September 2022 | -$2,130.46

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 were 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	$908	$30.20
Food and Drink	$583.34	$19.45
Transport	$466.30	$15.54
​Tours booked	$0	$
Miscellaneous	$580.93	$19.36
TOTAL	$2538.57	$84.55

This is a quick reference category breakdown of our expenses. We have used the month of September as a bit of a corner stone for future travels. This is because we knew we had more than 2 weeks of free accommodation where we could really get ahead in our work and plan what the rest of our year would look like. Breaks like these are incredibly valuable. Bringing our average costs down and setting ourselves up for the future at the same time is a no-brainer!

Accommodations Expenses

Location	Accomodation	Nights	Notes	Cost
Banja Luka Bosnia	Air BnB Full apartment	4		$172
Arezzo Italy	Hotel room with Private Bath	4		$231
Cortona Italy	Air BnB Full apartment	1		$65
Corton Italy	Trusted house sitters	15	Love this	$0
Perugia italy	Air BnB Full apartment	2	Very uncomfortable bed	$134
Brindisi Italy	Hotel room with Private Bath	2		$146
Matera Italy	Air BnB Full apartment	1	Expensive.. But it was a cave!	$160
TOTAL				$908

September was great for us for accommodation. as you can see the cost was nil over a 15 night span while we did our trusted house sitters. What's more is we had an incredible host family to hang out with and show us the ropes of the beautiful town of Cortona! The same town where Under the Tuscan sun was filmed! That town will be a fond memory for us for years and years to come thanks to the incredible hospitality. Oh, AND we got to hang out with 3 awesome animals everyday!

Transport Expenses

Route	Mode	Notes	Cost
Mostar to Banja Luka	Bus	Booked at station	$40
Banja Luka to Milan	Flight	Ryanair with luggage	$127.10
Milan to Arezzo	Bus & Train		$74.24
Perugia to Brindisi	Flight	Ryanair with luggage	$129.50
Brindisi to Matera	​Flix bus		$26.25
TOTAL			$466.30

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, Taxis and short cheap trains which I thought wouldn't add any value in this section! (I kept the total the same) Really not a bad expense for a month which had two flights! Id attribute that to the use of the ryanair discovery app. We like to find our flights early when they're cheap and then craft our travel itinerary around them. For example, the cheapest flights we could find to get us to Italy was between Banja Luka and Milan. So we ended up going through Bosnia (and had a lot of fun doing it)

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 Report

Source	Notes	Amount
Affiliate (other)	​Amazon + Getyourguide + Viator	$0
Licensing	footage from video	$171.55
Youtube	Ad revenue	$533.61
TOTAL		$705.16

Affiliate Income Amazon - We are sad to report that Amazon has dropped off as an affiliate partner as we were just not getting enough clicks! I will keep it here though because as we gain a bigger audience we will re apply! Get your Guide - We have been fortunate enough to have a few people use our link to book experiences with Get Your Guides! this has resulted in income howvere as it is less than $50 we can't withdraw it yet. Happy for this one to keep going up slowly until we can claim it! Viator - A great addition to our affiliate income has been a link we made to Viator from our Ha Long Bay cruise video. We are kicking ourselves that we didn't create this link earlier as we are sure we've missed out on some income. We even had someone click on our link and purcahse the same cruise we did which resulted in some commission - we need to wait until they complete the tour before we can withdraw and add it to our income report. But it's a great start!

Licensing Agreements Vietnam footage- We couldnt believe it when we recieved an email asking to license some of our footage. We agreed on a price for what ended up being 4 seconds of footage from our Hue Vietnam video which netted us $30USD per second! That converts to an incredible $171.55 AUD. Which means that 4 seconds of footage has paid for a day and a half of travel for us. Mind blowing! we are very thankful for this and have learnt alot about licensing from the eperience!

YouTube Analytics

Thank you Romania! Our views for the month of September have been HEAVILY weighted toward our Romania videos. We were fortunate enough to have a Romanian magizine write two articles about our adentures in Romania driving a much higher percentage of external traffic than we have ever experienced. It helped our video on the Transfargarasan highway really take off and as I write this it sits at a whopping 48,000 views! We had a brain storm about the external traffic and decided to link another Romanian video at the end of the transfagarasan which we think may have helped our cause and resulted in more subscribers! Unfortauntely, toward the end of the month we released the videos in Montenegro and Serbia which (Although we did try really hard to create something mroe story-driven) did not do well at all and saw us finish out the month with 3 10 of 10's in a row. If your unclear of what that is, youtube ranks your latest video against your last 10. 1 of 10 being the best, 10 of 10 being the worst performing. If we didn't have residual views from the Romania videos this would have been a real kick in the pants!

Summary

Final balance at the end of September Expenses: -$2663.96 Income: +$705.16 Change - $1,958.8

Thank you so much if you have read this far!

Editorial Note - Opinions expressed here are author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.

User Generated Content Disclosure - Responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

*affiliate links - we may earn commission