Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

What’s the #1 question that we get?

How do you afford to travel so much?

Well, I can tell you, right away, that it’s definitely not just from the money we make from making YouTube videos. I mean, we make a little, which is far more than we ever hoped for or expected, but it’s also far from enough to support ourselves financially, let alone go to the northern most city on the planet.

So, how do we do it then?

It’s about our priorities. The most important things that we wanted to do when we started our channel and our travels were:

1. Help others live out their travel dreams

2. Keep traveling as long as we possibly can

3. Not run out of money in the process

Everything that we do, all our financial choices, are based around those three priorities, almost exclusively.

That being said, I just want to say how wildly lucky we are to be able to do this at all. While we saved for years for this and we are working hard everyday to make this our lifestyle, we also never want to take this thing for granted.

Now…prepare for some math. I’ve read too many articles that promise to “Show you how we afford to travel so much!” without any actual information or numbers, so prepare yourself for many numbers. We brought the receipts.

And next week we’re going to release a video breaking all these down even further, if you’re interested.

Here they come

Traveling, for us, as it turns out, is not too different cost wise compared to the lives we were living before.

Even in the most expensive places in the world, we’re spending about $100 / day for the two of us. That breaks down to roughly $60 a night for a budget hotel or hostel, $20 for food, and $20 for everything else - getting around the city, going into a museum, etc.

To extrapolate that number out, $100 a day for two people puts us at $3000 per month for both of us.

12 months in a year makes that $36,000 per year.

That puts us at an equivalent spending level as both people in a married couple combining to make $47,000 per year before taxes.

$750 per person every 2 weeks in take home pay.

That puts us well under the median household income for the US - by about $20,000 per year.

TL;DR - We’re spending way, way less full time traveling than we used to spend while living and renting in the US, working our 9-5’s.

For those of you who enjoy the math, here’s some evidence:

In Europe, our food budget is primarily spent on grocery store food, kebabs, or delectable pastries - $20 just doesn’t go very far in restaurants. So, instead, we head to the closest pâtisserie or bäckerei (depending on what country we’re in), Lidl or ALDI (whichever is closer), get a bunch of bread, muesli, yogurt, meat, and cheese. We live off of that, almost exclusively. And if we have access to a kitchen, we might splurge for some $2 tortellini and $1.50 pesto. In SouthEast Asia, we’ll be able to eat out for $20 a day easily at any of the incredible street food carts that are so plentiful. Grab food delivery is also quite reasonable.

It varies based on where we’re going, but we’ve found that $10 per day, per person, give or take, for food is largely doable just about anywhere.

There’s mayo in there, I think

I think it’s important to remind you here of our priorities, listed at the top.

We don’t travel like we’re on a 2 week vacation anymore - trying to savor every moment of the few days available by doing the most of everything before we have to go back to work. We’ve definitely done those trips before, but this is an entirely different style.

We don’t really go out to eat at fancy restaurants, go to every single museum and art gallery anymore. We only stay at nice hotels where breakfast might be included when we have the points to do so and it’s a good redemption.

It took us a little bit of time to adjust to that reality when we first started our trip (which led to a gem of a video titled “Harsh realities about traveling on a budget”…it still makes us cringe.)

And while a lot of what we see of full time traveling seems glamorous and full of highlight reels, much of full time travel is also just this:

Just about to enjoy my 23rd meat and cheese sandwich

Grab and go breakfast? Meat, cheese, and bread—you guessed it.

All so that we can enjoy things like this…

Sorry, got off topic for a second. Back to the how.

Secondly, we cut down on costs by not really paying for flights. Especially long-haul international ones.

We spent 2 years churning credit cards - accumulating chase points, airline frequent flier miles, hotel points - and we still use these regularly. We used them to fly to Rome for free when we started our RTW trip well over a year ago. We used them to stay in Innsbruck for 5 nights for free. We used them to stay on Jeju Island for 4 nights for free. We used them to fly back home from South Korea for free.

All in all, we saved just under $13,000 of travel expenses just on our 1 year RTW trip. And on this latest trip to the northernmost city in the world? It’s saved us around $2,500.

It’s that big of a deal for us. We wouldn’t be able to do this without those points. (Blah blah blah, skillshare course we made that will teach you how to do all this, etc etc etc. You know about it by now :))

Our points bank is running a bit low, and seeing as we’re not really making much-to-any money right now, getting approved for additional credit cards is basically impossible right now. Our credit scores are higher than they’ve ever been, but we just don’t have much income. Once this points bank is out, we’re going to need to figure something else out. Or, hopefully, our little YouTube business will be generating enough revenue to allow us to get some sweet business cards.

Yes, I do have a spreadsheet for this.

Third, we saved up a bunch of money before we quit our jobs. We spent as little as we possibly could, which in San Francisco and Hawaii, felt like hard mode. We squirreled away about 70% of our annual salaries for just under 2 years. We did everything we could to cut back on our spending, and make more money.

We took on a roommate.

We sold our car and I commuted to work via skateboard.

We had a lot of rotisserie chicken meals.

We figured out what we needed to do to ask for a raise in our jobs.

We started flipping things on eBay.

We sold just about everything extra that we owned. Surround sound system? Gone. Extra chairs that we never sat in? Get outta here. Garlic press that we used 1 time total? Get on craigslist.

We stopped going out to eat with friends, and invited them to come over and we would cook a meal.

Cutting out just one meal a week at a restaurant was saving us $200 per month. When we cut out all eating out, and made all our meals at home? It was a game changer for us.

Our version of fine dining

Getting rid of the excess at our apartment in SF

The Game Plan

Fourth, we do make some money from making these YouTube videos. We’re making anywhere from $1500-$2300 per month from the ads that run on our videos, and *some* money from the sponsorships we get.

We can’t tell you how much, because whenever you sign a contract to do a brand deal, that contract requires you to not say how much the brand deal is for. Sorry, got to leave that out.

We make literally nothing from Instagram or TikTok. We once got a free powerbank from doing a IG reel about it. That’s still not money, but does constitute the total amount of ROI we’ve gotten from IG and TikTok. To be fair, it is the thing that keeps Lisa’s phone and all of our cameras from dying while traveling.

We probably work about 60-70 hours per week, per person on our YouTube channel and everything that goes with it - editing, writing, pre-production, post-production (the biggest chunk), making IG reels and TikToks, responding to comments, telling this company that sells boob tape, “Sorry, we just don’t think this brand deal is the right fit for us.”

$1500 per month, divided by 60 hours per week * 2 people, for 120 hours per week, or 480 hours per month puts our hourly salary at a whopping $3.13 per hour.

Roughly doubling that amount would put us at only $6.26 per hour. Not saying that’s how much we make after the brand deals. Not saying it isn’t.

So, that’s why I say at the top that we’re a long way from being able to live on our YouTube income. Oh yeah, and all that is before taxes.

But still, this is the best job we’ve ever had. We absolutely love it. We wouldn’t trade it for anything.

We just need to figure out how to get it to pay the bills. We’re much, much closer to that than we were a year ago, but we’re still a long ways off.

Not for sale.

I mentioned all of these amounts and numbers because they do factor into how we afford to travel. There are many, many, many people doing YouTube full time (probably some even reading this right now) that make significantly less than that. We’re lucky to even be pulling in the amount that we are. We have you to thank for that.

At the end of the day, we are beyond lucky to have been able to find a job that allows us to do the thing we love the most and hopefully equip others to do the same. And for us, the best way to do this is just try to be as transparent as possible.

It’s a really difficult, unclear way to make money. Starting one’s own business always is. We do have some income. Certainly not enough to offset our expenses, but there it is.

I really hope that this helps somebody out there understand not only how we afford to travel, but also how the economics of full time travel and Youtube work. It was a huge shift in our thinking, getting comfortable with little-to-no income while reducing our expenses as far as possible.

We’re also generally savers. We love a good deal, we always question whether something is worth it before doing it, we’ll almost never order a bottle of wine at a restaurant - because we know that we can just buy one for $5 at a grocery store and drink it at home later. That mindset was in us from childhood, from the get go.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s email. I really, really hope that sharing these numbers, how we think about it, and how the money side of full time travel works. It’s more of a mindset shift than anything, but understanding the numbers can help it all make sense.

Thanks again for reading this, watching our mini movies, commenting, and (hopefully) enjoying the stuff we make. We, in the most literal way possible, work for you. Everything we make, we hope you like it.

There’s still no other job that we would want. We love this gig. :) And we have you to thank for the fact that we get to keep doing it.

Thank you so, so, so much.

Where to next?

Today

TRYING TO MAKE IT TO THE WEDDING IN TIME. YOU’LL KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT SOON.

The (Near) Future

Super, super unclear. We’ve been so focused on trying to make it to Longyearbyen, and to the wedding in time, that we haven’t really had time to think about anything else.

Videos This Week

Top 8 Things To Do in South Korea. You know what it is.

Our last weekend in South Korea was a blast—all thanks to a K-Pop concert that we somehow managed to get into.

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

Bonus Dog Content

This is Fenris. He’s a retired sled dog whose job is to protect humans from polar bears

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