How we fund our travels

How we fund our travels

Lets talk money… this would hands down be one of the most asked questions we get! “How do you afford to travel Australia?” or “How do you make money on the road?”. We are sharing this blog to help those who are wanting to work online and share our knowledge on the different streams of income on the road.

About us

If you are new here, our names are Sarah and Keelan and we are in our late twenties. We are both from the South West of Western Australia and have always been passionate about the outdoors and travelling. Keelan is an electrician by trade and I am a Secondary School Teacher and taught Outdoor Education.

When we first met, we actually talked about travelling Australia on our first date!! We both said that it was a dream of ours to travel around Australia with our partner when we were older. When we started dating, we made the decision that we would travel Europe on a backpacking holiday and then do Australia once we were “settled” as it was something that we thought was more achievable with a family. Then the dreaded covid hit… We then knew that travelling to Europe was not going to be an option, but we didn’t want to cancel our plans, so Australia it was!!

How we started…

When we first decided that we wanted to travel Australia, we knew we wanted to have enough money behind us to do a full year of travel without working. So we saved, and saved, and saved!! We both saved up enough to support ourselves for a year of travel without having to work and had paid for our car & caravan outright so that we had nothing to pay off while we travelled. Our plan was to travel for as long as we could on our savings and once we needed to top up our funds we would stop in a town & work as an electrician and relief teacher. Keelan had completely quit his job (with the assurance he would have a job waiting if he ever wanted to return) and Sarah had taken a year of unpaid leave from her permanent Teaching role. It’s important to remember that it is just Keelan and I travelling together, we don’t have any kids or pets to provide for on the road, so our budget ($40K for 1-2 years) might look a little different for a family. We do not own a house and we were only in a rental in Perth, so we didn’t have to think about selling our house or putting renters in. In May 2021 we took off from Perth and travelled WA for 7 months before heading into South Australia.

At this stage, we were doing YouTube and Instagram as a hobby on the road.

Our FIRST ever post on Instagram ⬇

How do we fund our trip now?

Fast forward 1.5 years and I have officially resigned from my Teaching role with the Department of Education and we are now working on the road. We are treating YouTube & social media as a serious full-time job and it is no longer a hobby for us. So that leads us to our most asked question “How do you make money on the road?”…

YouTube:

Our most consistent source of income is through YouTube. Once you hit a certain amount of subscribers & watch time on YouTube your channel becomes monetised. This means that every time someone watches an advert on our video, we receive a small payment from YouTube… and when we say small, we mean it 😂 It’s basically $0.01 per view. However, this adds up and with posting regularly we are able to make an income from it. Our advice to you if you are going to make a YouTube channel while you travel is to do something you are passionate about, because for the amount of hours you put into filming & editing a single video, the pay check is not great! So if you are doing something you love then you wont mind! For example, if you LOVE cooking, why not start a channel on cooking? For us, we are passionate about what we do so we are happy doing it!

https://www.youtube.com/@SarahandKeelanTravels

Sponsorships:

The next source of income is sponsorships on social media. This is when you get paid to post about a certain brand or company on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. For example, a brand might reach out and say they love your content on Instagram & would like you to post about their product. We would then shoot content for them & post it to our platform. It is important to stay true to yourself and only promote something that you truly believe in. We are VERY selective about the sponsorships we accept and make sure it’s a product we love & use. If you wouldn’t recommend the product to your family, you shouldn’t promote it.

The rates that you charge for this work completely depend on the size of your following and the amount of engagement you get on your posts. It is very easy for companies to find your engagement rate online and it is very clear when someone has bought followers – so don’t do this – it is not good for your brand and name (we see people doing this a lot lately & it’s very obvious their following is not real or genuine).

If you would like more information on setting rates on Instagram – check out the links below:

https://landing.theright.fit/blog/how-much-should-i-pay-an-influencer

https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-rates/

https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-influencer-rates/

Check out the rates card below from Tribe:

Photography

The next way to make money is by selling photos or videos. This is a good option for when a company likes your work but it’s not a brand that you would like to promote on your platforms (what we said above about staying true to yourself). The prices that you would charge for photos & videos would completely depend on your level of skill in photography.

Have a look below at photography pricing:

https://orlandosydney.com/photography-prices-rates/#:~:text=Product%20Photographers%20charge%20per%20photo,and%20or%20license%20usage%20fees.

Affiliate Marketing

If you find a product that you have used for a certain amount of time and know works, then you could get into affiliate marketing for this brand. Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product to someone – sometimes through a discount code and get a commission when someone buys the product.

We only agree to do affiliate marketing for a company if we have USED & TESTED their products and are happy with their performance. If we would be comfortable selling to our parents, our siblings or our grandparents, then that’s when we are comfortable doing affiliate marketing for a brand.

More information on affiliate marketing: https://www.shopify.com/au/blog/affiliate-marketing#:~:text=Affiliate%20marketing%20means%20you%20earn,%2C%20leads%2C%20downloads%2C%20etc.

Merchandise

This is not something we have really delved into much yet, as we have heard of so many people who are trying to sell merchandise and it doesn’t really work for them. We had a few T-Shirt designs made up when we did the 4WD Show’s which we have for sale on our website, but we haven’t really gotten into merchandise big time. Its definitely an option.

If you are creative, this might be an option for you!

Other ways to make money on the road:

We have spoken about how we personally make money on the road, but that is not the only way. To be honest, the easiest way to make money on the road is to do casual work. You can work in your profession or try something new!! There is SO much work out there! Below are a few examples of jobs you could pick up on the road:

  • Station work
  • Hospitality & Bar work
  • Fruit & produce picking
  • Caravan Park work
  • Camp Host
  • Casual Labor
  • Mine worker

Sometimes places will even offer you free accommodation in exchange for work. We have heard of heaps of people who will get free accommodation at a caravan park and have to do an hour of work a day – e.g. clean the BBQs or toilets daily.

Lastly, make sure you budget!

This is probably one of the most important parts about money while travelling for us! We budget hard, which is why we still have savings behind us. We don’t spend all the money we make on YouTube and we make sure we are saving our money. Ways we cut down on the road include; only eating out once a month (which is usually parmi night $15-20 each = $40/$50 for a night out), if we get take-out it’s KFC & nothing fancy ($20 max), we buy our groceries in bulk and look for specials (having a freezer helps as we are able to buy specials & bulk meat and then freeze it), we don’t buy lunches and just have wraps or rice & tuna, we buy fuel when it’s cheap (Fuel Map App is great), we don’t travel many kilometres each week and move slow, we visit free attractions and try to find low-cost campsites as much as possible. These are all ways that you can save money on the road! Our next blog will be a detailed breakdown of what we spend each week which will hopefully help you with planning your travels.

Our biggest piece of advice?

Make sure you have savings behind you! You don’t want to be stressing over money while you are trying to enjoy your travels, so have enough money behind you when you first take off. Try to work out what is the minimum you could live off and then work out a budget. Think about things like how often you’ll need to stay at a caravan park for power, showers, toilets etc or will you free camp your way around Aus?

This was our budget when we first took off travelling – we lived on $400 a week!!

Our second piece of advice? Always remember why you started to travel! We were seeking a stress free lifestyle, to experience new things together & to achieve our goals of wanting to travel while we are young. Our life experiences showed us that “you are never guaranteed tomorrow” – We always remind ourselves of why we started this journey.

If you are planning to work on the road – remember work/life balance ❤

Want to know more about how we fund our travels?

Here are a few videos we have done on the topic:

Our latest video on the topic: https://youtu.be/JgUI2RgMhlc

 

Some of our older videos on the topic: 

 

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