’re “special,” and that’s why they were able to achieve success. Our hope is that by sharing this journey from the beginning you’ll be able to see that two regular people had a crazy dream and worked hard to make it a reality. In turn, we hope this will inspire you to dream a big dream and go after it.

Thoughts on Quarter 3 of 2018

Wow! Where do I start? This quarter’s report is a special one. Who knows, this could be the best income and expense report we ever post. Hopefully not, but it will be a hard one to beat moving forward.

In the quarters leading up to this report, our income from YouTube and other related activities had increased to a level we never expected. This quarter, we continued to maintain our normal revenue streams, and we hosted our first tour which turned out to be our biggest financial win in the last 3 years.

Hosting our first tour was a daunting task and a big risk. Once we committed to hosting the tour, my brain raced with “what if” scenarios. What if we can’t fill all of the spots? What if people drop out at the last minute? What if this costs way more than our budget? What if someone wrecks a Vespa? What if we’re terrible hosts? What if no one has fun?

Thankfully, I’m a very optimistic person, and I can dismiss those thoughts almost as quickly as they come to mind. There were 101 reasons this tour wouldn’t work, but thankfully we didn’t let those doubts hold us back from one of the most rewarding months of our lives (both personally and financially).

When you get further down into the report and you see how much money we brought in from the tours, you’re going to think, “Wow! They brought in that much money and got to spend a month driving around Italy on a Vespa and eating delicious food?”

At the risk of sounding like we’re complaining, I’ll keep this part short. Technically, yes. We got paid well to ride Vespas around Italy. But it wasn’t all sunshine, rainbows, and delicious Italian wine. We knew going into it that hosting the tours would be a lot of work, but nothing could have prepared us for how all-consuming and exhausting it would be to host 4 weeks of tours back to back.

The tours were a huge success, but that came at the expense of neglecting everything else in our lives for an entire month (including our main focus for the last 2 years: our YouTube channel). Going into it, we thought Kara would be able to edit for a couple hours every night, and the plan was to continue posting a couple videos per week.

That didn’t happen. We weren’t able to upload a single video during the month of July, and you’ll see below that several of our income streams were down due to the decrease in uploads. However, the income from the Vespa Tour more than made up for the dips in other areas.

This was a super interesting quarter, and we wouldn’t trade the experiences that we’ve had over the last few months for anything. Even if the Vespa Tour wouldn’t have worked out financially, it was rewarding in ways that we never expected. There’s something about connecting in person over a unique shared experience that creates a very special bond. We want to say a huge thank you to everyone that came and made the trip so special!

Ok, let’s dive into the details of this unique Q3 report!

Income Report

1. YouTube Ad Revenue – $13,947.59 (Change from Q2 -$1,661.75)

We saw a dip in ad revenue this quarter, but it actually wasn’t as bad as I expected considering we didn’t upload a single video in the month of July. When I realized there was no way we were going to have time to edit and upload videos during the Vespa Tour, I got really nervous that YouTube would punish us for not uploading for a long period of time. I fully expected to see a huge drop in both new subscribers and ad revenue.

Even when we weren’t uploading, our ad revenue stayed between $100 – $150 per day, and when we started uploading again it jumped back up between $175 – $250. It’s nice to have a library of 500 videos that can continue getting views and earning ad revenue even when we aren’t posting new videos!

Although our channel’s ad revenue faired better than expected, I do feel like we lost some momentum after not posting for a month. Before the Vespa Tour, our channel was growing around 1,000 new subscribers per day. Ever since the tour, our growth has slowed to 500 – 700 new subscribers per day. It’s hard to complain too much about 500 – 700 per day, but it’s not a good feeling to see your growth curve going in the opposite direction.

2. Patreon & PayPal – $5,759.04 (Change from Q2 -$2,621.97)

Our Patreon revenue is directly tied to the number of videos we upload. When you set up a page on Patreon, you can choose to charge your patrons monthly or per video. We choose “per video” for this very reason.  We didn’t want our patrons to pay us anything if we weren’t creating new content. Since we didn’t upload a video in July, we didn’t make any money from Patreon that month.

It’s scary to build a business on top of a platform that you don’t own. So much of our success/failure is tied to the growth of our YouTube channel, and we have very little control over that growth. This is why we’re so grateful for our patrons! Thanks to their support, we know that no matter what YouTube decides, this is one consistent source of income that we can count on every month!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Patreon, it’s an online platform that allows you to support the work of your favorite creators giving them a chance to continue working on their creations without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from!

CLICK HERE to learn more about becoming a patron!

3. Course Sales – $11,453 (Change from Q2 -$4,896)

Our course income dropped by almost 30% this month, but it’s not as bad as it looks. Last month Kara launched her editing course and sold over 50 in the first week which inflated our Q2 income.

I had suspected that our sale of online courses was closely correlated to our YouTube channel’s growth, and since our channel is growing more slowly after neglecting it during the month of July, I expected the drop in course sales to be more substantial.

Thankfully, this was our first full quarter of selling 2 courses, and I believe that’s what kept our income at about $10,000 for the quarter. We’ve each created an online course to teach others the subjects where we have the most expertise. For me, that’s travel hacking, and for Kara, it’s video editing.

1. 30 Days to Becoming a Travel hacker is a course I created to teach others the strategies I use to save thousands of dollars on flights and hotels.
2. Kara’s Behind the Scenes Guide to Creating a Vlog is the course Kara created to let you watch over her shoulder and learn the exact methods she uses to create one of our travel vlogs.

We do very little promotion for either course. My plan for Q4 is to create an email funnel for both courses that promote the courses to our new subscribers. I’m hoping that this will increase our combined sales to $5,000 per month (that’s the goal).

4. Affiliate Income – $14,673.18  (Change from Q2 +$2,316.76)

• Amazon – $1,226.64
• Epidemic Sound – $2,850
• Creditcards.com – $7,172.64
• TravelCon – $2,892.75
• Audible – $165
• ConvertKit – $44.10
• Adobe – $322.05

The majority of our affiliate income comes from the ongoing promotion of companies we love such as Amazon, banks with awesome travel credit cards, and Epidemic Sound. It’s an awesome feeling to get handsomely rewarded for doing something we were already doing for free, recommending products we use and love.

This is where the income report really starts to get exciting! Of the $14,000+ we made from affiliates this month, over $11,000 should be reoccurring moving forward. The only one off promotion we did this month was for the TravelCon virtual ticket ($2,892.75).

This was our first full quarter being a part of a travel credit card affiliate program. Even with very little promotion, this program has become the biggest contributor to our affiliate income. Our biggest forms of promotion at the moment include our Top 10 Travel Credit Cards monthly posts, and our free credit card consultations.

If you’d like help figuring out which travel credit card(s) to sign up for to maximize your rewards and savings, you can request a FREE consultation by clicking the button below!

Request a Free Credit Card Consultation

My goal is to continue producing more helpful travel hacking content and hopefully get our credit card affiliate income to over $5,000 per month by the end of the year.

Our Epidemic Sound affiliate income is still increasing. We get all the music for our YouTube videos through this service. It’s hard to find good music for YouTube videos. Kara used to waste hours of her life searching for music, and now she has a huge library of royalty-free songs to choose from! She loves this service, promotes it at the end of all of our videos, and we get paid anytime someone signs up for a free trial.

If you need music for YouTube videos, click here to check out Epidemic Sound!

Last but not least, Amazon also brought in a decent amount of affiliate income. The majority of our Amazon affiliate income is generated by people who visit the following pages where we recommend gear we use and love.

Our Vlogging Gear
Our Packing List
Keep Us on the Road

5. Sponsored Content – $8,500 (Change from Q2 +$5,000)

As our channel grows, we’re getting more and more opportunities to include sponsors in our videos. It seems like every day someone sends me an email asking us to review their product on our channel. We turn down the majority of these offers, but if the product/company meets our 3 criteria, then we entertain the idea of adding them as a sponsor.

1. Can we get genuinely excited about the product/company?
2. Is this something we think our viewers would be interested in knowing more about?
3. Does the company value our platform, and are they willing to pay us enough money?

This quarter we published 20 vlogs, and only 1 of those videos was sponsored. We’re thankful that Audible saw enough value in our first sponsorship (in Q2) to sponsor a second video this quarter. I love listening to audiobooks, and it’s awesome that Audible is willing to pay us to recommend our favorites!

The biggest chunk of our “sponsorship” income came from a video that wasn’t even posted on our channel. We worked with Matador Network to make a video for GoRVing. The agreement was for us to travel to Maine and be the “talent” in the video, and post 2 Instagram photos promoting the final video when it was released on the Matador Network’s channel.

This was the most we had ever been paid for a sponsored video, and we didn’t even have to bother our audience (you) with an ad on our channel. It was awesome!

6. Vespa Tour – $113,000 (Change from Q2 +$113,000)

During the month of July, we hosted our first tour! It was exciting, fun, exhausting, stressful, and rewarding both emotionally and financially.

We conceived and planned this tour completely from scratch. When we originally had the idea for the tour, we didn’t know if anyone would be crazy enough to come on a tour planned by two YouTubers who had no clue what they were doing when it came to hosting a tour.

So, we were surprised when our tour sold out in less than an hour. We had originally only planned to host one week long tour, but we were encouraged by how quickly the first one sold out. So we opened up 2 additional weeks of tours that sold out within the month. Then our family and friends decided they wanted to come, so we planned a 4th week of the tour with them! In total, we hosted 4 weeks of tours with a total of 45 people.

When we originally sold the tickets we hadn’t fully planned the tour yet, and I had to do my best to estimate the costs. Thankfully, my estimates were decently accurate once everything was tallied up at the end of the tour. Although we spent a lot more than expected on some things, other things ended up costing less than we had budgeted.

The part that made the tour really special was also the reason it ended up being a big financial win for us. We planned and controlled every aspect of the trip, and we had (wonderful) friends and locals help out instead of hiring a professional company to oversee things like logistics and meals.

We didn’t do this to save money. We did it because we wanted our tour to be different from all of the other group tours. We wanted the people on the tour to connect with locals and have an experience that was authentic to the region.

Instead of hiring a professional tour guide, we hired a local college student who was knowledgeable about the region, but more importantly, super passionate about her hometown. Instead of hiring a professional chef, we had a local friend come to the villa and cook us authentic food that he grew up eating. Instead of meticulously planning out every aspect of the day, we left plenty of free time for people to go off on their Vespa and discover the area without a guide.

Hosting the Vespa Tour was one of the most rewarding experiences of our lives. Now that the tours are over, it feels like we have 30+ new best friends, and it was an incredible feeling to get to share one of our favorite places in the world with all of our new friends! If you came on the Vespa Tour and you’re reading this, thank you for making it such a special month.

There will probably never be another Vespa Tour, but we will definitely plan other tours. If you’d like to be the first to know when we announce our next tour, add your email below!

7. Speaking – $1,000 (Change from Q2 +$1,000)

A few weeks ago we gave our first talk ever at a conference. We were invited to speak about getting started on YouTube at TravelCon, which was NomadicMatt’s inaugural travel conference. We were super nervous before giving our first talk, but it went extremely well. I never thought I would enjoy public speaking, but it was a huge adrenaline rush and actually a lot of fun!

From a financial perspective, speaking at the conference didn’t really make sense. The $1,000 we got paid, didn’t even cover the cost of our flights from Kyrgyzstan ($1,400). So we actually ended up paying $400 to speak, and I probably spent close to 40 hours preparing for the talk.

With that said, we didn’t do it for the money. This was an opportunity for us to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones which I believe is the best way to grow as a person. And, hopefully, it put us in a position to give more talks down the road that could pay off financially (or at least give our brand more exposure).

Total Q3 Income – $168,332.81 (Change from Q2 +112,092.04)

The pie chart above gives you a quick breakdown of how each revenue stream is contributing to our total income.

Expense Report

Transportation Expenses – $3,648

Normally, we save money on our transportation expenses using miles and points that we’ve saved up by applying for the best travel credit cards. However, this month we ended up paying for a lot of flights out of pocket because we either 1. couldn’t find an available award flight or 2. it didn’t make financial sense to use our points.

We spent a lot of time in Central Asia this quarter, and it turns out that there aren’t a lot of award flights (flights you can book with points) available when traveling within the region. On top of that, there isn’t a lot of airline competition within the region which means flights aren’t cheap. So, we ended up spending more than usual on flights this quarter.

Plus, there were a couple times when award flights were available, but it actually made more sense to save our points and just pay for the flights. When I redeem frequent flyer miles, I try to get at least $.02 of value from each point. So, if I do the math, and I’m getting less than $.02 of value per point, I usually save my points and just pay for the flight. I’ll give you a quick example.

One way flights from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan to Austin, Texas were $700. It would have cost 42,500 United miles for an award ticket, plus taxes and fees of $100. Below is the math I use to get the value per mile.

$700 (cost of a paid ticket) – $150 (taxes and fees of award ticket) = $550 (true savings of using frequent flyer miles)

$550 (true savings of using frequent flyer miles)/42,500 (frequent flyer miles needed for award ticket = $.0129 (value per mile)

Since I was only getting a value of $.0129 per mile, I just decided to pay for the tickets to Austin instead of using my frequent flyer miles. I hope that makes sense and wasn’t too confusing.

Accommodation Expenses – $343.07

Our accommodation expenses seem to keep getting lower. It helps that we spent the month of July in Italy hosting the Vespa Tour. The villa that we stayed in definitely wasn’t free, but our accommodation costs were lumped in with the Vespa Tour expenses. Outside of the Vespa Tour, Airbnb credits we receive from referrals and a couple sponsored trips enabled us to keep our accommodation expenses crazy low this quarter!

Destination Expenses – $2,376.49

This category is the money we spent while on the ground at each destination. This includes things like food, local transportation, and entertainment.

Business Expenses – $3,208.80

Each month we pay for several online subscriptions and other things to keep the vlog, blog, online courses, and email list running smoothly. I look at most of these expenses as “investments” instead of expenses because most of them are tools that enable us to make money.

Partnerships Manager – $1,019.75
In addition to helping us secure partnerships, Benji also manages our private travel hacking Facebook group, writes blog posts, and helps with credit card consultations.  I guess it’s time to think about updating his title…

Video Editor – $601.60
For the first time ever, we hired an editor to help rough cut our videos in an effort to cut down on Kara’s editing time so we can start uploading more consistently. Kara would like me to make it VERY CLEAR that she still edits our videos. Our new editor just cuts off the unusable stuff at the beginning and end of every clip and then adds the clips to the timeline in Premiere Pro. This usually saves Kara a couple hours of time, but she’s still doing all of the real editing and crafting the overall story of the video.

Convert Kit – $0 (paid upfront yearly)
The great email platform that we use to send emails to our email list of 25,000+ people

Teachable – $297
The platform where I host my course “30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker”, “The Mistake Fare Manual”, and now Kara’s new editing course.

Premiere Pro – $98.28
The program Kara uses to edit our videos

Google Service – $49.17
This is the money we pay Google for our email address every month so that we can look semi-professional.

Touchnote Postcard – $299.90
This is the service we’re using to send postcards to our patrons!

Epidemic Sound – $45
This is where we get all of our royalty free music for our YouTube videos!

TubeBuddy – $57
This service allows us to bulk edit the cards and end cards across all of our videos on YouTube. Basically, we pay $19 to avoid spending hours of our lives monotonously changing cards on our channel.

Godaddy – $92.05
This is the service we use to pay for our website and all of the other domains I buy when I think of a good business idea 🙂

Equipment– $649.05
We had to invest in some new backpacks, hard drives, and other miscellaneous things this quarter.

Fixed Costs – $1,010.09

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $219.05

Health Insurance – $558

Google Fi – $233.04

It would be irresponsible to travel without health insurance, so we pay what feels like too much money for an international health insurance plan every month. We used the T-Mobile Unlimited International plan for the first 2 years of our travels. However, at the beginning of this year, I decided to switch to the Google Pixel 2XL and try out Google’s phone service called Project Fi. It’s a lot faster T-Mobile’s international service, but having separate carriers is increasing our overall phone bill. So I either need to convince Kara to come to the Android dark side or jump back on the T-Mobile train with Kara.

Miscellaneous – $550.31

This category is made up of expenses that didn’t fit into any of the categories above. Some little things like Spotify and Netflix and a few bigger things like credit card annual fees and birthday presents for friends and family.

Vespa Tour- $66,215.45

I’m not going to try and break this category down in detail. That needs an entire expense report of its own. Instead, I’ll just give you the total cost of running the Vespa Tour all lumped together.

Total Q2 Expenses – $11,136.76 + 66.215.45 = $77,352.21

Summary

“Savings”

This is how much money we saved this month thanks to partnerships, frequent flyer miles, and referrals. This is just a fun vanity metric to calculate. If you love numbers like me, it’s fun to look at how much money this quarter “should have” cost us.

Frequent Flyer Miles – $650

Before Kara and I left to travel full-time, we saved up almost 2 million miles and points! We’ve used these miles and points to save over $25,000 on travel expenses. If you want to learn how to do the same check out my course 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

This quarter we only put our frequent flyer miles to use once. We redeemed 25,000 United miles for a last minute flight from Dallas to Vancouver. These flights would have cost us over $800, but instead they were only $150 in taxes and fees. They would have been even cheaper, but we had to pay a fee for booking them at the last minute.

Airbnb Credits – $1,167.40

When someone signs up for Airbnb using our link, they save $40 on their first stay. Plus, we get between $20 – $40 when that person completes their first trip!

It’s a win-win, and we wanted to say thank you to everyone who has signed up and taken a trip using our link!

If you want to save $40 on your first Airbnb stay, click the link below to create an account!

CLICK HERE to save $40 on your first Airbnb

Partnerships – $4,500

Every month our YouTube channel gets over 3,000,000 views, which gives us opportunities to partner with companies for free experiences/accommodations in return for featuring them in our videos. Below are partnership exchanges we participated in this quarter.

Maine Trip (Including Flights) – $3,500

World Nomad Games – $1,000

Total “Savings” – $6,317.40

That’s a wrap for our Quarter 3 income and expense report. These reports are getting more and more unbelievable. If you find it hard to believe that we’re making this much money while traveling the world, you’re not alone. We’re having a hard time believing it too! Thank you for all of your support. We couldn’t do it without you. I’d love to hear what you think about this report in the comments below!

In Q2 of this year, we brought in over $56,000 from our YouTube channel and other related income streams! The numbers in this report feel completely crazy to us, but it hasn’t always been this way. If this is your first time ever reading one of our income and expense reports, I suggest starting with the first one we ever published in July of 2016 (our total income was $603.26)

Now that we’re making a significant amount of money from this business, I feel like it’s important to tell you why we started writing these reports in the first place. It is NOT to brag about how much money we’re making. Trust me, when we first started sending out these reports, we were actually losing a lot of money!

There are three major reasons we started sending out these income and expense reports:

1. I (Nate) am a business nerd! I always wonder how much money people are making and exactly how they’re making it. I wish more people would transparently share their entrepreneurial journey; so that’s why I do it! When other people do it, I find it inspiring and incredibly interesting! So I hope you’re inspired or at least entertained when you read these.

2. When Kara and I tell people that we travel full-time, the response we get the majority of the time is, “I wish I could do that.” At this point in the conversation I usually just bite my tongue. I realize that, for some, full-time travel truly isn’t possible. But for most of the people who say “I wish I could do that,” they could if they really wanted to. Yes, some people would have to work harder than others, but most people could make it happen if they were willing to make travel a priority.

A couple years ago, Kara and I made travel our top priority. We saved up money for over a year, we moved out of our apartment, we sold our cars, and we quit our jobs. Now we put in the work (almost) every day to be able to afford to continue traveling. We hope that by sharing this report each month, it will inspire some of you to go from “I wish I could” to “How could I.”

3. We’re not special, and we want you to remember that no matter where this journey takes us. I feel like once people become “successful” it’s easy to think they’re “special,” and that’s why they were able to achieve success. Our hope is that by sharing this journey from the beginning you’ll be able to see that two regular people had a crazy dream and worked hard to make it a reality. In turn, we hope this will inspire you to dream a big dream and go after it.

Thoughts on Quarter 2 of 2018

Last quarter I was in slight disbelief of the big numbers we were posting in our income and expense report. This quarter, we doubled our profits from last quarter… After two years of barely scraping by (financially), it feels surreal that our YouTube channel is turning into a real business that’s making real money.

Our channel is continuing to grow at 700 – 1,000 subscribers per day, and that growth is directly translating to substantial growth in all of our major revenue streams, but we’re not just sitting back on autopilot. We don’t know how long we’ll continue growing at this rate, so we’re trying to capitalize on the opportunity by creating additional income streams.

I’m really excited about both of the new income streams we created this quarter. First, Kara created an online course that teaches exactly how she edits our videos. Tons of people have asked her about her editing process, and I finally convinced her to take a week off from editing our videos to sit down and record her entire editing process.

If you want to watch over Kara’s shoulder as she edits one of our travel vlogs, click the link below to check out the course.

Kara’s Behind the Scenes Guide to Creating a Vlog

Second, I was finally able to get approved for the creditcards.com affiliate program. This affiliate program allows us to earn a commission anytime someone signs up for a credit card I mention on our blog or in my travel hacking course. We were already promoting these credit cards because they can help save travelers a ton of money. So, it’s nice to finally be rewarded for the referrals we’re sending their way!

Since travel credit card offers are constantly changing, I’ve started publishing a new blog every month ranking the top travel credit cards. If you want to see how much you can save on travel by signing up for one the top cards, check out my most recent post.

Top Travel Credit Cards for August 2018

If you find this post useful, we’d really appreciate it if you use our links to sign up for your next card.

Ok, let’s dive into the nitty gritty details of the Q2 report!

Income Report

1. YouTube Ad Revenue – $15,609.34 (Change from Q1 +$1,425.34)

Once again, we made more money than I ever thought we’d make from YouTube ad revenue. This quarter our views increased from 8 million to 10 million, and almost 50% of those videos were monetized. This means YouTube showed an ad on the video, and we split that ad revenue with YouTube.

So even though we’re splitting pennies with YouTube on each ad that’s shown on our channel, those pennies really start to add up as our channel views continue to increase. I’ve also noticed an increase in ad rates when we post videos from luxury destinations. So, the Maldives was a nice little bump for us. I assume that’s because advertisers are paying more to reach people who would potentially spend a lot of money to visit those destinations.

2. Patreon & PayPal – $8,381.01 (Change from Q1 +$1,880.01)

It’s scary to build a business on top of a platform that you don’t own. So much of our success/failure is tied to the growth of our YouTube channel, and we have very little control over that growth. For the second quarter in a row, YouTube has continued showering us with new subscribers. So, I’m starting to get more optimistic that the growth will continue, but in the back of my mind I’m always a little nervous YouTube will turn off the subscriber faucet, and we’ll be back where started.

This is why we’re so grateful for our patrons! Thanks to their support, we know that no matter what YouTube decides, this is one consistent source of income that we can count on every month!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Patreon, it’s an online platform that allows you to support the work of your favorite creators giving them a chance to continue working on their creations without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from!

CLICK HERE to learn more about becoming a patron!

3. Course Sales – $16,349 (Change from Q1 +$7,674)

We saw a huge increase in course sales this month because we now have 2 courses for sale! We’ve each created an online course to teach others the subjects where we have the most expertise. For me, that’s travel hacking, and for Kara, it’s video editing.

1. 30 Days to Becoming a Travel hacker is a course I created to teach others the strategies I use to save thousands of dollars on flights and hotels.
2. Kara’s Behind the Scenes Guide to Creating a Vlog is the course Kara created to let you watch over her shoulder and learn the exact methods she uses to create one of our travel vlogs.

As you can see from the chart above, we had a huge spike in course sales toward the end of May and beginning of June. That was the first week Kara launched her course, and we put a lot of effort into promoting the launch. It paid off because, in the first week, she sold over 50 courses!

Money aside, I’m super proud of all of the effort she put into creating the course. It took me a long time to convince her into making it because she didn’t think she was good enough, and she was scared people wouldn’t like it.

As I suspected, the exact opposite has been true! She’s received tons of good feedback, and she’s empowered almost 100 people with the ability to create beautiful and engaging videos.

If you’re interested in learning how to edit videos, you should really check it out – Kara’s Behind the Scenes Guide to Creating a Vlog

4. Affiliate Income – $12,356.42 (Change from Q1 +7,377.42)

• Amazon – $1,502.55
• Epidemic Sound – $1,800
• Creditcards.com – $2,442
• The Paradise Pack – $5,964
• Other – $341

The majority of our affiliate income comes from the ongoing promotion of companies we love such as Amazon and Epidemic Sound. This quarter however, we made the majority of our affiliate income from a one week affiliate promotion of The Paradise Pack.

The Paradise Pack is a huge collection of online resources that help people save money on travel and work from the road. Once per year my friend and travel hacking mentor, Travis Sherry, bundles all of these resources together and sells them for a HUGE discount. The catch is that the discount only lasts for one week. If you miss it, you have to wait until the next year to buy it. This year, there was over $5,000 worth of online resources being sold for $497.

We were honored to have Kara’s new course included in this year’s Paradise Pack. By including Kara’s course in the Paradise Pack, we were able to earn a 50% commission when someone purchased the pack using our link. This one week sale made us over $5,000 in affiliate income!

While $5,000 is a big chunk of change, I get much more excited about by the consistent streams of passive income through our ongoing affiliate promotions.

Up to this point, our biggest stream of affiliate income has been Epidemic Sound (around $1,000 per month). We get all the music for our YouTube videos through this service. It’s hard to find good music for YouTube videos. Kara used to waste hours of her life searching for music, and now she has a huge library of royalty-free songs to choose from! She loves this service, promotes it at the end of all of our videos, and we get paid anytime someone signs up for a free trial.

If you need music for YouTube videos, click here to check out Epidemic Sound!

I’m super excited about the potential of the creditcards.com affiliate relationship because in the first full month of promotion we were able to generate over $2,000 in income. My goal is to be consistently making $5,000 per month by the end of the year!

And last but not least, Amazon also brought in a decent amount of affiliate income. It’s pretty awesome that we made over $1,000 just by recommending products we use and love. The majority of our Amazon affiliate income is generated by people who visit the following pages.

Our Vlogging Gear
Our Packing List
Keep Us on the Road

5. Video Licensing – $45 (Change from Q1 -$455)

We aren’t proactive about seeking out sponsored videos or video licensing deals. However, sometimes they come to us. This quarter fewer people reached out to us than usual, but we were still able to sell a clip of sleeping in the airport for $45. At least there was a bit of a silver lining to having to sleep in the airport, although I would have gladly paid $45 to have not missed our flight.

5. Sponsored Content – $3,500 (Change from Q1 +2,000)

As our channel grows we’re getting more and more opportunities to include sponsors in our videos. It seems like every day someone sends me an email asking us to review their product on our channel. We turn down the majority of these offers, but if the product/company meets our 3 criteria, then we entertain the idea of adding them as a sponsor.

1. Can we get genuinely excited about the product/company?
2. Is this something we think our viewers would be interested in knowing more about?
3. Does the company value our platform, and are they willing to pay us enough money?

This quarter we published 33 vlogs, and 2 of those videos were sponsored. Our first sponsor was Quip. Quip is a toothbrush company which, admittedly, doesn’t scream perfect fit for an audience of travelers. However, I had almost purchased a Quip toothbrush for both of us last time we were in the United States because it looked like the perfect electric travel toothbrush. Once they sent us the brushes, we confirmed they were awesome and were really excited to promote them.

We also worked with Audible. I LOVE Audible and listening to audio books when we travel. So, when Audible reached out it was a no-brainer. We’re working on creating a long-term relationship with them so you’ll probably hear more about Audible soon!

Total Q2 Income – $56,240.77 (Change from Q1 +19,901.77)

The pie chart above gives you a quick breakdown of how each revenue stream is contributing to our total income.

Expense Report

Transportation Expenses – $1,737.09

Normally, we save money on our transportation expenses using miles and points that we’ve saved up by applying for the best travel credit cards. However, this month we were able to save all of our miles and points and still lower our cost thanks to a few sponsored flights.

Turkish Airlines was kind enough to sponsor our flights (in business class) to and from the Shorty Awards! We didn’t know if we would win a Shorty Award, and we debated for a long time whether or not it was worth spending the money to fly from Bali to New York to sit through an award ceremony where we would potentially lose. Thankfully, Turkish Airlines sponsored the flights so we didn’t have to make the tough decision.

Also, Epidemic Sound flew us to and from Stockholm so we could attend their annual company party as a way to say thank you for promoting their service!

I should probably add a lot of exclamation marks behind all of the sentences in the section above, because I don’t say these statements flippantly. This is a huge deal for us to get sponsored flights and we’re super grateful for both Turkish Airlines and Epidemic Sound!

Accommodation Expenses – $465.86

Our accommodation expenses seem to keep getting lower. Thanks to Airbnb credits we receive from referrals, hotel points, a couple sponsored trips, and good friends we were able to keep our accommodation expenses crazy low this quarter!

Destination Expenses – $2,424.86

This category is the money we spent while on the ground at each destination. This includes things like food, local transportation, and entertainment. Let’s be honest though, most of this spending probably went towards delicious local food.

Business Expenses – $3,489.55

Each month we pay for several online subscriptions and other things to keep the vlog, blog, online courses, and email list running smoothly. I look at most of these expenses as “investments” instead of expenses because most of them are tools that enable us to make money.

Partnerships Manager – $2,030
In addition to helping us secure partnerships, Benji also manages our private travel hacking Facebook group, writes blog posts, and helps with credit card consultations.  I guess it’s time to think about updating his title…

Convert Kit – $311.16
The great email platform that we use to send emails to our email list of 25,000+ people

Teachable – $297
The platform where I host my course “30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker”, “The Mistake Fare Manual”, and now Kara’s new editing course.

Premiere Pro – $98.28
The program Kara uses to edit our episodes

Google Service – $55.14
This is the money we pay Google for our email address every month so that we can look semi-professional.

Touchnote Postcard – $167.40
This is the service we’re using to send postcards to our patrons!

Epidemic Sound – $45
This is where we get all of our royalty free music for our YouTube videos!

TubeBuddy – $57
This service allows us to bulk edit the cards and end cards across all of our videos on YouTube. Basically, we pay $19 to avoid spending hours of our lives monotonously changing cards on our channel.

Motion Array – $57
We bought some cool new transitions for videos from this service.

Express VPN – $25.90
We had to buy a VPN so we could access YouTube on our river cruise and upload our videos.

Equipment – $328.23
While we were in Sweden we had to buy a new hard drive and microphone for our camera.

Fixed Costs – $1,157

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $374.28

Health Insurance – $558

Google Fi – $189.33

It would be irresponsible to travel without health insurance, so we pay what feels like too much money for an international health insurance plan every month. We’ve been really happy with our T-Mobile Unlimited International plan for the past 18 months. However, last quarter I decided to switch to a Google phone and try out Google’s phone service called Project Fi. So far it’s superior to T-Mobile’s international service, but I accidentally continued paying for T-Mobile for a couple months :/

Miscellaneous – $821.97

This category is made up of expenses that didn’t fit into any of the categories above. Some little things like Spotify and Netflix and a few bigger things like credit card annual fees and birthday presents for friends and family.

Total Q2 Expenses – $13,959.44

Summary

“Savings”

This is how much money we saved this month thanks to partnerships, frequent flyer miles, and referrals. This is just a fun vanity metric to calculate. If you love numbers like me, it’s fun to look at how much money this quarter “should have” cost us.

Hotel Points- $1,470

Before Kara and I left to travel full-time, we saved up almost 2 million miles and points! We’ve used these miles and points to save over $25,000 on travel expenses. If you want to learn how to do the same check out my course 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

JW Marriott Cairo – $1,470

Earlier this year we redeemed 270,000 Marriott points for a Nights + Flight package. This earned us a 7-night certificate which was good for a free 7-night stay at any Marriott category 1-5 hotel. We also got 132,000 United miles to redeem towards free flights. We cashed in our 7-night certificate for this stay. It costs $210 per night for a room at the Cairo JW Marriott. So, the total value of this certificate was $1,470!

Partnerships – $24,890

Every month our YouTube channel gets over 3,000,000 views, which gives us opportunities to partner with companies for free experiences/accommodations in return for featuring them in our videos. Below are partnership exchanges we participated in this quarter.

Bali Customized Tours Day Trip – $150

Turkish Airlines Business Class Flights (KUL > NYC > MLE) – $13,000

Soneva Maldives Experience – $7,000

Istanbul On Food – Food Tour – $120

Pyramids Day Trip – $120

Nile River Cruise – $3,900

Epidemic Sound Stockholm Trip – $1,600

Airbnb Credits – $580.84

When someone signs up for Airbnb using our link, they save $40 on their first stay. Plus, we get between $20 – $40 when that person completes their first trip!

It’s a win-win, and we wanted to say thank you to everyone who has signed up and taken a trip using our link!

If you want to save $40 on your first Airbnb stay, click the link below to create an account!

CLICK HERE to save $40 on your first Airbnb

Total “Savings” – $27,940.84

That’s a wrap for our Quarter 2 income and expense report. These reports are getting more and more unbelievable. If you find it hard to believe that we’re making this much money while traveling the world, you’re not alone. We’re having a hard time believing it too! Thank you for all of your support. We couldn’t do it without you. I’d love to hear what you think about this report in the comments below!

This report is being published late for a couple of reasons. The first is because we’ve been really busy. The second is because, for the first time since we started publishing these reports over a year and a half ago, it feels to me like we’re bragging by publishing this report.

Up until this point, we’ve been scraping by financially. We spent the majority of our savings during the first year of travel (2016), and we were still “losing” money up until Q4 of last year. These past reports were easy for me to publish because they showed that we were making sacrifices to pursue our dreams. This felt admirable to me, and I was proud of the financial risk we were taking to turn our dream into a reality.

I hesitated to hit publish on this report because I didn’t want people to get the wrong impression. However, when we first started publishing them, we said our goal was to inspire others to go after their big dreams. It wouldn’t be fair to share the struggle (financially) without sharing the success!

So, here it is… In Q1 of this year, we brought in over $36,000 from our YouTube channel and other related income streams! The numbers in the report feel completely crazy to us, but it hasn’t always been this way. If this is your first time ever reading one of our income and expense reports, I suggest starting with the first one we ever published in July of 2016. Spoiler alert, our total income was $603.26.

So, now more than ever, I feel like it’s important to tell you why we started writing these reports in the first place. It is NOT to brag about how much money we’re making. Trust me, when we first started sending out these reports, we were actually losing a lot of money!

There are three major reasons we started sending out these income and expense reports:

1. I (Nate) am a business nerd! I always wonder how much money people are making and exactly how they’re making it. I wish more people would transparently share their entrepreneurial journey; so that’s why I do it! When other people do it, I find it inspiring and incredibly interesting! So I hope you’re inspired or at least entertained when you read these.

2. When Kara and I tell people that we travel full-time, the response we get the majority of the time is, “I wish I could do that.” At this point in the conversation I usually just bite my tongue. I realize that, for some, full-time travel truly isn’t possible. But for most of the people who say “I wish I could do that,” they could if they really wanted to. Yes, some people would have to work harder than others, but most people could make it happen if they were willing to make travel a priority.

A couple years ago, Kara and I made travel our top priority. We saved up money for over a year, we moved out of our apartment, we sold our cars, and we quit our jobs. Now we put in the work (almost) every day to be able to afford to continue traveling. We hope that by sharing this report each month, it will inspire some of you to go from “I wish I could” to “How could I.”

3. We’re not special, and we want you to remember that no matter where this journey takes us. I feel like once people become “successful” it’s easy to think they’re “special,” and that’s why they were able to achieve success. At this point in our lives, Kara and I are pursuing this crazy dream of turning our passion for travel into a sustainable business, and we’re starting to see some level of success. Our hope is that by sharing this journey from the beginning you’ll be able to see that two regular people had a crazy dream and worked hard to make it a reality. In turn, we hope this will inspire you to dream a big dream and go after it.

Thoughts on Quarter 1 of 2018

Wow! I never thought we’d publish a Q1 income report that put us on track to earn over 6 figures in a year while traveling full-time. It’s crazy to look back at just how far we’ve come in the last 2 years. The first income and expense report we ever published was a monthly report of July of 2016. We made a grand total of $603.26.

I remember being really excited when we made $8,792 the first quarter of last year, and we almost broke even on our income and expenses. Here we are one year later, we’ve quadrupled our income, and it’s looking like we may be able to put some money in the bank for the first time since we started traveling.

In the beginning, we never thought we’d earn enough ad revenue from YouTube to pay the bills. So, we’ve focused on creating multiple income streams that are complements to our channel. Now that our channel is growing faster than ever other revenue streams are growing along with it.

To give you some perspective on the unexpected growth we’re experiencing, the majority of last year our channel received 75 to 100 new subscribers per day. This year, our channel is growing between 750 – 1,000 new subscribers per day. As more people discover our channel, there are more opportunities for them to buy our courses, sign up to become patrons, and buy stuff from our affiliate links.

So, our channel growth has resulted in a huge jump in our income this quarter, which I’ll break down for you now.

Income Report

1. YouTube Ad Revenue – $14,184.58 (Change from Q4 +$5,966)

Honestly, this is more money than I ever thought we’d make from YouTube ad revenue. We’ve worked hard to create multiple income streams because I didn’t think it would ever be possible to cover the expenses of traveling full time with YouTube ad revenue alone. It turns out I was wrong! Our ad revenue this quarter more than covered our expenses, and there was even a bit left over.

Out of the 8 million views that received in Q1, almost 50% of those videos were monetized (This means YouTube showed an ad on the video and we split that ad revenue with YouTube). Our monetization rate has been closer to 30% in the past. So, the major jump in ad revenue was due to a combination of increased views and a higher monetization rate.

2. Patreon & PayPal – $6,501 (Change from Q4 +$2,656)

It’s scary to build a business on top of a platform that you don’t own. So much of our success/failure is tied to the growth of our YouTube channel, and we have very little control over that growth. At the moment, YouTube is being very kind to us and showering us with new subscribers. But in the back of my mind I know that things could change at any moment, and we could be right back where we were last year (barely scraping by).

This is why we’re so grateful for our patrons! Thanks to their support, we know that no matter what YouTube decides, this is one consistent source of income that we can count on every month!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Patreon, it’s an online platform that allows you to support the work of your favorite creators giving them a chance to continue working on their creations without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from!

CLICK HERE to learn more about becoming a patron!

3. 30 Days To Becoming A Travel Hacker Course – $8,675 (Change from Q4 +$3,590.20)

30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker is a course I created to teach others the strategies I use to save thousands of dollars on flights and hotels.

This is a great example of our channel’s growth impacting other revenue streams we’ve created. In the description of every video, we promote a free guide I wrote called the “Ultimate Guide to Lounge Access.” When someone downloads this guide, they are added to our email list. Over the following week, I send them a lot of free and useful information about how they can reduce the cost of travel by implementing my favorite travel hacking strategies. At the end of the week, I give them the option to buy “30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker” where they’ll get access to all of my best travel hacking strategies in an easy to follow online course.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the world of online marketing, this is called a sales funnel. If your funnel is good, the more people you put in the funnel, the more people end up purchasing your product in the end.

Now that our channel is receiving over 3 million views per month, more than 50 people are downloading my guide and entering the funnel every single day. This means 50 new people per day learn about my course, and a small percentage end up purchasing it.

If you’re interested in learning how to earn and redeem frequent flyer miles to travel around the world for pennies on the dollar, check out 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

6. Affiliate Income – $4,979 (Change from Q4 +3,590)

• Amazon – $1036
• Epidemic Sound – $1,800
• Ultimate Photography Bundle- $1,978
• Other – $165

Last year we purchased a bunch of online photography resources at a crazy discount during a one week sale called the “Ultimate Photography Bundle.” Kara used these resources to improve her photo editing and level up our Instagram game. This year we had the opportunity to promote the bundle and earn a commission for each bundle we sold. I sent out an email to our list, and Kara made an Instagram story promoting it. It obviously resonated with our audience because we were able to make almost $2,000 with just those two posts.

Our most consistent source of affiliate income is Epidemic Sound. We get all the music for our YouTube videos through this service. It’s hard to find good music for YouTube videos. Kara used to waste hours of her life searching for music, now she has a huge library of royalty-free songs to choose from! She loves this service, promotes it at the end of all of our videos, and we get paid anytime someone signs up for a free trial.

If you need music for YouTube videos, click here to check out Epidemic Sound!

As usual, Amazon also brought in a decent amount of affiliate income. It’s pretty awesome that we made over $1,000 just by recommending products we use and love. The majority of our Amazon affiliate income is generated by people who visit the following pages.

Our Vlogging Gear
Our Packing List
Keep Us on the Road

5. Video Licensing – $500 (Change from Q4 -$1,000)

We aren’t proactive about seeking out sponsored videos or video licensing deals. However, sometimes they come to us. This quarter we granted non-exclusive licensing rights to our footage from the Bolivian Salt Flats to a company for $500.

5. Sponsored Content – $1,500 (Change from Q4 +1,500)

In the past we have done very little sponsored content, but as our channel grows we’re getting more and more opportunities. We turn down 90% of the opportunities that come our way because they aren’t a good fit for our channel, but this quarter we got an opportunity to work with DJI to review their new mobile gimbal.

The video we did for DJI was less about the money and more about (hopefully) creating a long-term relationship with a company that makes awesome products! The mobile gimbal was a good starting point, but we’re hoping we’ll have the opportunity to review one of their new drones at some point in the future!

Total Q1 Income – $36,339 (Change from Q4 +15,815)

The pie chart above gives you a quick breakdown of how each revenue stream is contributing to our total income.

Expense Report

Transportation Expenses – $3,949.49

We started the year off by going on a cruise through the middle east. The cruise wasn’t cheap, but it was a great way to see 4 middle eastern countries in the limited amount of time we had during the month of January. Cruises are a little tricky to categorize in this report because I track transportation and accommodations separately, and a cruise falls into both categories. So to keep things simple I just included all of the cruise expenses here in the transportation category.

Had it not been for the cruise, our transportation expenses would have looked crazy low for all of the travel that we did this quarter. We basically flew around the world 1.5 times for less than $2,000 thanks to miles and points!

Accommodation Expenses – $1,082.88

Thanks to Airbnb credits we receive from referrals, hotel points, and a couple sponsored trips, we were able to keep our accommodation expenses crazy low this quarter!

Destination Expenses – $2,424.86

This category is the money we spent while on the ground in each destination. This includes things like food, local transportation, and entertainment. Let’s be honest though, most of this spending probably went towards delicious local food.

Business Expenses – $3,219.88

Each month we pay for several online subscriptions and other things to keep the vlog, blog, online courses, and email list running smoothly. I look at most of these expenses as “investments” instead of expenses because most of them are tools that enable us to make money.

Partnerships Manager – $1,425
This quarter we gave Benji some additional responsibility. In addition to being our Strategic Partnerships Manager, he’s also started managing our private travel hacking Facebook group for people who purchase my travel hacking course. Now that we have over 200 members, it was getting hard for me to keep up with it. So I was very excited to get some help from a fellow travel hacking expert.

Travel Hustle Editor – $200
This quarter Claire finished up her final two posts in the Travel Hustle interview series she was writing for the blog!

Convert Kit – $323.54
The great email platform that we use to send emails to our email list of 25,000+ people

Teachable – $297
The platform where I host my course “30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker” and “The Mistake Fare Manual”

Premiere Pro – $98.28
The program Kara uses to edit our episodes

Google Service – $47.22
This is the money we pay Google for our email address every month so that we can look semi-professional.

Touchnote Postcard – $238.66
This is the service we’re using to send postcards to our patrons!

Epidemic Sound – $45
This is where we get all of our royalty free music for our YouTube videos!

TubeBuddy – $57
This service allows us to bulk edit the cards and end cards across all of our videos on YouTube. Basically, we pay $19 to avoid spending hours of our lives monotonously changing cards on our channel.

Gleam – $39
This is the service we used to host our 100k Giveaway.

Motion Array – $57
We bought some cool new transitions for videos from this service.

Express VPN – $12.95
We had to buy a VPN so we could access YouTube on our river cruise and upload our videos.

Fixed Costs – $1,157

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $371.13

Health Insurance – $558

Car Insurance – $210

Google Fi – $49.53

It would be irresponsible to travel without health insurance, so we pay what feels like too much money for an international health insurance plan every month. We’ve been really happy with our T-Mobile Unlimited International plan for the past 18 months. However, this quarter I decided to switch to a Google phone and try out Google’s phone service called Project Fi. It’s still early, but so far it’s far superior to T-Mobile’s international service.

Miscellaneous – $2,143,20

This category is made up of expenses that didn’t fit into any of the categories above. Normally, it’s made up a few small purchases we’ve made here and there, but this quarter we had a couple of the big expenses included in this category.

Chase Sapphire Reserve Membership Fee – $450

Google Pixel 2 XL – $948

Total Q2 Expenses – $13,959.44

Summary

“Savings”

This is how much money we saved this month thanks to partnerships, frequent flyer miles, and referrals. This is just a fun vanity metric to calculate. If you love numbers like me, it’s fun to look at how much money this quarter “should have” cost us.

Frequent Flyer Miles – $5,500

Before Kara and I left to travel full-time, we saved up almost 2 million miles and points! We’ve used these miles and points to save over $25,000 on travel expenses. If you want to learn how to do the same check out my course 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

Nashville to Oman – $1,800

We redeemed 85,000 United Airlines frequent flyer miles to fly from Nashville to Oman for only $44! It’s still crazy to me that frequent flyer miles give you the ability to book two tickets to the other side of the world for the same price that you’d pay for a nice dinner.

Dubai to Nashville – $1,600

These flights should have cost around $800 a piece. Instead, we redeemed 80,000 American Airlines miles, and we just paid $100 each in taxes and fees.

Nashville to Aruba – $600

We had to head straight from a wedding in Nashville to a wedding in Aruba. Thankfully, the flights didn’t break the bank. Instead of paying $600 for flights we redeemed 30,000 American Airlines miles and paid a grand total of $31.20 to fly to Aruba.

Aruba to Delhi – $1,500

It is not cheap to get from Aruba to Delhi, India. The cheapest tickets we could find would have cost us $1,500. Instead, we redeemed 100,000 United miles and only paid $184.82 for both tickets!

Partnerships – $8,160

Every month our YouTube channel gets over 3,000,000 views, which gives us opportunities to partner with companies for free experiences/accommodations in return for featuring them in our videos. Below are partnership exchanges we participated in this quarter.

Oman Desert Camp (2 nights) – $400

Visit Dubai (Hotel & Activities) – $1,610

Delhi Food Tour – $150

Myanmar River Cruise – $6,000

Airbnb Credits – $1,202.93

When someone signs up for Airbnb using our link, they save $40 off their stay. Plus, we get between $20 – $40 when that person completes their first stay!

It’s a win-win, and we wanted to say thank you to everyone who has signed up and taken a trip using our link!

If you want to save $40 on your first Airbnb stay, click the link below to create an account!

CLICK HERE to save $40 on your first Airbnb

Total “Savings” – $14,862

That wraps up our Quarter 1 income report. It’s still hard for me to believe what I just finished writing! We just made over $20,000 traveling the world. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Before we jump in, let me give you the “why” behind this report. It is NOT to brag about how much money we’re making. Trust me, when we first started sending out these reports, we were actually losing a lot of money!

There are three major reasons we started sending out these income and expense reports:

1. I (Nate) am a business nerd! I always wonder how much money people are making and exactly how they’re making it. I wish more people would transparently share their entrepreneurial journey; so that’s why I do it! When other people do it, I find it inspiring and incredibly interesting! So I hope you’re inspired or at least entertained when you read this.

2. When Kara and I tell people that we travel full-time, the response we get the majority of the time is, “I wish I could do that.” At this point in the conversation I usually just bite my tongue. I realize that, for some, full-time travel truly isn’t possible. But for most of the people who say “I wish I could do that,” they could if they really wanted to. Yes, some people would have to work harder than others to make it happen, but most people could make it happen if they were willing to make travel a priority.

A couple years ago, Kara and I made travel our top priority. We saved up money for over a year, we moved out of our apartment, we sold our cars, and we quit our jobs. Now we put in the work (almost) every day to be able to afford to continue traveling. We hope that by sharing this report each month, it will inspire some of you to go from “I wish I could” to “How can I.”

3. We’re not special, and we want you to remember that fact no matter where this journey takes us. I feel like once people become “successful” it’s easy to think they’re “special” and that’s why they were able to achieve success. But in reality, (almost) every successful person started out as a “regular” human. At this point in our lives, Kara and I are pursuing this crazy dream of turning our passion for travel into a sustainable business. If we do achieve success one day, we hope that by sharing this journey from the beginning you’ll be able to see that two regular people had a dream, went after it, and achieved success. In turn, we hope this will inspire you (a “regular person”) to dream a big dream and go after it!

Thoughts on Quarter 4 of 2017

Wow! Where do I start? We almost doubled our revenue from Quarter 3, and we made over $20,000 this quarter. Our channel is experiencing a ton of growth right now, and that’s leading to growth in all of our revenue streams. Plus, this quarter included the holiday season; so we were able to sell merchandise, and I was able to offer a special promotion on my course to increase sales. And as if things couldn’t get any better, we were also offered the most money we’ve ever been paid for a licensing deal. It was pretty much the perfect storm (in a good way) that allowed us to double our revenue this quarter.

Income Report

1. YouTube Ad Revenue – $8,217.75 (Change from Q3 +$6,079.96)

From the very beginning, we’ve looked for additional ways to fund our travels so we didn’t have to rely on ad revenue from YouTube. I didn’t think it would ever be possible to make enough money from YouTube ad revenue to sustain our travels, but if the last few months are any indication, I may be wrong.

Our channel experienced a ton (for us) of growth the last 3 months of 2017. It started in late September when we published our first Trans-Siberian Railway video. We had no clue people would be so eager for content about the Trans-Siberian Railway. To date, the first video from the trip has over half a million views!

We’ve had other videos in the past do really well, but usually, the growth is short-lived, and our channel levels back out somewhere around previous levels. To our surprise, our channel still hasn’t dipped back down and is continuing to grow!

To help put this growth in perspective, the first 9 months of 2017 we averaged just above $20 per day in YouTube ad revenue. During the last three months, we averaged over $90 per day! During the month of December alone we made almost $4,000.

Will we continue to get this level of ad revenue moving forward? I doubt it. I think this substantial increase in ad revenue was a perfect storm of sorts. Our channel was experiencing a lot of growth during the holiday season when ad rates are at their peak. Even though I expect our ad revenue to drop in the first quarter of 2017, I still think we’re going to be way ahead of last year’s averages!

2. Patreon – $3,854 (Change from Q3 +$50)

We’re in the good graces of YouTube at the moment, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last two years, it’s that things can change in an instant. It’s super comforting to know that if YouTube changed everything tomorrow, and our revenue went to $0, we would still have this incredible group of Patrons supporting our work!

Even though we only show an increase in $50 of support for the quarter, our base of patrons has actually grown substantially. For the majority of the year, we published around 20 videos per month. During the last three months, we only posted between 10-15. It seems that YouTube is rewarding us for slowing down our posting schedule (I think they like it when our most recent video racks up a lot of views before we publish a new one). Even though we slowed down our posting, our increase in new patrons has kept our revenue at a similar level.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Patreon, it’s an online platform that allows you to support the work of your favorite creators giving them a chance to continue working on their creations without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from!

CLICK HERE to learn more about becoming a patron!

3. 30 Days To Becoming A Travel Hacker Course – $4,420 (Change from Q3 $1,196)

In the last 3 months of the year, we saw a $1,000+ increase in course sales. The majority of this growth can be attributed to our Black Friday deal. For a few short days around Black Friday, I decreased the cost of my travel hacking course from $147 to $119. A lot of people jumped on the opportunity to grab the course at a discount. As you can see from the graph above, on Cyber Monday (the day the discount was ending) we made over $1,000 from course sales in a single day! Aside from the original course launch, that’s the most courses we’ve ever sold in a single day!

I had the idea to create this course for over a year before I actually made myself sit down and put it together. In the end, I probably spent over 100 hours creating it, but I’m so glad I finally found the self-disciple to make it happen. Making this course was the best thing I did for our finances in 2017! To date, it’s generated over $20,000 in passive income for us while we’ve been on the road.

In addition to it being a huge financial win for us this year, it’s also been super rewarding helping people travel to their dream destinations for pennies on the dollar. It makes my day when I get an email from someone who’s super excited about a cheap flight they just booked using the skill they learned in the course!

If you’re interested in learning how to earn and redeem frequent flyer miles to travel around the world for pennies on the dollar, check out 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

6. Affiliate Income – $1,388.80 (Change from Q3 +654.54)

• Amazon – $487.70
• Audible – $75
• Epidemic Sound – $780
• Gleam – $20
• Convert Kit – $26.10

Up until this point, Amazon has always been the main driver of our affiliate income. The majority of our affiliate income has come from recommending products we use and love on the following pages on our website.

Our Vlogging Gear
Our Packing List
Keep Us On The Road

However, this month my entrepreneurial wife took it upon herself to generate over $780 in affiliate from the music site we use and love called Epidemic Sound. I can’t take any credit for this increase in affiliate income. It was Kara’s idea to sign up for the Epidemic Sound affiliate program. It was her idea to start promoting their service at the end of our videos, and it’s really paid off.

We get all the music for our videos through Epidemic Sound. It’s really hard to find good music for YouTube videos. Kara used to waste hours of her life searching for music, and now she has a huge library of quality royalty-free songs to choose from!

If you need music for YouTube videos, click here to check out Epidemic Sound!

5. Sponsored Videos & Video Licensing – $1,500 (Change from Q3 -$922)

As I have said before, we aren’t proactive about seeking out sponsored videos or video licensing deals. However, now that we’ve published over 450 videos on YouTube, occasionally people find them and want to license them for their own projects. This quarter a media company putting together a video for a bank wanted exclusive rights to footage from one of our videos, and we were able to license it to them for $1,200. We also licensed two other videos (non-exclusively) for $150 to a travel company that creates those viral style videos that you see on Facebook.

6. Merch Sales – $1,152

It had been a year since we sold t-shirts and mugs, so we got my super talented sister to create a new design for us just in time for the holidays. Even though we sold 147 units, the profit margins were pretty low because we choose to print on high quality t-shirts. Honestly, we weren’t super happy with the quality of the merchandise we sold last year, so this year it was less about making money and more about making sure people got a shirt they would be really excited to wear!

Total Q4 Income – $20,532.55 (Change from Q3 $10,039.55)

Since the beginning, we’ve been trying to develop multiple income streams that will combine together to fund our travels. The pie chart above gives you a quick breakdown of how each revenue stream is contributing to our total income. I believe this is the first time YouTube has ever made up the largest percentage of our revenue.

Expense Report

Transportation Expenses – $2,133.91

We were at home 7 out of the last 12 weeks of the year for a wedding and the holidays, so we didn’t rack up as many transportation expenses as usual. This number would be extremely low, but we included the cost of our repositioning cruise in this section. The cost should really be spread across the accommodations as well, but I thought it would be cleaner to keep the entirety of the cruise expense in one place.

Accommodation Expenses – $0

Yes, you read that right. We spent $0 on accommodations during the last 3 months of the year. I was as shocked as you were when I was putting this report together. I’ll try to briefly explain how this happened. We spent three weeks in Italy staying with our awesome friends. We spent one night in London partnering with the Yotel in return for free accommodations. We spent two weeks on a repositioning cruise which we technically paid for, but those expenses were accounted for in the transportation section.

We spent 3 nights at an Airbnb in Barbados, and we redeemed airbnb credits that we got from referrals for a free stay. Our last two nights in Barbados we partnered with Sandals for a 2 night all-inclusive stay. We spent the rest of the year staying at our parents’ houses while were were home in Tennessee. All of this cost us a grand total of $0. We owe a big thank you to our parents and Bob and Gina for the 10 weeks of free accommodations!

Destination Expenses – $1,468.52 ($1,225 less than Q3)

This category is the money we spent while on the ground in each destination. This includes things like food, local transportation, and entertainment. This quarter also included buying Christmas gifts and other non-travel related expenses while we were home for 7 weeks.

Business Expenses – $4,517.33 ($2,059 more than Q3)

Each month we pay for several online subscriptions and other things to keep the vlog, blog, online course, and email list running smoothly. I look at most of these expenses as “investments” instead of expenses because most of them are tools that enable us to make money.

The main reason we had a huge increase in business expenses this month is because we paid for a 1-year subscription to our email service provider. Normally, we pay monthly, but they offered a huge discount on Black Friday if we paid for the year upfront.

Partnerships Manager – $1,625
In addition to being our Strategic Partnerships Manager, Benji is also an expert travel hacker. In Q4 he wrote a few new travel hacking posts for the blog.

Travel Hustle Editor – $600
Claire is the organizer and editor of our Travel Hustle interview series on the blog! She does an awesome job. She works full-time as a freelancer.

Convert Kit – $1,536.55
The great email platform that we use to send emails to our email list of 13,000+ people

Teachable – $297
The platform where I host my course “30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker” and “The Mistake Fare Manual”

Premiere Pro – $98.28
The program Kara uses to edit our videos.

Google Service – $45.00
This is the money we pay Google for our email address every month so that we can look semi-professional.

Touchnote Postcard – $223.71
This is the service we’re using to send postcards to our patrons!

Epidemic Sound – $45
We used free music from SoundCloud forever, but we’ve started paying $15 per month to Epidemic Sound for more access to royalty free music.

TubeBuddy – $57
This service allows us to bulk edit the cards and end cards across all of our videos on YouTube. Basically, we pay $19 to avoid spending hours of our lives monotonously changing cards on our channel.

GoDaddy – $39.51

We use Godaddy to host our website, but I don’t recommend you do the same. If you’re interested in starting a blog, I recommend going with Bluehost.

Fixel – $99

We’re going to be using this software to create some awesome content for Instagram! This was a one time purchase, not a monthly expense.

Fixed Costs – $1,204.13 ($47.14 more than Q3)

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $463.54

Health Insurance – $528.88

Car Insurance – $211.71

It would be irresponsible to travel without health insurance, so we pay what feels like too much money for an international health insurance plan every month. We’ve been happy with our T-Mobile International Unlimited plan for the past two years, but we’re getting tired of having our data limited to 2G speed while we’re traveling. In 2018 Nate is going to be trying out Google’s Project Fi. We’ll definitely report back on our findings!

Miscellaneous – $601.16

This category is made up of small things that didn’t fit into any of the categories above. Our miscellaneous expenses were a lot higher since we were at home for 7 weeks this quarter.

Total Q4 Expenses – $9,925.05 ($1,902.55 less than Q3)

Summary

“Savings”

This is how much money we saved this month thanks to partnerships, frequent flyer miles, and referrals. This is just a fun vanity metric to calculate. If you love numbers like me, it’s fun to look at how much money this month “should have” cost us.

Frequent Flyer Miles – $438.80

Before Kara and I left to travel full-time, we saved up almost 2 million miles and points! We’ve used these miles and points to save over $25,000 on travel expenses. If you want to learn how to do the same, check out my course 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

Barbados to Nashville – $11.20

These flights should have cost around $450, but by redeeming 25,000 AA miles, they only cost $11.20!

Partnerships – $1,670

Now that our YouTube channel is getting over 2,000,000 views per month, we’re getting opportunities to partner with companies for free experiences/accommodations in return for featuring the company in a video. You’ll always know if we’ve partnered with a company because at the end of the vlog we’ll put a message that says either “Accommodations Provided By:” or “This Adventure Made Possible By:” This serves as an advertisement for the company that we partner with, but it also helps us to be transparent about content on our vlog being sponsored.

LHR Yotel – $170

Sandals Barbados – $1,500

Airbnb Credits – $150

When someone signs up for Airbnb using our link, they can save $40 off their stay. Plus, we get between $20 – $40 when that person completes their first stay!

It’s a win-win, and we wanted to say thank you to everyone who has signed up and taken a trip using our link! This quarter we redeemed our credits for 3 free nights on the beach in Barbados!

If you want to save $40 on your first Airbnb stay, click the link below to create an account!

CLICK HERE to save $40 on your first Airbnb

Total “Savings” – $2,258.80

That wraps up our Quarter 4 income report! You deserve a pat on the back if you made it all the way here. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Before we jump in, let me give you the “why” behind this report. It is NOT to brag about how much money we’re making. Trust me, when we first started sending out these reports, we were actually losing a lot of money!

There are three major reasons we started sending out these income and expense reports:

1. I (Nate) am a business nerd! I always wonder how much money people are making and exactly how they’re making it. I wish more people would transparently share their entrepreneurial journey; so that’s why I do it! When other people do it, I find it inspiring and incredibly interesting! So I hope you’re inspired or at least entertained when you read this.

2. When Kara and I tell people that we travel full-time, the response we get the majority of the time is, “I wish I could do that.” At this point in the conversation I usually just bite my tongue. I realize that, for some, full-time travel truly isn’t possible. But for most of the people who say “I wish I could do that,” they could if they really wanted to. Yes, some people would have to work harder than others to make it happen, but most people could make it happen if they were willing to make travel a priority.

A couple years ago, Kara and I made travel our top priority. We saved up money for over a year, we moved out of our apartment, we sold our cars, and we quit our jobs. Now we put in the work (almost) every day to be able to afford to continue traveling. We hope that by sharing this report each month, it will inspire some of you to go from “I wish I could” to “How could I.”

3. We’re not special, and we want you to remember that fact no matter where this journey takes us. I feel like once people become “successful” it’s easy to think they’re “special” and that’s why they were able to achieve success. But in reality, (almost) every successful person started out as a “regular” human. At this point in our lives, Kara and I are pursuing this crazy dream of turning our passion for travel into a sustainable business. If we do achieve success one day, we hope that by sharing this journey from the beginning you’ll be able to see that two regular people had a dream, went after it, and achieved success. In turn, we hope this will inspire you (a “regular person”) to dream a big dream and go after it!

Thoughts on Quarter 3 of 2017

Well, we are back in the red for Quarter 3 of 2017. I’m going to blame it on Iceland and our Trans-Siberian Railway adventure. My sister and her husband talked us into going to Iceland with them this summer, and while it was really expensive, it was a blast and I don’t regret spending the money to go! I have similar feelings about our Trans-Siberian trip.

Even though we took a couple expensive trips, we were able to save a lot of money in several other areas. We saved on transportation using frequent flyer miles, accommodations using Airbnb credits and staying with friends, and on “experiences” thanks to partnerships were able to line up. So while we lost over $1,000 this quarter, it could have been way worse without the money saving techniques mentioned above.

On the income front, we owe a big thank you to our PATRONS! Pledges from our patrons on Patreon.com accounted for the largest chunk of our income in Q3. Every month over 500,000 people watch our videos on YouTube for free. Around 100 of them choose to support us financially. Without these 100 individuals, we wouldn’t be able to continue making videos for everyone else! So on behalf of us (and everyone who watches our videos for free on YouTube) we’d like to say a special thank to our patrons!

Outside of Patreon, we didn’t see a substantial amount of growth in any of our income streams. However, we broke $10,000 in income for a second quarter in a row! If we continue to sustain this level of income, we should be able to continue traveling and making videos indefinitely as long as we keep our expenses in check!

With that said, we don’t plan on growing content or complacent. We’ll continue to do our best to increase our current income streams, in addition to adding new ones!

So without further ado, let’s jump into the income and expense report!

Income Report

1. YouTube Ad Revenue – $2,137.79 (Change from Q2 +$311)

Our YouTube ad revenue increased slightly this quarter! The amount of money you make from YouTube ads is correlated with the number of views you receive and which countries those views come from. However, YouTube doesn’t show an ad every time a viewer clicks on a new video. They have some algorithm that determines how many ads you get shown during your viewing session. For example, this quarter we had around 1.7 million views, but ads were only shown on about 500,000 of those views.

I found the increase in ad revenue interesting this month because in Q2 we had almost the exact same amount of views that we had in Q3 (1.7 million). However, last quarter they only showed ads on 400,000 views as opposed to 500,000 this quarter.

I’ve given up on trying to figure out the YouTube system. I’m just reporting the facts 🙂

2. Patreon – $3,814 (Change from Q2 +$1,130)

YouTube ad revenue can be fickle, which is why we’re so grateful for the patrons that choose to support our work! This second year of full-time travel wouldn’t be possible without them!

We continue to be blown away by the generosity of our patrons! The fact that people spend their hard earned money to support our work is super humbling!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Patreon, it’s an online platform that allows you to support the work of your favorite creators giving them a chance to continue working on their creations without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from!

CLICK HERE to learn more about becoming a patron!

3. 30 Days To Becoming A Travel Hacker Course – $3,224 (Change from Q2 -$2,760)

In Q2 I officially launched 30 Days to Becoming A Travel Hacker! I did a lot of promotion around the launch and generated over $5,000 in sales! Since I did so much promotion for the course last quarter (and very little this quarter), the drop in sales was expected. I’m actually really happy with the Q3 sales numbers.

In the last income and expense report, I said “I don’t expect to make $5,000 every month, but I’m hoping I can sell 5 or 10 every month at the full price of $147. That would be a nice bump in our consistent monthly income!”

I averaged approximately 7 course sales per month! 5-10 sales per month was a total guess, but apparently it was pretty accurate! Hopefully we can continue to average 7 sales in the coming months! As of now, I’m doing very little promotion for the course besides linking to it in our YouTube videos, but I’m planning to put together an email drip sequence that promotes the course to new people who subscribe to our email list. So, maybe we can even bump up the average next quarter!

If you’re interested in learning how to earn and redeem frequent flyer miles to travel around the world for pennies on the dollar, check out 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

6. Affiliate Income – $739.26 (Change from Q2 +109.83)

• Amazon – $440.56
• Audible – $30
• Epidemic Sound – $240
• Gleam – $20
• Convert Kit – $8.70

As usual, Amazon was the main driver of our affiliate income. It’s pretty awesome that we made over $400 just by recommending products we use and love. The majority of our Amazon affiliate income is generated by people who visit the following pages.

Our Vlogging Gear
Our Packing List
Keep Us On The Road

We also added a few additional affiliate income streams to the mix this quarter, Epidemic Sound being the big one! We get all the music for our YouTube videos through Epidemic Sound. It’s so hard to find good music for YouTube videos. Kara used to waste hours of her life searching for music, now she has a huge library of royalty free songs to choose from! We love the service, so we’re telling everyone about it, and we’re getting paid to do it!

If you need music for YouTube videos, click here to check out Epidemic Sound!

5. Sponsored Videos & Video Licensing – $578 (Change from Q2 -$122)

We aren’t proactive about seeking out sponsored videos or video licensing deals. However sometimes they fall into our lap, like the licensing deal we received from a Dutch public broadcast organization. They reached out to us and offered to pay us $578 to be able to use footage from our Peru Sky Lodge video.

They have non-exclusive rights to the video to use it for 1 broadcast and 2 re-runs. I honestly have no clue if this is a good rate to be paid for licensing a video, but it’s great for us. All we had to do was send over a video file that we had already created and receive a check!

Total Q3 Income – $10,493 (Change from Q2 -$1,587)

Since the beginning, we’ve been trying to develop multiple income streams that will combine together to fund our travels. The pie chart above gives you a quick breakdown of how each revenue stream is contributing to our total income.

Expense Report

Transportation Expenses – $3,548.79

This quarter our transportation expenses are a little higher than usual because we paid almost $2,000 for our Trans-Siberian train tickets. We knew this trip would stretch our budget, but it was something we really wanted to do, and the experience did not disappoint! Plus, the videos have done suprisingly well on our channel!

Accommodation Expenses – $1,886.29

Thanks to Airbnb credits we’ve received from referrals and staying with family and friends, we were able to keep our accommodation expenses really low this quarter! We averaged $21 per night for the quarter, and that number would be much lower if we hadn’t spent 8 nights in Iceland where everything is really expensive.

Destination Expenses – $2,694.49

This category is the money we spent while on the ground in each destination. This includes things like food, local transportation, and entertainment. Let’s be honest though, most of this spending probably went towards delicious local food.

Business Expenses – $2,458.04 ($166.97 less than Q2)

Each month we pay for several online subscriptions and other things to keep the vlog, blog, online course, and email list running smoothly. I look at most of these expenses as “investments” instead of expenses because most of them are tools that enable us to make money.

Partnerships Manager – $1,200
This quarter we gave Benji some additional responsibility. In addition to being our Strategic Partnerships Manager, he’s also started writing a weekly series on the blog called Frequent Flyer Friday. Each week he covers a travel hacking topic that will help you save money on your next trip!

Travel Hustle Editor – $300
This quarter we hired Claire to help us start our new Travel Hustle interview series on the blog!

Convert Kit – $373.03
The great email platform that we use to send emails to our email list of 9,000+ people

Teachable – $297
The platform where I host my course 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker and The Mistake Fare Manual

Premiere Pro – $98.28
The program Kara uses to edit our episodes

Google Service – $45.00
This is the money we pay Google for our email address every month so that we can look semi-professional.

Touchnote Postcard – $42.73
This is the service we’re using to send postcards to our patrons!

Epidemic Sound – $45
We used free music from SoundCloud forever, but we’ve started paying $15 per month to Epidemic Sound for more access to royalty free music.

TubeBuddy – $57
This service allows us to bulk edit the cards and end cards across all of our videos on YouTube. Basically, we pay $19 to avoid spending hours of our lives monotonously changing cards on our channel.

Fixed Costs – $1,157 ($194 less than Q2)

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $425

Health Insurance – $522

Car Insurance – $210

It would be irresponsible to travel without health insurance, so we pay what feels like too much money for an international health insurance plan every month. We’ve been really happy with our T-Mobile Unlimited International plan for the past 18 months. However, last quarter extra charges started showing up on our bill, and we paid a bit more than usual which is frustrating. I also forgot to cancel our car insurance when we left, so our car was covered while it set in my parents driveway for 3 months :/

Miscellaneous – $82.99

This category is made up of just a few small things that didn’t fit into any of the categories above.

Total Q2 Expenses – $11,827.60

Summary

“Savings”

This is how much money we saved this month thanks to partnerships, frequent flyer miles, and referrals. This is just a fun vanity metric to calculate. If you love numbers like me, it’s fun to look at how much money this month “should have” cost us.

Frequent Flyer Miles – $3,567

Before Kara and I left to travel full-time, we saved up almost 2 million miles and points! We’ve used these miles and points to save over $25,000 on travel expenses. If you want to learn how to do the same check out my course 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

Nashville to Rome – $1,389

We redeemed 60,000 American Airline frequent flyer miles to fly from Nashville to Rome for only $11.20! We booked this flight about 2 weeks before leaving. I love the flexibility that frequent flyer miles give you!

Reykavik to Riga – $304

These flights should have cost around $400, but by redeeming 30,000 UA miles we reduced the cost to $96!

Vladivostock to Seoul (Business Class) – $785

These fligths should have cost around $800, but instead we redeemed 18,000 British Airways miles and flew in business class for only $15. We normally wouldn’t fly business class on such a short flight, but there were no economy seats available. So thanks to British Airway’s distance based award chart, business class was still a great deal.

Seoul to Bologna – $109.60

We had to fly back to Italy to plan our Vespa tour. Without frequent flyer miles these flights would have been really expensive. Probably somewhere around $1,200. We redeemed 90,000 UA miles and only paid $109.60

Partnerships – $3,402

Now that our YouTube channel is getting over 750,000 views per month, we’re getting opportunities to partner with companies for free experiences/accommodations in return for featuring the company on the vlog. You’ll always know if we’ve partnered with a company because at the end of the vlog we’ll put a message that says either “Accommodations Provided By:” or “This Adventure Made Possible By:” This serves as an advertisement for the company that we partner with, but it also helps us to be transparent about content on our vlog being sponsored.

Florida Keys Road Trip – $1,000

Italia Rail Rome Adventure – $800

Burssels Chocolate Tour – $140

Paris Vespa Tour – $300

Yotel x2 – $240

Silfra Snorkel – $300

Moscow Food Tour – $150

Lake Baikal Walking Tour – $70

DMZ Tour – $184

Airbnb Credits – $946

When someone signs up for Airbnb using our link, they can save $40 off their stay. Plus, we get between $20 – $40 when that person completes their first stay!

It’s a win-win, and we wanted to say thank you to everyone who has signed up and taken a trip using our link!

If you want to save $40 on your first Airbnb stay, click the link below to create an account!

CLICK HERE to save $40 on your first Airbnb

Total “Savings” – $7,916

That wraps up our Quarter 3 income report! I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

We’re trying something new this month. In the past we’ve only sent these income reports out to our email list. This is the first income report that’s been published on our website for the world to see! Normally these income reports are sent out monthly. But since I was way behind, I’ve combined January, February, and March into the “Q1 Income Report” in an attempt to get caught up!

Before we jump into the income report let me start by saying, the purpose of this income report is not to brag about how much money we’re making. Trust me, when we first started sending out these reports, we were barely making any money, and we still have yet to cover our travel expenses with the income we’re bringing in! However, after 16 months, we’re getting really close!

There are three major reasons we started sending out these income and expense reports:

1. I (Nate) am a business nerd! I always wonder how much money people are making, and exactly how they’re making it. I wish more people would transparently share their entrepreneurial journey, so that’s why I do! When other people do it, I find it inspiring and incredibly interesting! So I hope you’re inspired or at least interested when you read this.

2. When Kara and I tell people that we travel full-time, the response we get majority of the time is “I wish I could do that”. At this point in the conversation I usually just bite my tongue. I realize that, for some, full-time travel truly isn’t possible. But for most of the people who say “I wish I could do that,” they could if they really wanted to. Yes, some people would have to work harder than others to make it happen, but most people could make it happen if they were willing to make travel a priority. A couple years ago, Kara and I made travel our top priority. We saved up money for over a year, we moved out of our apartment, we sold our cars, and we quit our jobs. Now we put in the work almost every day to be able to afford to continue traveling. We hope that by sharing this report each month, it will inspire some of you to go from “I wish I could” to “How could I.”

3. We’re not special, and we want you to remember that no matter where this journey takes us. I feel like once people become “successful” it’s easy to think they’re “special” and that’s why they were able to achieve success. But in reality, every successful person started out as a “regular” human. At this point in our lives, Kara and I are pursuing this crazy dream of turning our passion of travel into a sustainable business. If we do achieve success one day, we hope that by sharing this journey from the beginning you’ll be able to see that two regular people had a dream, went after it, and achieved success. In turn, we hope this will inspire you (a “regular person”) to dream a big dream and go after it!

Thoughts on Quarter 1 of 2017

First, I’d like to start by thanking all of our patrons on Patreon! At the beginning of the year a handful of you stepped up to make sure that we could financially continue this adventure for a second year, and for that we’re truly grateful! One of the most exciting aspects of this income report is that our patronage has more than doubled since the beginning of the year. Another thing I’m really excited about is the successful pre-launch of my 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker course. Even though it was only a pre-launch, it’s already become our largest income stream!

In terms of expenses this quarter, I’m pretty happy with how we did during these first three months. The ability to stay around our budget was thanks (in no small part) to the number of partnerships we were able to line up during the first quarter. Thanks to these partnerships, we received over 30 free nights of accommodations and many free meals and activities! With that said, we definitely spent a little more on airfare because we weren’t able to be as flexible since we had scheduled partnerships. We found ourselves traveling to more off the beaten path destinations. We definitely could have spent less, but the goal isn’t to spend as little as possible. The goal is to have the best experiences possible without spending irresponsibly so that we’ll have enough money to continue this adventure! So without further ado, let’s jump into the income and expense report!

Income Report

1. YouTube Ad Revenue – $2,069.25

During the first three months of the year our YouTube ad revenue hovered around $700 per month. Depending on the day, we made anywhere from $12 to $45. YouTube ad revenue is fickle and hard to understand. An increase in views doesn’t necessarily lead to an increase in ad revenue. However, I’ve learned that anytime we have a spike in new subscribers we also have a spike in ad revenue. Our spike in ad revenue on February 6th was due to a correlating spike in subscribers. During this time, we were holding our 30K Giveaway picking someone to win a Priority Pass and free access to my travel hacking course. More people than usual were subscribing to our channel for extra entries into the competition!

2. Patreon – $1,738.05

We set up our Patreon page last August with no clue how it would be received. Seven months later, in the month of February, the money that we were earning from our Patreon page officially surpassed our YouTube ad revenue! We are so grateful for all of our patrons! This second year of full-time travel wouldn’t be possible without them! Seriously, there’s a good chance Kara and I would not still be making YouTube videos if it wasn’t for each one of our patrons who make it financially possible!
CLICK HERE to learn more about coming a patron!

3. 30 Days To Becoming A Travel Hacker Course – $3,344.24

This is the first time my new course 30 Days to Becoming A Travel Hacker has made an appearance on this income report! I’ve wanted to create this course ever since we hit the road. After saving up almost 2 million frequent flyer miles and saving over $10,000 on flights during our first year of travel, I get TONS of questions about earning and redeeming frequent flyer miles. I hesitated to create this course for a long time because there’s so much information already online. Over the past four years, I’ve taught myself everything I know about travel hacking from free blogs on the internet. However, I eventually came to the realization that not everyone has four years to sit around the internet to teach themselves everything they need to know about travel hacking. So, I had the idea to create a course that would condense my four years of travel hacking into a 30 day intensive course that would teach a person everything they needed to know to start earning and redeeming miles and points for free flights and hotels around the world.

However, before I spent weeks of my life devoted to building this course, I wanted to gauge interest and demand. So in January I pre-sold the course with a $50 discount for anyone who was willing to pre-buy the course before it was created. Over 30 people purchased early access to the course! If 30 people were willing to buy a course that wasn’t even created yet, I had all of the proof of demand I needed to start building the course.

Creating this course took longer than anticipated, but I’m excited to announce that the it is finally complete! I’m currently making tweaks based on feedback from our founding members that purchased early access to the course, and the final version will be available to everyone starting in June!

4. Mistake Fare Manual – $237.51

The Mistake Fare Manual has continued to sell the occasional copy on auto pilot. This e-book doesn’t make us a ton of money every month, but it is truly passive income. However, I do expect it to drop off in the future because I’m giving away the Mistake Fare Manual as a bonus to anyone who purchases 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

If you want to learn how I’ve been able to find and book CRAZY CHEAP flights around the world, check out the Mistake Fare Manual!

5. Flight Deal Notifications – $130.67

The Flight Deal Notifications are another income source that doesn’t make us a ton of money each month, but it is completely passive. Once I add someone to the notifications list, there’s no additional work to be done! You can get 6 free months of flight deal notifications when you purchase the Mistake Fare Manual, but you can also sign up for the Flight Deal Notifications separately! If you want the best flight deals from around the web sent straight to your phone as soon as they’re posted, sign up for my Flight Deal Notifications!

6. Affiliate Income – $1,273

• Ultimate Photography Bundles – $659
• Amazon – $523.99
• Audible – $90

The Ultimate Photography Bundle was a week long sale of the best photography courses on the internet. They sold at a crazy discount! During the sale you could get $5,000 worth of photography stuff for only $79! Kara and I purchased the deal for ourselves, and then I decided to send you guys an email about this awesome deal, because I didn’t want the photographers on this email list to miss out. Before I sent out the email, I became an affiliate of Ultimate Bundles, so I could earn a commission for any referrals that purchased the course. I took two hours to type up one email about the deal. Since the deal was so good, 17 people purchased it! As an affiliate, I earned a 40% commission from every sale. In total, I earned $659 just from sending out one email! That’s crazy!

One of the best things I did when we started this adventure was to create an email list. I’m not always great at sending out the Sunday Summary, but we’ve been able to grow our list to over 4,500 subscribers! Our email list has become one of our most valuable resources. Not only did one email result in over $600 of income, but the reason I was able to pre-sell 30 copies of the course is because we have direct access to over 4,000 people’s email inbox!

There are a lot of email providers to choose from when you decide to build an email list. We highly recommend ConvertKit! If you’re serious about creating income through an email list, I’m confident there’s no better tool available than ConvertKit!

Last but not least, we made over $500 through the Amazon affiliate program by recommending products we use and love. The majority of our Amazon affiliate income is generated through people who visit the following pages.

Our Vlogging Gear
Our Packing List
Keep Us On The Road

Total Q1 Income – $8,792

Since the beginning, we’ve been trying develop multiple income streams that will combine together to fund our travels. The pie chart above gives you a quick breakdown of how each revenue stream is contributing to our total income.

Expense Report

Transportation – $2,546.70

The table above includes all of the major forms of transportation that we paid for during the first three months of the year. Smaller forms of transportation like local bus, taxis, and Ubers are included in the general expense section.

Accommodations – $1,968

As you can see from the table above, we were able to save a lot of money on accommodations during the first three months by partnering with tour companies! We also cashed in some hotel points when we needed a few days to rest our heads in nice places and catch up on work!

General Travel Expenses – $2,708.55

• Credit Card Charges – $1,278.76
• ATM Withdraws – $1,429.79

Unfortunately, I didn’t do a good job of meticulously tracking every penny during the first three months of the year. Instead, I calculated this section by looking back through our credit card statements and seeing how much money we withdrew from ATMs. It would have taken days of my life to go through these and try to break them into categories like I normally do…

Business Expenses – $1,685.75
Partnerships Manager – $600.00
We hired an awesome guy to help us develop partnership opportunities, and he’s lined up some amazing partnerships for us!
Priority Pass – $225.00
Convert Kit – $199.76
The email platform that we use to send you these emails.
Teachable – $117.00
The platform I used to build build and sell my course.
Premier Pro – $65.52
The program Kara uses to edit our episodes.
Gleam.io – $39.00
The software we used to make our 30K Giveaway go semi viral
PTBA – $75.00
We joined the Professional Travel Blogging Association. It’s yet to be determine whether or not this was a good use of our time and money.
Accountant – $250
Upwork – $56.52
We’ve hired a virtual assistant off Upwork to add subtitles to the occasional YouTube video and upload some of our episodes to Facebook.
Google Service – $23.00
This is the money we pay Google for our email address every month so that we can look semi-professional.
Touchnote Postcard – $34.95
This is the service we’re using to send postcards to patrons!

Fixed Cost – $1,172.79
T-Mobile Phone Plan – $372.81
Health Insurance – $522
Car Insurance – $277.98

Our phone plan and international health insurance are necessities. Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication with our insurance agent and we paid for pointless car insurance for while our car just sat there for three months…

Summary

“Savings”

Frequent Flyer Miles – $5,100

Hotel Points – $2,078
JW Marriott – $1,393
Holiday Inn Antofagasta – $460
Airbnb Credits – $225

Before Kara and I left to travel full-time we saved up almost 2 million miles and points! We’ve used these miles and points to save over $20,000 on travel expenses. If you want to learn how to do the same check out my new course 30 Days to Becoming a Travel Hacker!

Partnerships – $31,920
Polo Day – $340
Santiago Cooking Class – $190
EL Tatio Geysers – $100
Southern Explorations – $5,390
Chile Tour – $1,000
Gustu – $200
Kuoda Bolivia – $3,000
Galapagos $13,000
Otorongo Lodge – $900
Delfin Amazon Cruise – $7,800
Total $31,920

Total “Savings” – $39,098

We partnered with a TON different companies during the first three months of the year! This enabled us to go on adventures that we would otherwise never be able to afford. The majority of these partnerships were lined up over our Christmas break. When I was initially planning out all of these partnerships, I thought these epic adventures would help us create episodes that everyone would love. It turns out some of you prefer our old style of videos where we just wander around and create our own adventures on a budget. We’re not going to stop participating in epic partnerships. In addition to really cool experiences, partnerships also allow us to keep our travel cost down and afford traveling and making vlogs. However, we are going to try to strike a better balance the second half of the year. We definitely want to spend more time traveling around on our own. To be honest, partnerships are amazing but also exhausting. That’s because we have less time to work and usually end up shooting twice as much video as we would during a regular day of filming.

If you have thoughts on partnership videos vs. watching us wander around on the cheap, feel free to shoot me an email and share your thoughts! Please keep in mind that these partnerships are helping to fund our travels, so cutting them out completely is out of the question, unless a lot more of you want to become patrons 🙂