How we afford to travel full-time
(And Make Money!)
How do we afford to travel full-time?
So, what do you do for a living?
We often get asked this at every family gathering. And, well the answer is, we travel.
‘But how do you earn money?’. – We’ve been asking ourselves this for the last 3 years.
To most people our life looks like a dream, a fairy-tale that we are so ‘lucky’ to live the life that we do. However, yes we are ‘lucky’ but also, we worked really hard for this.
What you don’t see is everything that has gone on behind closed doors for the last 3 years. The literal blood, sweat and tears…many tears.
Our Story
In 2021, Maisie got made redundant and then lived job to job during covid, getting laid off a further two times. We were in limbo with what to do and always knew we wanted to travel. So we sold our house, car and took everything we owned and flogged it at a car boot.
Car boot sales are weird places. But that was our life every Sunday morning at 5am for months. That extra 50p for your kitchen whisk can go a long way.
Once we had sold everything, we set a date booked a one-way train ticket and packed our backpacks.
After being set back for a year from covid we were finally happy to be living our dream.
But...
We made two big mistake.
We travelled Scandinavia our first month travelling. Visiting 6 countries in 9 days, and we didn’t budget at all.
We spent a 1/3 of our yearly budget in 4 weeks. Our original route was to get from the UK to Thailand by train, an epic adventure. We made it to Russia and then… we had to fly out of the country due to conflict with a neighbouring country. So we took a direct flight to Thailand.
We had been travelling for 3 months and still had a pot of money left. Thailand was cheap and we definitely knew how to better manage our money now. But one major problem still remained… we weren’t making any money.
Bonus tip number 1:
Make friends and connections whilst travelling. You never know who you will meet or what opportunities may come from this.
We, by chance made friends with a guy who was opening a new hostel in Southern Thailand. Obviously, we got chatting and decided to come and work for him renovating and running the hostel.
We stayed there for 4 months for free. This saved us so much money.
Yes, this prolonged our budget, but again we still weren’t making any income.
However, this tip is a good way to prolong the money that you already have before you start making an income on the road.
Firstly, we worked on ways to stretch our budget. Volunteering in hostels, like we did, is a great way to save money and stretch your budget further.
We also changed our lifestyle. Instead of working out at a gym we worked out at home, instead of buying £4 coffees from the shop every day we bought instant and made it ourselves.
Small habit changes can have a huge long-term impact and can help to stretch your budget further.
Our Top Money Saving Tip
The top money saving tip we can give you is to travel slow. By booking accommodation for 1-3 months at a time you usually get huge discounts. By staying in one area for longer, you get to find the best and cheapest spots to eat. The best free attractions and not be spending money on transport every other day. We visited 6 countries in 9 days. It was ridiculous and so expensive, we won’t be doing that again. Now we aim to spend minimum 2 weeks to 1 months in any location before moving on.
Work on ways to budget and stretch your money further. This will also come in handy when you do start earning and income.
Do you have what it takes?
Travelling full-time to most seems like the ultimate dream life. To have no responsibility, to see and experience amazing places every day is like a never-ending holiday.
However, this is far from the truth.
We have spent days on end holed up in hotel rooms working. It takes hard work to find a strategy that’s works for you. We have multiple income streams and often work many more hours now than we ever did in a corporate 9 to 5 job.
The only difference now is that we are doing something that we love and can do it whilst sitting on a sun lounger on the beach.
Let's talk about loneliness
It can get lonely out here sometimes. We travel full-time as a couple so we aren’t as lonely as some other solo travellers. But there’s always the times when you miss another birthday, birth of a niece or nephew, wedding or warm embrace of your mum and dad that can really have you feeling down. Its undeniable you will get home sick, one of the things we weren’t prepared for was this feeling. Your life is amazing and your mind is elsewhere but your family’s life is still ongoing and evolving. Are you truly going to be able to be away from loved ones for a year or even three?
It takes a lot of ‘learning the hard way’ to live life on the road. A lot of mistakes will be made but just like anything, you learn from them.
Even now this could all be taken away from us tomorrow, we are still learning, figuring out and building a steady income stream to sustain our long-term travel plans. It’s stressful not knowing if this could all be over by this time next year, are you able to live this way? But when the reward is as big as this, is it worth it?
Income Stream 1:
Blogging
As you already know we write articles and blog posts here on our website maisieandnikita.co.uk.
We only started this blog early in 2023 to share our travels guides and experiences with other travellers and hopefully help some of you along the way.
Never intending, to turn this into an income stream but after a lot of research we have found a way to monetise our content and create yet another way to make money on the road.
Having multiple income streams is smart when living full-time on the road. Our website doesn’t currently make enough to sustain our lifestyle by any means but any income is great when travelling full-time. If you are planning on travelling full-time, you should make a travel blog and document your travels, in guides and tips and share your travel experiences and knowledge.
Income Stream 2:
Social Media Content Creation
In November 2021 we set off on our travels, with the dreams of making it as a social media influencer and travelling the world full-time.
Well as you can imagine, that completely flopped.
We loved creating content and being in front of the camera came naturally to us. But we went about it the wrong way.
We spent hundreds of pounds on courses and e-books on how to be Instagram famous and buying tech equipment and cameras we had no idea how to use.
We were trying too hard and it showed in our content what we once loved was now becoming a chore. Pressure and stress were looming over us and we began to hate taking pictures and gave up entirely.
When in Russia, Nik decided to create a TikTok account and we started creating content again. This time fun and relaxed videos of us together travelling, more real and raw content. Without the pressure and stress of us feeling like we HAD to make it or we would have to go home was gone.
After 3 months of consistently posting on TikTok of our travels, we hit 100 thousand followers. We had 4 viral videos over 1 million views, one reaching 14 million views.
We were blown away by the response to our videos, we were having fun creating content, and doing what we loved, travelling. We were able to monetise this by working with hotels and tourism boards around southeast Asia. We were so lucky to receive free nights in hotels, free excursions, and even monetary payment for our content. We cannot recommend TikTok enough, or any social media platform to start documenting your travels. Juts take the plunge and do it, and remember most of all to have fun and don’t put too much pressure on yourself.
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Income stream 3:
Seasonal Work
So, this one we have been gatekeeping till last.
This is the BEST way to make money travelling full-time. This is the exact method that we use for our main source of income whilst travelling full-time.
Currently we are working as hotel and holiday let managers in the Isles of Scilly for 3 months, then we will be jetting off to the French Alps for our second winter season as resort managers in the most luxurious ski resort in the world.
Usually, we will work for 6 months of the year over winter and then we will use the money we have saved to travel the 6 months 0ver summer.
The last year we have worked in seasonal jobs during all seasons, year-round, across the globe, to save (yes, we said SAVE) money for our next big adventure.
In one year, we will have saved £30K whilst travelling full-time. We are saving more money now whilst living life on the road than we ever did whilst working a corporate 9 to 5 job.
We have found a way to travel full-time whilst earning a steady income. Read our full post here about seasonal work and how to get started. It is the best thing that has ever happened to us.
In Conclusion...
Admittedly, travelling full-time is the most amazing experience and our absolute dream. We wouldn’t change our life now for the world. But we didn’t get here out of chance, after hard work, determination, many days feeling hopeless and many tears shed (and a few less hairs on our heads) we are finally comfortably living full time on the road out of our backpacks … for now.
These are the three main ways we earn money and travel full-time, living life on the road 365 days of the year.
