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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 🙂

That wraps up our Quarter 1 income report! After this, it’s back to our regularly scheduled monthly income reports! I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Yes, this is OCTOBER’s Income and Expenses. Sorry for the delay! This is the closest we’ve ever been to breaking even, thanks to our merchandise sales this month. I hope you enjoy the October edition of Income & Expense Report!

Since these emails tend to get really long, I’ve included a table of contents below.

1. Income Report

2. Expense Report

3. Summary

4. “Savings”

Why Do We Send Out A Monthly Income Report?

This section is the same as last month – so this is for new people who are receiving the income report for the first time. If you read it last month, scroll down until you read “Income Report” and start there!

Let me start by saying, the purpose of this income report is not to brag about how much money we’re making from our YouTube channel. Trust me, when we first started sending out these reports, we were barely making any money!

Kara and I began this crazy adventure of full-time travel on January 10, 2016. When we originally started, the plan was to take a year off to travel the world. We had saved up enough money (plus a lot of frequent flyer miles) to get us through the end of the year.

About midway through the year we decided that we were really enjoying this full-time travel thing, and we were both going to be really sad if this adventure has to end in December. Plus, we’ve developed an amazing community of people on YouTube who have become a part of the adventure. It’d be a shame if all the fun had to end so soon!

Since we had only saved up enough money to travel for a year, we needed to find a way to make money on the road so we could continue traveling. For the last four months we’ve been on a journey to see if we can turn our YouTube channel into a little business that supports our travel. The reason we’ve decided to publish these income reports is because we want you to be a part of the journey.

We’re getting close to the point where we’re able to fund our travels through our YouTube channel! Traveling and sharing our adventures on YouTube is something Kara and I are both really passionate about. We feel super fortunate that we’re (almost) able to make a full-time living doing something we enjoy so much!

Our hope is that by transparently sharing our journey from the start, we might inspire you to go after one of your biggest dreams. So without further ado, here is the October income report.

1. Income Report

Kara and Nate Merchandise – $1,505.16

We sold apparel and coffee cups for the first time during the month of October, and it went way better than expected. Over 130 items were purchased in just 10 days! We sold t-shirts, hoodies, long sleeved t-shirts, and coffee mugs. Each item had a different profit margin, but in the end it averaged out to about $11.50 of profit per item sold.

We used the TeeSpring platform to sell our merchandise. We had a great user experience! If you plan to sell custom apparel, I recommend using TeeChip.com. I had originally planned to use TeeSpring.com, but I found the user interface on the back end of TeeChip to be much more intuitive. Plus, TeeChip offers higher margins, which allowed Kara and I to offer our apparel at a lower price!

My only complaint about TeeChip is that their analytics – which is why there’s no pretty graph at the bottom of this section.

YouTube Ad Revenue – $736.62

Change from last month – (October $736.62) – (September $725.79) = $10.83

Our ad revenue increased by over $200 in the month of September – mostly due to our capsule hotel getting a lot of views (randomly) bringing in a lot of new subscribers. While we didn’t have any videos go semi viral during the month of October, I’m happy to see that our ad revenue stayed between $20 – $30 almost every day of the month!

Patreon – $345.17

Change from last month (October $345.17) – (September 280.09) = $158.95

Before we jump into the business side of things, we’d like to say a belated special THANK YOU to our new October patrons: Andrew, Jessica, Kris, and Beatrice!

Patreon is the easiest way to support our channel. If you’d like to help keep us on the road producing new content, click the link below.

Click Here to Visit Our Patreon Page

Patreon is a platform that allows creators to receive reoccurring funding from fans. We’re excited about Patreon because, like the YouTube ad revenue we receive, it allows us to focus completely on creating awesome YouTube content.

Below is a screen shot of our pledge growth since launching our Patreon page in August. The green bar represents new pledges and the blue bar stands for the cumulative amount, and the red bar stands for decreased pledges.

Amazon Affiliate Income – $96.92

Change from last month (October $96.92) – (September $109.35) = –$12.43

Our Amazon affiliate income slipped below $100 for the first time in two months, but $96 is pretty close :). Thank you so much to everyone who takes the time to make an extra couple of clicks in order to give us a small commission from your Amazon purchases!

We haven’t added any new resources to our website in the last two months, so that’s probably why our income dipped a little bit this month. However, the three resource pages below still drove over 2,000 visitors to Amazon! I love that we were able to make over $100 this month just from recommending products we already use and love.

1. Travel Essentials – This page lists all of the packing gear we’re lugging around the world with us.

2. Vlogging Gear – This page lists all of the gear we use to create our vlogs on a daily basis.

3. Keep Us on the Road – This page explains all of the ways people can help financially support our travels.

Just so you know: We get paid for ANYTHING you buy off of Amazon within 24 hours of clicking our link! It doesn’t have to be the product we recommended. If you click through to look at our camera, and then get distracted and buy toilet paper, we still receive a commission for the toilet paper!

Mistake Fare Manual Sales – $151.00

Change from last month (October 151.00) – (September $158.82) = –$7.82

I’m amazed at how consistently the Mistake Fare Manual sells without any promotion. The past three months, we’ve made 5 – 7 new sales each month. Although $150 isn’t a ton of money, it’s completely passive income!

If you’d like to learn how to find and book mistake fares, click here to learn more about the Mistake Fare Manual

Below is a graph that shows our sales of the Mistake Fare Manual since it was published in June. Spoiler Alert: It’s already December so you can see our November sales as well.

The Mistake Fare Manual sells for $29. We use the Teachable platform to deliver the book. After they take out their fees, our profit is $26 per book.

Audible Partnership – $60

Change from last month (October $60) – (September $30) = $30.00

Last month, I was disappointed with the results from our Audible partnership, and I said:

“We’re going to continue promoting the free trial for another month. If only a few people sign up this month, we’ll reevaluate whether or not it’s worth promoting.”

We doubled our Audible Affiliate income this month, but it still wasn’t near as much as I expected. You’ll still be able to sign up for a free trail through our Keep Us On The Road page, but we won’t be promoting at the end of our videos. That screen real estate is too valuable to waste on something that’s only going to bring in $60.

I figured a graph with four bars on it was kind of pointless… So onto the next section!

Flight Deal Alerts – $13.96

Change from last month (October $13.96) – (September $8.97) = $4.99

The flight deal alerts are an easy way to get the best flight deals from around the web sent directly to your phone. Having these alerts set up is key to finding and booking mistake fares. They are sold as a companion to the Mistake Fare Manual.

Normally, flight deal alerts cost $2.99 per month. But when you purchase the Mistake Fare Manual, you can get 6 months of alerts for only $1.

We have over 50 people receiving amazing flight deal notifications on a daily basis, but the majority of our subscribers have paid $1 for six months after purchasing the Mistake Fare Manual, which is why we don’t make a ton from our flight deal alerts each month.

Other Affiliate Income – $31.40

Change from last month (October $31.40) – (September $5.98) = 25.42

Our additional affiliate income this month came from a course we promote called The Pitching Master Class. It’s a course that teaches you how to partner with travel companies for free and have paid experiences like we’ve been doing for the last few months. We found their advice very helpful, so we always link the course in our “Vanity Metrics” section at the bottom of this monthly email.

The course retails for $157 and we make about a 20% commission, so the $31.40 we made this month came from one person clicking on our link and purchasing the course!

Hopefully we’ll be able to find more affiliate links to work into our site and emails. However, we’ll never force affiliate links. We only recommend sites and products we use and love, so the addition of new affiliates will have to be organic.

Total Income for October – $2,940.23

Change from last month (October $2,940.23) – (September $1,319.18) = $1,621.05

Below is a graph that shows the make up of our income by revenue source.

Wow! We got really close to hitting our goal of $3,000 in a month, which is awesome! Unfortunately, over half of our income came from our apparel sales which isn’t a source of sustainable income that we can count on month to month.

We’re grateful for the extra money we earned this month, but in the coming months we’ll need to work on increasing revenue streams that can produce a consistent income for us each month.

2. Expense Report

Business Expenses

Convert Kit – $49

Business Email From Google – $5

Adobe Premiere Pro – $19.99

Teachable – $39

Traverse Mingle Tickets – $24.22

Total Business Expenses = $137.21

Fixed Costs

GeoBlue Health Insurance – $161

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $148.75

Kindle Unlimited – $10.94

Get a 30 Day Free Trial of Kindle Unlimited (Tons of Free Lonely Planet Guide Books!)

Total Fix Costs – $320.69

Travel Expenses

Dubrovnik, Croatia – $357 [Oct. 1 -5]

• Airbnb (4 Nights) – $176
• Other – $181.02

Kotor, Montenegro – $423.50 [Oct. 5 – 9]

• Airbnb (4 Nights) – $216
• Other – $207.50

North Cyprus – $257.41 [Oct. 9 – 18]

• Hotels – $0
• Other – $257.41

Athens, Greece – $481.34 [Oct. 18 – 22]

• Airbnb (4 Nights) – $187
• Other – $294.34

Santorini, Greece- $961 [Oct. 22 – 25]

• Airbnb (3 Nights) – $567
• Other – $394.10

Ziest, Netherlands – $164.89 [Oct. 25 – 31]

• Accommodations – $0
• Other – $164.89

Transportation

Flights

Montenegro to North Cyprus – $0

North Cyprus to Athens, Greece – $0

Athens, Greece to the Netherlands – $352.40

Private Taxi

Dubrovnik to Montenegro – $60

Total Spent on Transportation – $412.40

Total Expenses for October – $3,515.26

Change from last month (October $3,515.26) – (Sept. $3,027.62) = -487.64

Below is a graph that shows the break down of our expenses by category.

3. Summary

Total September Income

YouTube $736.62

Patreon $345.17

Mistake Fare Manual $151.00

Amazon Affiliate Income $96.92

Audible Partnership – $60

Flight Deal Notifications $13.96

Other Affiliate Income $31.40

Merchandise Sales – $1505.16

Total = $2,940.23

Total September Expenses

Business Expenses – $137.21

Fixed Expenses – $320.69

Travel Expenses – $3,057.36

Total = $3,515.26

Total Monthly Loss – $575.03

Change from last month (October $575.03) – (September $1,708.44) = 1,133.41

Before I sat down to write this income report, I was pretty confident that the month of October was going to be our first month to break even. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite make it, but this is the least amount of money we’ve “lost” in a month while being on the road.

We would have been even closer to breaking even this month if it wasn’t for a couple splurges in Santorini. We rented an amazing Airbnb that was way above our normal budget, and we paid to spend a day cruising around the island on catamaran. While we’re disappointed we didn’t break even for the first time this month, we don’t regret our splurges. Santorini was an amazing experience that we got to share with two of our closest friends. Some things are worth the extra money, and Santorini was one of them!

4. Savings (Vanity Metrics)

This is how much money we saved this month thanks to partnerships, frequent flyer miles, and negotiating. 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.

Money Saved by Using Hotel Points & Frequent Flyer Miles!

This is the first month out of the entire year that we didn’t use a single frequent flyer mile or hotel point! It’s nice to keep those stashed away in the bank for times that we really need them!

Total Saved with Frequent Flyer Miles – $0

Partnerships

Now that our YouTube channel is getting over 500,000 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.

During the month of October, we had our biggest partnership ever! It was also the first time we had a been approached by a company instead of us reaching out to them.

RT Flights to North Cyprus – ~$400 (Our Cost Free)

8 Nights of Accommodations in North Cyprus – ~900 (Our Cost Free)

7 Day Rental Car in North Cyprus – ~$200 (Our Cost Free)

Athens Food Tour – $110 (Our Cost Free)

Total Partnership Savings – ~ $1,610

99% of the time we’re the ones who initiate these partnerships. Rarely do brands reach out to us. We learned how to pitch brands for partnerships from Tommo and Megsy at Travel Master Class.

If you have a travel platform and you’re interested in learning how to partner with travel brands, we highly recommend checking out their course Pitching Master Class!

Negotiation – $50

When we stay in an Airbnb for an extended period of time, I try to negotiate the price down by contacting the host directly. This month I was only able to negotiate one of our Airbnb stays for a savings of just over $50.

Total Savings for September – $1,660

This month’s income report went much better than last month’s. It will take you 10-15 mins to read. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy 🙂 If you don’t have time to read it now, flag it so you can come back and give it a proper read later!

Since these emails tend to get really long, I’ve included a table of contents below.

1. Income Report

2. Expense Report

3. Summary

4. “Savings”

Why Do We Send Out A Monthly Income Report?

This section is the same as last month – so this is for new people who are receiving the income report for the first time. If you read it last month, scroll down until you read “Income Report” and start there!

Let me start by saying, the purpose of this income report is not to brag about how much money we’re making from our YouTube channel. Trust me, it’s nothing to brag about!

Kara and I began this crazy adventure of full-time travel on January 10, 2016. When we originally started, the plan was to take a year off to travel the world. We had saved up enough money (plus a lot of frequent flyer miles) to get us through the end of the year.

Now that we’ve been on the road for 9+ months, we’ve decided that we’re really enjoying this full-time travel thing, and we’re both going to be really sad if this adventure has to end in December. Plus, we’ve developed an amazing community of people on YouTube who have become a part of the adventure. It’d be a shame if all the fun had to end so soon!

Since we only saved up enough money to travel for a year, we’re going to need to find a way to make money on the road so we can continue traveling. So we’re currently on a journey to see if we can turn our YouTube channel into a little business that supports our travel. The reason we’ve decided to publish these income reports is because we want you to be a part of the journey.

We’re no where close to being able to support ourselves through our YouTube channel, and it’s going to be a huge challenge to get there in the next 3 months. However, traveling and sharing our adventures on YouTube is something Kara and I are both really passionate about. It would be amazing to make a full-time living doing something we enjoy so much, so we’re going for it!

Our hope is that by transparently sharing our journey from the start, we might inspire you to go after one of your biggest dreams. So without further ado, here is the September income report.

1. Income Report

After running YouTube ads for three full months we’ve learned there’s no way we were going to make enough money from YouTube ads in the next 3 months to support our travels. So we’re in the process of developing additional sources of income. Below are the six ways we made money related to our YouTube channel in the month of September.

YouTube Ad Revenue – $725.79

Change from last month – (September $725.79) – (August $514.26) = $211.53

After watching our YouTube ad revenue slowly creep up over the past few months, we saw a big jump this month! This was also our first time to break half a million views in a month!

Our average number of views per video are definitely up this month, but we also had a video go semi-viral. Our capsule hotel video got over 50,000 views this month. One day YouTube just decided it should be popular and started promoting to a lot of people. To be honest, I have no clue why this happens. The capsule hotel video brought us a lot of new subscribers, and I believe the new subscribers are to thank for the increase in ad revenue. THANKS GUYS 🙂

Patreon – $280.09

Change from last month (September $280.09) – (August 93.87) = $186.22

We created a Patreon page mid way through August, so this was our first full month on Patreon. We’re SO GRATEFUL for the support that we’re receiving through this platform. Thanks to our patrons, we’re receiving almost $20 per video published.

We’d like to say a special THANK YOU to our new patrons: Sara, Savanna, Cara, Jim, Lisa, Barbara, Xandrios, and Will!

Patreon is the easiest way to support our channel. If you’d like to help keep us on the road producing new content, click the Patreon link below.

Click Here to Visit Our Patreon Page

Patreon is a platform that allows creators to receive reoccurring funding from fans. We’re excited about Patreon because, like the YouTube ad revenue we receive, it allows us to focus completely on creating awesome YouTube content.

Below is a screen shot of our pledge growth since launching our Patreon page in August. The green bar represents new pledges and the blue bar stands for the cumulative amount. Unfortunately, Patreon only lets you show growth by month so the graph looks a little silly.

Amazon Affiliate Income – $109.86

Change from last month (September $109.35) – (August $102.86) = $6.49

Wow! Our Amazon affiliate income broke $100 two months in a row. Thank you so much to everyone who takes the time to make an extra couple of clicks in order to give us a small commission from your Amazon purchases!

We didn’t add any new resources to our website this month, but the three resource pages below still drove over 2,000 visitors to Amazon! I love that we were able to make over $100 this month just from recommending products we already use and love.

1. Travel Essentials – This page lists all of the packing gear we’re lugging around the world with us.

2. Vlogging Gear – This page lists all of the gear we use to create our vlogs on a daily basis.

3. Keep Us on the Road – This page explains all of the ways people can help financially support our travels.

Just so you know: We get paid for ANYTHING you buy off of Amazon within 24 hours of clicking our link! It doesn’t have to be the product we recommended. If you click through to look at our camera, and then get distracted and buy toilet paper, we still receive a commission for the toilet paper!

Mistake Fare Manual Sales – $158.82

Change from last month (September 158.82) – (August $158.82) = $0

$158.82 in passive income is great, but I’m way more excited about the testimonial I received this month! Gena was able to book a mistake fare from Las Vegas to London for $271. Below is the email I received from Gena.

“I used the tips and tricks taught me in the book to get text message alerts from a number of sites, and when I caught wind of the $271 deal from Las Vegas to London I quickly hopped online (found issues, but then an hour or two later it was back) and booked two tickets. I live in LA so it’s a quick cheap extra ticket away. I cannot wait to fly Virgin Atlantic nonstop over the ocean for this highly discounted fare. My boyfriend has been dying to go and now I can make that trip happen for him all under the price of what would not even be one ticket price and on a full-feature, food-included, airline! #winning“

This email made my day. It’s fulfilling to know that my book is helping people travel to their dream destinations for pennies on the dollar!

Quit shopping for airfare like everyone else If you’d like to learn how to find and book a mistake fare like Gena, click here to learn more about the Mistake Fare Manual

Below is a graph of Mistake Fare Manual sales in the month of September.

The Mistake Fare Manual sells for $29. We use the Teachable platform to deliver the book. After they take out their fees, our profit is $26 per book. This month with sold six books (the same as last month). $158.82 isn’t a ton of money, but it’s completely passive income which is really nice!

Audible Partnership – $30

Earlier this month we scored a partnership with Audible. These lucrative partnerships are usually reserved for podcasters, but they made an exception for us. We were super excited to be accepted to the Audible Partnership program because they offer a lucrative commission when a new user signs up for a free Audible trial using your link.

To be completely honest, I thought this was going to be a huge a financial win for us this month because we make $15 for each person who signs up for a free Audible trial using our link. However, after promoting the trial in our videos and on our website, we only had two people sign up.

We’re going to continue promoting the free trial for another month. If only a few people sign up this month, we’ll reevaluate whether or not it’s worth promoting.

If you’d like to receive a free audiobook and help make this section look better in the income report next month, click the link to sign up for a FREE 30-day Audible trial. You’ll receive a free audiobook, and we’ll get $15. 🙂

Click Here to Get a FREE Audiobook!

I figured a graph that showed two people signing up was kind of pointless… So onto the next section!

Flight Deal Alerts – $8.97

Change from last month (September $8.97) – (August $17.95) = $8.98

The flight deal alerts are an easy way to get the best flight deals from around the web sent directly to your phone. Having these alerts set up is key to finding and booking mistake fares. They are sold as a companion to the Mistake Fare Manual.

Normally, flight deal alerts cost $2.99 per month. But when you purchase the Mistake Fare Manual, you can get 6 months of alerts for only $1.

We have over 50 people receiving amazing flight deal notifications on a daily basis, but the majority of our subscribers have paid $1 for six months after purchasing the Mistake Fare Manual. The $8.97 we made this month came from the three people who are paying full price for the subscription.

Other Affiliate Income – $5.98

Change from last month (September $5.98) – (August $18.22) = $12.24

Our additional affiliate income came from two sites.

Momondo.com – $5.64

Skyscanner.com – $0.34

This small commission we received from these two websites came from The Score Cheap Flights resource page we added to our website last month. The page lists the two main websites we use to search for cheap flights along with a couple other resources. I still have no clue how the commission structure works with the flight booking websites…

Hopefully we’ll be able to find even more affiliate links to work into our site. However, we’ll never force affiliate links. We only recommend sites and products we use and love, so the addition of new affiliates will have to be organic.

Total Income for June – $1,319.18

Change from last month (September $1,319.18) – (August $905.98) = $413.20

Below is a graph that shows the make up of our income by revenue source.

Increasing our income by over $400 this month is really exciting, but we’re going to need to do even better next month if we want to reach our goal of $3,000 per month by the end of December!

The thing that excites me most about this month’s income report is that we saw a big jump in both YouTube and Patreon revenue. These two sources of income allow us to focus all of our effort on uploading quality content. So it’s exciting that they’re both growing and account for over 75% of our total revenue!

2. Expense Report

Business Expenses

Convert Kit – $49

Business Email From Google – $5

Adobe Premiere Pro – $19.99

Teachable – $39

Total Business Expenses = $112.99

Fix Costs

GeoBlue Health Insurance – $161

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $135.91

Kindle Unlimited – $10.94

Get a 30 Day Free Trial of Kindle Unlimited (Tons of Free Lonely Planet Guide Books!)

Total Fix Costs – $307.85

Travel Expenses

Barcelona, Spain – $86.64 [Sept. 1 – 2]

• Airbnb (1 Night) – $55.71
• Other – $30.93

Krakow, Poland – $490.39 [Sept. 2 – 9]

• Airbnb (8 Nights) – $181
• Other – $309.39

Bratislava, Slovakia – $132.53 [Sept. 9 – 12]

• Hostel (2 Nights) – $107.62
• Other – $24.91

Budapest, Hungary- $242.61 [Sept. 12 – 15]

• Airbnb (3 Nights) – $99
• Other – $143.61

Munich, Germany- $317.16 [Sept. 16 – 20]

• Holiday Inn Express (4 Nights) – $0
• Oktoberfest Attire – $49.41
• Other – $267.75

Ljubljana, Slovenia – $390.33 [Sept. 20 – 24]

• Airbnb (4 Nights) – $200
• Other – $190.33

Split, Croatia – $293.70 [Sept. 25 – 29]

• Airbnb (4 Nights) – $131.33
• Other – $62.37

Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina – $119.53 [Sept. 29 – 30]

• Hostel (2 Nights) – $43.69
• Other – $75.89

Wow! I did not realize we had been in eight different countries this month. No wonder September feels like a blur!

Transportation

Flights

Barcelona to Krakow – $195.02

Buses

Krakow to Bratislava (Overnight) – $38.71

Budapest to Munich (Overnight) – $60

Munich to Ljubljana – $31.40

Ljubljana to Split (Overnight) – $69.14

Trains

Bratislava to Budapest – $38.54

Rental Car

Split to Mostar – $101.08

Total Spent on Transportation – $533.89

3. Summary

Total September Income

YouTube $725.79

Patreon $280.09

Mistake Fare Manual $158.82

Amazon Affiliate Income $109.35

Audible Partnership – $30

Flight Deal Notifications $8.97

Other Affiliate Income $5.98

Total = $1319.18

Total September Expenses

Business Expenses – $112.99

Fixed Expenses – $307.85

Travel Expenses – $2,606.78

Total = $3,027.62

Overall Monthly Gain/Loss = $1,708.44

Change from last month (September $1,708.44) – (August $4,149.83) = -2441.39

In last month’s Income report I said “I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to keep Sept. under $3,000!”. We went over by $27.62. While we didn’t quite meet our goal, I’d say we did pretty good to spend just over $3,000 while visiting 8 countries in a single month!

After blowing out the budget last month, Kara and I made a strong effort to save a much money as possible this month. The biggest sacrifice we made to save money was taking three different overnight buses. Not only are buses the cheapest form of transportation around Europe, but we also save on a night of accommodation.

I’m feeling much better about this month’s income and expense report than I was about last month’s. Reaching break even by December actually feels like an attainable goal!

4. Savings (Vanity Metrics)

How much money we saved this month thanks to partnerships, frequent flyer miles, and negotiating. 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.

Money Saved by Using Hotel Points!

We used 80,000 IHG points to stay four nights in Munich during Oktoberfest. Using hotel points was the only way we could afford to stay in Munich during the festival without completely breaking the bank. Since we were staying at the hotel during Oktoberfest, the cost per night was almost $200.

Total Saved with Frequent Flyer Miles – $800

This gave us a per point value of 1 cent per point!

I learned most everything I know about Frequent Flyer miles from Trav’s Frequent Flyer Boot Camp course. If you’re ready to start traveling the world for pennies on the dollar, I highly recommend checking out Trav’s course to fast track your travel hacking success.

Partnerships

Now that our YouTube channel is getting over 500,000 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 be transparent about content on our vlog being sponsored.

When we travel with other people, we usually seek out less partnerships. We ended up partnering with two companies during the month of September.

Bratislava Food Tour – $146 (Our Cost Free)

Ljubljananjam Food Tour – $124 (Our Cost Free)

Total Partnership Savings – ~ $270

We were the ones who initiated all of these partnerships. We aren’t to the point where brands are reaching out to us, yet 🙂 We learned how to pitch brands for partnerships from Tommo and Megsy at Travel Master Class.

If you have a travel platform and you’re interested in learning how to partner with travel brands, we highly recommend checking out their course Pitching Master Class!

Negotiation – $100

When we stay in an Airbnb for an extended period of time, I try to negotiate the price down by contacting the host directly. This month I was able to negotiate two of our five Airbnb stays for a savings of just over $100.

Total Savings for September – $1,170.00

This income and expense report took me 7+ hours to put together. It will take you 10-15 mins to read. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy 🙂 If you don’t have time to read it now, flag it so you can come back and give it a proper read later!

This email got really long. Like so long that it needs a table of contents. See below.

1. Income Report

2. Expense Report

3. Summary

4. “Savings”

Why Do We Send Out A Monthly Income Report?

This section is the same as last month – for new people who are receiving the income report for the first time. If you read it last month, scroll down till you read “Income Report” and start there!

Let me start by saying, the purpose of this income report is not to brag about how much money we’re making from our YouTube channel. Trust me, it’s nothing to brag about!

Kara and I began this crazy adventure of full-time travel on January 10, 2016. When we originally started, the plan was to take a year off to travel the world. We had saved up enough money (plus a lot of frequent flyer miles) to get us through the end of the year.

Now that we’ve been on the road for 6 months, we’ve decided that we’re really enjoying this full-time travel thing, and we’re both going to be really sad if this adventure has to end in December. Plus, we’ve developed an amazing community of people on YouTube who have become a part of the adventure. It’d be a shame if all the fun had to end so soon!

Since we only saved up enough money to travel for a year, we’re going to need to find a way to make money on the road so we can continue traveling. So we’re currently on a journey to see if we can turn our YouTube channel into a little business that supports our travel. The reason we’ve decided to publish these income reports is because we want you to be a part of the journey.

We’re no where close to being able to support ourselves through our YouTube channel, and it’s going to be a huge challenge to get there in the next 6 months. However, traveling and sharing our adventures on YouTube is something Kara and I are both really passionate about. It would be amazing to make a full-time living doing something we enjoy so much, so we’re going for it!

Our hope is that by transparently sharing our journey from the start, we might inspire you to go after one of your biggest dreams. So without further ado, here is the July income report.

1. Income Report

We’re quickly learning that unless our channel goes viral, there’s no way we were going to make enough money from YouTube ads in the next 6 months to support our travels. So we’re in the process of developing additional sources of income. Below are the four ways we made money from our YouTube channel in the month of July.

YouTube Ad Revenue – $486.67

Change from last month – (July $486.67) – (June $491.19) = $4.52

July was our second full month of running ads on our YouTube channel. Our revenue from ads grew a tiny bit in July, but not by much. The data is a little deceiving because at the end of June our Qatar Airways Business Class video was getting a lot of views, so that increased the ad revenue more than usual for the month of June. The ad revenue for July has been much more consistent. You can see a graph of our ad revenue over the last ninety days below. (Notice the spike at the end of June)

Mistake Fare Manual Sales – $104

Change from last month (July $104) – (June $238) = $-134

Last month I published my first ebook at the beginning of June in conjunction with the Paradise Pack. We did quite a bit of promotion with the Paradise Pack in the month of June, hence the higher sales in June. This month we haven’t done any promotion. There are only three places you can find a link to this book. Here in the income report, in the description of our YouTube videos, and on our website under the “Score Cheap Flights” tab. Although four sales isn’t very many, I’m excited that we still sold a few copies with very little promotion.

The Mistake Fare Manual sells for $29. We use the Teachable platform to deliver the book. After they take our their fees our profit is $26 per book. I just thought I’d explain the discrepancy between selling 4 books at $29 and only making $104. Below is a graph of our sales in July.

We’re planning to do a big promotion for the book at some point in the near future.

In the meantime, if you want to learn how to find and book Mistake Fares that will help you fly around the world for pennies on the dollar, click here to learn more about the Mistake Fare Manual.

Flight Deal Alerts – $2

Change from last month (July $2) – (June $45) = $43

The flight deal alerts are an easy way to get the best flight deals from around the web sent directly to your phone. Having these alerts set up is key to finding and booking mistake fares. They are sold as a companion to the Mistake Fare Manual.

Normally, flight deal alerts cost $2.99 per month, but when you purchase the Mistake Fare Manual you can get 6 months of alerts for only $1. The $2 we made this month was from people who had purchased the book and taken advantage of the 6 months for only $1. Below is a screen shot of our sales in the month of June.

Again, we aren’t doing any promotion for the flight deal notifications, and the sales page is TERRIBLE. Currently the only people purchasing the flight deal notifications are people who buy the Mistake Fare Manual. You don’t have to read The Mistake Fare Manual in order for these flight deal notifications to be value. They can be used to find great short term flight deals. However, we don’t convey that anywhere on the sales page.

In addition to properly launching the Mistake Fare Manual in the near future, I plan to completely redo the sales page for the Flight Deal Notifications.

In the meantime, if you want to find short term flight deals using my flight deal notifications, you can sign up HERE. They’re only $2.99 per month, so you have very little lose if you try it and don’t like it.

Don’t forget the very important lesson we all learned from the Dr. Seuss Book Green Eggs and Ham. You never know if you’ll like something until you try it.

And you may!

—

I like green eggs and ham!

I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!

-Dr. Seuss

Amazon Affiliate Income – $6.07

Change from last month (July $6.07) – (June $0) = $6.07

This is a new addition to the income report. We made our first few sales through the Amazon Affiliate Program this month. It’s not much, but it’s a start. In the coming months, one of my focuses will be building our affiliate income (in an ethical way) in by recommending products that we use and think could add value to other people’s lives.

The Amazon Affiliate Program pays a maximum of 10% for each sale. We’re currently in the 4% bracket. Due to the low commission structure, I don’t think Amazon will ever be a big money maker for us. However, it’s a huge e-commerce that a lot of people already trust so it was an easy place to start! Below is a graph of our sales in July.

Total Income for June – $603.26

Change from last month (July $603.26 ) – (June $2,444.17) = $1,840.91

While it’s a little sad to see our income down over $1,800 this month, it’s about what I expected. Last month was an anomaly. We earned over $1,700 by being an affiliate for the Paradise Pack. Since the Paradise Pack is only sold for one week each year, we knew the revenue number we posted last month wasn’t sustainable.

Time to get to work promoting my own products, and figuring out how to make more income through affiliate marketing! My goal for August is to double our income from this month.

I heard somewhere that if you make your goals public you’re more likely to achieve them, so there you go!

2. Expense Report

Business Expenses

Convert Kit – $49

Business Email From Google – $5

Adobe Premiere Pro – $19.99

Total Business Expenses = $73.99

Fix Costs

GeoBlue Health Insurance – $161

T-Mobile Phone Plan – $122.48

Total Fix Costs – $283.48

Travel Expenses

Kenya – $150 [July 1 – 6]

The last several days we were in Kenya, we saved money by staying with friends who live in Kisumu, thanks Keith and Erin! Also, the last night we were in Kenya we saved over $100 by sleeping in the airport instead of paying for a hotel/taxi rides.

South Africa – $887.68 [July 6 – 16]

• Visas – $0
• Rental Car – $101
• Accommodations – $441.28
• Misc – $345.40

Zambia – $261.84 [July 16 – 17]

• Visas – $100
• Hostel (1 Night) – $45.99
• Victoria Falls Entrance Fee – $40
• Misc – $30
• Food – $25.85
• Driver – $20

Zimbabwe – $160 [July 17 – 20]

• Visas – $60
• Transportation – $40
• Victoria Falls Entrance Fee – $60
• Canceled Hostel Reservation – $3.83

Mauritius – $470.27 [July 21 – 31]

Since we stepped foot in Mauritius, I’ve been tracking all of our expenses in an awesome app called Trail Wallet. I’m going to try to keep track of all of our expenses in this app moving forward. Below is a screen shot from the app.

The total on the app is different from our total expenses above, because this trip spilled into August, and the additional expenses will appear on next month’s report.

Want to really dig into our expenses? Click the link below to a spread sheet of every penny we spent in Mauritius.

Mauritius Expense Spread Sheet

Other – $26.70

JNB Airport Hostel – $26.70

Flights

Kisumu to Nairobi, Kenya – $240.13

Johannesburg to Cape Town, South Africa – $231.52

Cape Town, South Africa to Livingstone, Zambia – $400

Taxes & Fees on United “Round Trip” Ticket NBO > JNB > MRU > ZAR – $538.60

Taxes & Fees on British Airways Flight from Victoria Falls to Johannesburg – $88

Total Spent on Flights – $1,498.25

Frequent Flyer Miles

United MileagePlus Miles – 70,000

British Airways Avios – 8,000

Total Frequent Flyer Miles Spent – 78,000

Total Travel Expenses – $3,454.74 & 78,000 Frequent Flyer Miles Spent

3. Summary

Total July Income

YouTube – $491.19

Mistake Fare Manual – $104

Flight Deal Notifications – $2

Amazon Affiliate Program – $6.07

Total = $603.26

Total July Expenses

Business Expenses – $73.99

Fixed Expenses – $283.48

Travel Expenses – $3,454.74

Frequent Flyer Miles Spent – 78,000

Total = $3,812.21

Overall Monthly Gain/Loss = $3,208.95

The goal is to get the number above to turn green by the end of the year! As you can see, we still have a long way to go!

4. Savings (Vanity Metrics)

How much money we saved this month thanks to partnerships, frequent flyer miles, and negotiating. This is just a fun vanity metric to calculate. We probably would have taken a different route around Africa if we didn’t have frequent flyer miles, and we definitely wouldn’t have paid to go on all of the activities in Mauritius. However, if you love numbers like me, it’s still fun to look at how much money this month “should have” cost us.

Money Saved with Frequent Flyer Miles

Flights from Victoria Falls to Johannesburg cost $175 each. We used 8,000 Avios and paid $88 in taxes and fees. We saved $262 using points, which gave us a per point value of 3.3 cents.

We used 70,000 United miles and paid $538.60 in taxes and fees to fly from NBO (Nairobi, Kenya ) to JNB (Johannesburg, South Africa) to MRU (Mauritius) to (DAR) Dar Es Shalaam, Tanzania. Flying in Africa is expensive. These numbers won’t be exactly right because the time frame is different, but I just went to Momondo and priced out these flights. The total cost for two people would have been:

NBO > JNB = $543

JNB > MRU = $718

MRU > DAR = $1,273

Total Cost = $2,534

This gave us a per point value of 2.9 cents per mile.

Total Saved with Frequent Flyer Miles – $2,257.40

I became a travel hacking master after taking Trav’s Frequent Flyer Boot Camp course. If you’re ready to start traveling the world for pennies on the dollar, I highly recommend checking out Trav’s course to fast track your travel hacking success.

Partnerships

Now that our YouTube channel is getting over 400,000 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 be transparent about content on our vlog being sponsored.

July was HUGE month for us in terms of sponsorships! I reached out to the Mauritius Tourism Board before our trip, and they hooked us up with a ton of companies during our two week stay in Mauritius!

South Africa

Shark Cage Diving with African Eco Charters – Cost $262 (Our Cost Free)

Mauritius

Chazal Eco Tourism Ziplining – $102

1 Night Outrigger Mauritius + 10 Course Lobster Dinner – $512

3 Nights Ocean Villas – $459

1 Night at Ocean Beauty – $123

Half-day canyoning trip with Otelair – $150?

Blue Safari Submarine & Sub Scooters – $500

Fun Adventures SeaKarts – $156

JP Henry Dolphin Swim – $100

Day at Casela World of Adventures – $186

Eureka Mansion Cooking Demonstration, Lunch, and Tour – $80? (totally guessing)

Total Partnership Savings – ~ $2,368

We were the ones who initiated all of these partnerships. We aren’t to the point where brands are reaching out to us, yet 🙂 We learned how to pitch brands for partnerships from Tommo and Megsy at Travel Master Class.

If you have a travel platform and you’re interested in learning how to partner with travel brands, we highly recommend checking out their course Pitching Master Class!

Negotiation – $208

When we stay in an Airbnb for an extended period of time, I try to negotiate the price down by contacting the host directly. During the month of July I was able to negotiate $208 off our Airbnb stays.

Total Savings for July – $4,833.40

Let me start by saying, the purpose of this income report is not to brag about how much money we’re making from our YouTube channel. Trust me, it’s nothing to brag about!

Kara and I began this crazy adventure of full-time travel on January 10th. When we originally started, the plan was to take a year off to travel the world. We had saved up enough money (plus a lot of frequent flyer miles) to get us through the end of the year.

Now that we’ve been on the road for 6 months, we’ve decided that we’re really enjoying this full-time travel thing, and we’re both going to be really sad if this adventure has to end in December. Plus, we’ve developed an amazing community of people on YouTube who have become a part of the adventure. It’d be a shame if all the fun had to end so soon!

Since we only saved up enough money to travel for a year, we’re going to need to find a way to make money on the road so we can continue traveling. So we’re currently on a journey to see if we can turn our YouTube channel into a little business that supports our travel. The reason we’ve decided to publish these income reports is because we want you to be a part of the journey.

We’re no where close to being about to support our travels through our YouTube channel, and it’s going to be a huge challenge to get there in the next 6 months. However, traveling and sharing our adventures on YouTube is something Kara and I are both really passionate about. It would be amazing to make a full-time living doing something we enjoy so much, so we’re going for it!

Our hope is that by transparently sharing our journey from the start, we might inspire you to go after one of your biggest dreams. So without further ado, here is our first ever income report.

JUNE INCOME REPORT

From doing research online, we learned that there was no way we were going to make enough money from YouTube ads in the next 6 months to support our travels. So we’re attempting to develop additional sources of income. Below are the four ways we made money from our YouTube channel in the month of June.

YouTube Ad Revenue – $486.67

As a YouTube creator you decide whether or not you want ads to be shown with your videos. We kept ads off our channel for the first five months because we didn’t want to take away from the viewer’s experience.

Finally, on May 18th we decided to turn on ads for the first time. We made this choice because this is about the time we decided we wanted to continue traveling, and this was the first step to financially supporting our continued travels. June was the first full month we allowed ads to run on our channel.

While $486.67 isn’t enough to keep us traveling full-time, it’s a great start! It’s a crazy feeling to actually be getting paid for making vlogs!! Below is a chart of our daily ad revenue.

Paradise Pack Affiliate Sales – $1,674.50

Many of you on this email list received a couple emails at the beginning of June in which I was promoting the Paradise Pack. The Paradise Pack is a once a year, one week sale of the best travel and location independent resources on the internet.

This year, I had the opportunity to be a contributor to the Paradise Pack with my new book the Mistake Fare Manual. As a contributor, I received a 50% commission for each Paradise Pack that was sold after someone clicked through using one of our links. In just 7 days we had 17 people purchase the Paradise Pack through one of our links!

Mistake Fare Manual Sales – $238

I published my first ebook at the beginning of June in conjunction with the Paradise Pack. We only promoted the book as part of the Paradise Pack, but several people found their way to the sales page and purchased just the book as a stand alone product. Below is a screen shot of our sales during the month of June.

I’m hoping this is a good sign! We plan to do a big promotion for the book at some point in the near future.

In the mean time, if you want to learn how to find and book Mistake Fares that will help you fly around the world for pennies on the dollar, click here to learn more about the Mistake Fare Manual.

Flight Deal Alerts – $45

The flight deal alerts are an easy way to get the best flight deals from around the web sent directly to your phone. Having these alerts setup is key to finding and booking mistake fares. They are sold as a companion to the Mistake Fare Manual.

Normally flight deal alerts cost $2.99 per month, but when you purchase the Mistake Fare Manual you can get 6 months of alerts for only $1. The $45 we made this month was all from people who had purchased the book and taken advantage of the 6 months for only $1. Below is a screen shot of our sales in the month of June.

Total Income for June – $2,444.17