June 2022 | -$2,563.40

So why record our expenses?

We wrestled with the idea of spending all our money on experiences versus knuckling down at work in an attempt to set ourselves up for the future. Ultimately, we decided that houses can burn down, investments can be lost and money can be wasted but memories can never be taken from you. We wanted to solidify those memories by creating videos. But also wanted to show people a realistic view of what a full-time travel lifestyle would cost. When I went looking for something similar they we're few and far between so I wanted to do something for the next person who comes looking. And so, a terrible and laborious google sheet was born. It's since been updated many times and is much easier to manage. All of the data here is from that sheet.

Where did the money come from? When we tell people that we are travelling full-time, they tend to have the same few comments. We must have wealthy parents who are paying for everything, or that we have come into inheritance or a lottery win or something else crazy. While we both acknowledge we are very privileged to be able to earn an income (and both have jobs unaffected by the pandemic) - so all the money we have saved up has been solely from working at jobs that we held without any tertiary education.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed putting it together!

What you came here for:

Breakdown of what's below:

• Expenses

• YouTube Analytics

• Summary

Expense Report

Expense by category

Catagory	Expense	Per day
Accomodation	$1140	$38
Food and Drink	$616.15	$20.53
Transport	$896	$29.86
​Tours booked	$0	$0
Miscellaneous	$171	$5.70
TOTAL	$2823.50	$96.03

This is a quick reference category breakdown of our expenses. These numbers are looking a lot better than our previous attempts. $38 per night for accommmodation is great and when you realise that this was June, in Europe, after covid. It's Incredible. we manage to do this by adding nights in free-stay accommodations which I'll explain more about below. Other than taht, no expensive tours really helped us in this one too!

Accommodations Expenses

Location	Accomodation	Nights	Notes	Cost
Luxor	Nefertiti	1	1 Night stop	$28
Cairo	Tahrir View	3		$150
Alexandria	Elite First	2		$100
Rome	Mary Louise	3		$264
Carcassone	Le Minevois	1		$63
Montpellier	Hotel F1	2	​Cheap for a reason	$120
Toulouse	Hotel F1	2	​Cheap for a reason	$130
Rodez	House sitters	10	Free stay	$0
Brussels	Airbnb	3	Private room	$175
Rotterdam	Stayokay	1		$110
TOTAL				​$1140

We signed up for Trusted house sitters a while ago and always planned to implement it into our long term travel lifestyle. Thankfully we managed to get accepted by a lovely family in Rodez, France. You can see the video here. While we were staying put and resting we took care of the house and pets and managed to catch up on lots of work. It has reaaallyy helped us and we are forever thankful to the family that took a chance on us and the trusted house sitters website! You can sign up using this link to get 25% off: Click this link!

Transport Expenses

Route	Mode	Notes	Cost
Aswan - Luxor	Train	​Seating Class	$12
Luxor - Cairo	Bus		$35
Cairo - Alexandria	Train		$15
Rome - Rome airport	Private transfer	only option make our flight	$103
Rome - Toulouse	Flight		$183
Carcassonne - Montpellier	Train		$43
Montpellier - Toulouse	Flix Bus		$33
Toulouse - Rodez	Train		$30
Rodez - Brussels	Flight	Ryan air	$151
Brussels - Rotterdam	Flix Bus		$37
TOTAL			$896

Things to note: The numbers are different to the 'Expenses by Category' Section. that's because in that section I use the Master sheet which includes small transports like Ubers, Grabs and Taxis which I thought wouldn't add value in this section! (I kept the total the same)

This months transports were not too bad for us. The only real shocker was the transfer we needed to get in order to meet our Ryan air flight out of Rome. The flight leaves so early that public transport isn't running yet. Theres also no ride standard uber in Rome so believe it or not, the cheapest option was to spend over $100 for a private transfer in a van at 4am. Really hurt the sould to drop an entire days budget on one 40 minute drive. But, beggers and all that.

Fixed Costs

Details	Notes	Cost
Insurance	SafetyWing	$123.50
Adobe Premier Pro		$29.00
Epidemic Sound	All our music!	​$22
TOTAL		$174.50

Insurance is expensive but worth it. Safety wing is our insurer of choice, they seemed to offer the most comprehensive cover especially when lots of countries needed specific types of insurance during the pandemic, they were great! Adobe is the software we used to edit our YouTube videos Epidemic sound is where we get all our music from, you can get a free trial with this link*: https://share.epidemicsound.com/i1nhpc

Income

Source	Notes	Amount
Youtube		$633.48
Amazon Affiliate		$0
Affiliate (other)		$0
TOTAL		$633.48

This month was great! still going well from our Thailand video we started to go a bit crazy with our Vietnam video's. Particularly our train video, Sapa Video and our Ha long Bay cruise. Those three kept us going through both India and Egypt where we saw an immediate and significant drop across the board (More on that below)

YouTube Analytics

This month was a continuation of the dramatic fall that happened as soon as we left the south east asia region. In may we had over 300,000 views but in June we were relegated to just over 70,000 and still falling. We also had a big drop in new subscribers as lots of the previous ones started to unsubcribe. We had high hopes in that leaving Egypt and India behind the views would start to rise again but we simply moved into the saturated market that is Europe in summer. Where we really struggled to stand out. Even if we felt like the videos we were making were among our best! you can be the judge! Total revenue was $260 for the month and we have a feeling we have a long and difficult battle to get back to the higher numbers.

Summary

Final balance at the end of June Expenses: -$2,823.50 Income: +$260.83 Change - $2,563.50

While the income has taken a big hit this month we sometimes forget to take stock of the entire situation. Even though we are eating savings, we are still travelling the world so any sort of income we are super thankful for. All-in-all we were still under our daily budget for the month of $100 per day and made a small dent in the overall running budget, trying to claw our way back from an expensive May. Unfortauntely, the next 2 months are in Europe in summer and because we are moving so fast we havent got any House sitting opportunities (yet) to soothe the budget. I'm not looking forward to the bloodbath!

Thank you so much if you have read this far!

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