It’s officially been three months since we moved into our travel trailer and hit the road. When I say “we” I’m talking the whole family. You see a lot of solo full time travelers, or couples who travel full time. But we’re a full time travel family! My husband and I, along with our two kids (2 and 5 years old), plus our 70lb dog and 4 cats.
But the one thing most people wonder is how we travel full time and make money.
How to afford to travel full time as a family is a big topic. Most people have a full time job in a physical location, so the thought that you can make money while being completely location independent is hard for people to grasp. And if I’m being perfectly honest, when I decided I wanted us to be able to travel full time I was really hesitant.
I wasn’t sure we would even be able to get to the point where we could afford to travel full time, let alone watch our income grow so quickly over the first three months.
Long story short: I started reselling on Ebay back in 2016 when I was a stay at home mom to my one-year-old son. I spent all of my free time doing it and was lucky to have my wonderful MIL to come spend time with my son a few days a week so I could work even more. Eventually, it got to the point where my husband was able to leave his job and stay home with us after the birth of our second child. We were not making a lot of money compared to his job, but we were able to make it work and prioritized family and freedom over money.
Even though we don’t resell now (we live in like 250 sq ft so there’s no room for inventory) in my opinion reselling is the most accessible way to start making money from home and I owe our current situation to reselling. That’s why I continue to teach it to others! (Shameless plug for the Reseller Roadmap here)
Below I’m going to outline how we make money while we travel full time as well as how much we made last month (August 2020). So it’s a little bit of an income report too!
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How We Travel Full Time & Make Money (plus how much we made)
Digital Products: $1,733
One thing I’ve been (very slowly) growing for probably two years now is digital products. I’ve tried many different kinds from selling printables on Etsy to trying the whole print-on-demand thing. But these days I focus on digital products that help other people make money from home. My top digital products are a reseller dashboard spreadsheet, a reseller printable planner, and my course the Reseller Roadmap. I remember when I first released the reseller dashboard and I made $500 that day selling it at a huge discount. I love being able to share these tools with other entrepreneurs.
>> Here’s my post about how to sell digital products
I’ve been growing these for a while and as my audience and traffic on my blog and youtube channel grow, so do my sales. I should be able to continue to market and grow my digital products more each month.
Affiliate Income: $527
If you’re not sure what affiliate income is, it’s basically my commission for helping to sell other people’s products. The biggest chunk of this amount is from Amazon. They give you a VERY low percentage of sales, but because everyone knows and loves amazon I link to the products I use in my business on my blog and on youtube and make a little money when people buy.
There are other companies that I’m also an affiliate for which include reselling tools like Vendoo and Reseller Assistant, as well as some courses that include a ThredUp course which I raved about to my email list in August prompting some sales.
While this isn’t a huge portion of my income, it definitely adds up and it’s been growing! At the beginning of the year I barely had any affiliate income so I’m excited to watch this grow as I put a little more effort into it.
Social Media Management: $500
Honestly, I made more via social media management, but much of it is lumped together with all of my other Fiverr orders which I’ll talk about below. This $500 is from someone who hired me directly, not on Fiverr like most of my other clients have. I won’t share client information, but I will share that I run their Instagram and Facebook pages. I come up with the content, schedule it, and engage with their audience. If you know a thing or two about social media, social media management is a great way to make money from home. I hope to grow this more and have hired a very part-time VA to help me keep up with this.
Fiverr: $3372
I’m honestly shocked that I made this much on Fiverr in August. In July I made just under $1,500 so my goal was to hit $2,000 on Fiverr in August. Obviously, I surpassed my goal by quite a bit! But I was SO busy and spent A LOT of time writing. It was almost a full-time job which kept me from working on my own businesses which was a bummer. But the money is nice and provided a significant bump in our income which I’m grateful for.
The services I offer on Fiverr are freelance writing services (mostly writing blog posts) as well as Pinterest Management. Most of my income from Fiverr is from writing blog posts. I wrote a total of 69 blog posts for my Fiverr clients in addition to a few random gigs here and there like Pinterest consultation and optimization services.
Here’s a breakdown of my Fiverr income (these numbers are before they take their 20% fee)
- 500 word articles: $1,550 (49)
- 700 word articles: $515 (11)
- 1,000 word articles: $520 (9)
- Pinterest Management: $575
- Misc orders: $465
- Tips: $166.55
If you add these up it won’t match with the Fiverr total at the top because these are before fees.
My plan is to release a course on how to get started and actually start getting orders on Fiverr soon. If you’re interested in that you can sign up here and I’ll email you once it’s ready.
>> In the meantime you can check out this post about Fiverr
Youtube: $725
It’s still crazy to me that I’m making any significant amount of money on YouTube, but I love it so much. My youtube income was actually lower in August than it has been in the past. I was over $800 for June and July, but because I was working so hard on my freelance writing services (and struggling with good internet) I wasn’t able to upload as many videos. I’m hoping to find the time to film more and get this up over $1,000/month by the end of the year.
>> Here’s a post I did about how much I make on youtube (when I was making much less!)
Total Income: $6,857
Keep in mind that this isn’t what hits our personal bank account. It doesn’t take into consideration expenses, fees, etc. other than the Fiverr. For Fiverr the number shared is after they take their 20%. But for everything else, there are fees involved, the software I pay for, etc. plus saving for taxes.
I actually follow the Profit First method and if you haven’t read that book you can get it here. I highly recommend it! Right now we take 55% of our total income for owner pay and put that into an account that we pay ourselves a salary out of. The rest goes into accounts for profit, operating expenses, and tax savings.
Even though I’ve hit this number and higher while reselling in the past, the amount I can take home is much higher the way I’m working now. There’s no inventory to spend money on, no shipping to pay for, etc. And the fact that we can live literally anywhere and take work with us is hands down the best part.
This is only three months into focusing on these businesses because up until about March of 2020 we were 90% focused on reselling while putting a little time here and there into youtube and digital products. Fiverr is something I started in May so the fact that I’ve been able to grow that income so quickly is mind-blowing to me. As I continue to work on the road and grow our business, our income should grow as well.
I hope this helped you get a little insight into how you can make money on the road. You don’t have to have 5 streams of income. I’m just a multi-passionate entrepreneur doing what I gotta do so that we can live full-time travel dreams.
