May 2022 | -$2,343.00

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	$560	$18.06
Food and Drink	$501	$16.16
Transport	$719	$23.19
​Tours booked	$832	$26.83
Miscellaneous	$214	$6.90
TOTAL	$2977	$96.03

This is a quick reference category breakdown of our expenses. This month looks a whole lot better than last. But it wasn't. We saved some money by using the points we accrued with our Qantas credit card in order to stay in a couple of places that were FAR too fancy for us. They also had very bad Point/Value ratio which I knew nothing about when I booked them! See accommodation breakdown below for details. The money we "Saved" from using points we decided to put toward a luxury cruise in Egypt. We truly had not discovered what it meant to travel long term yet and regret spending so much even if it was a great experience!

Accommodations Expenses

Location	Accomodation	Nights	Notes	Cost
Ha Long Bay	Cruise ship	2	listed in Tours	$0
Hanoi	Aimee House	1		$23
New Delhi	Shangi-La	7	This hurts	155,885 Points
Agra	Hotel Alleviate	3		$95
Jaipur	Hilton Hotel	4	This hurts too	$96 + 78,760 points
New Delhi	Prime Delhi	2		$104
Cairo	Museum Guest	3		$150
Luxor	Nefertiti	3		$95
Luxor	Nefertiti	4	listed in Tours	$0
TOTAL				$560 + 234,615 Points

This one really hurts. I had no idea about the value of points. We wanted to treat ourselves to a nice stay when we first got to India so we could acclimatise to the hustle and bustle slowly but we made a mistake here. Having done a lot more research into the use of points I can see that spending them on accommodation like this was a really bad move and has limited us in the future. Nevertheless an expensive lesson was learned.

Transport Expenses

Route	Mode	Notes	Cost
Delhi - Agra	Train	​Seating Class	$ Not recorded
Agra - Jaipur	Train	2nd class sleeper	$42
Jaipur - Delhi	Train	1st Class sleeper	$65
Cairo - Luxor	​Overnight Train	1st Class sleeper	$230
Cairo - Rome	Flight	​For next month	$240
TOTAL			$577

Things to note here, firstly, the number is 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! Also, yes, the price for the overnight sleeper train from Cairo to Luxor is crazy, we know. But it was the only overnight train offered and we really wanted to film it so we reluctantly paid the money. It waaaaassss an okay journey. You can watch it here

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 another great lift of views and income overall and we loved it. in the middle of the month and toward the end our India and Egypt videos started to publish and we saw a big drop-off across views and income. Our theory on this (Other than our videos not being good enough- Judge here) is that YouTube was showing our videos to people that they thought would like them. Unfortunately those were Vietnamese people who liked watching videos about Vietnam. What this meant is that YouTube was using lots of Impressions (Showing a viewer our thumbnail) on an audience who were no longer interested in our videos as we had left their country. This meant a very big tank in the CTR or 'Click through rate' which is one of the main metrics YouTube uses to determine the quality of a video and how many more people to show it too.

Summary

Final balance at the end of May Expenses: -$2,977.00 Income: +$634.00 Change - $2,343 .00

We are incredible thankful to be able to have any sort of income on the road! Even though we we're miss-guided this month and only remained under budget through an irresponsible use of points it feels good to have the daily expenses under $100 a day for the first time!

Thank you so much if you have read this far!

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