If I were to name the single biggest roadblock to achieving full time family travel, it would easily be finances. After all, if having enough location independent income to support your family was easy, everyone would be doing it, right?
This is why we are carefully planning our travel and are waiting until next year to depart. We want to put the systems in place that will provide us with a source of location independent income so that once we leave we can focus on creating new travel experiences without worrying about running out of money. Here are the 6 sources of income that will fund our family travel adventure:
Selling (Mostly) Everything We Own
One of the reasons that full-time travel is so appealing to us is that it gives us the opportunity to downsize our belongings. This allows us to worry less on maintaining all of our stuff, and focus more on spending time together without material distractions. Although I wish I could tell you that we’re selling EVERYTHING, the reality is that we have things that have sentimental or historical family value that we are going to hold on to. For example, we has a china set that has been passed down for generations on Jessica’s side of the family. This china will eventually be the china that little Nora gets one day, just like her mother and grandmother did decades earlier. We debated whether we wanted to completely downsize, but in the end, storing some sentimentally (not financially) valuable items is a better decision for us in the long term. While we don’t currently have a projected end date to our full-time travel plans, we do know that at some point we will most likely settle down somewhere, and those items that we kept will not only be useful, but let us honor our family’s legacy.
It feels like I wrote quite a lot on the things we’re not selling, so let’s talk about what we do plan on getting rid of! Furniture sets that we purchased recently, you can consider those goners. Random artwork that’s displayed throughout the house will be sold as well. We’ll be getting rid of our TVs, cars, the majority of the kids’ toys, and pretty much everything else that doesn’t have sentimental value. All the proceeds from selling these items will give us a certain amount of financial “runway” that can fund the initial portions of our travels as we get our other sources of income flowing.
Renting Our House
The next important decision we had to make was what we were going to do with our house. The three options we considered were 1) Selling it, 2) Renting it through Airbnb, and 3) Renting it through traditional leasing methods. After weighing pros and cons for these three options, we are choosing to rent the house through traditional leasing methods. We will hire a property management company and will try to select long-term tenants to rent the house while we’re gone. Also, we chose to rent and not sell because we didn’t want to touch any of the equity that we currently have on our house, since we feel our other income streams can support our travel lifestyle. We also decided to not use Airbnb because traditional leases provide a more predictable income stream, whereas while Airbnb might provide a higher ceiling of potential income, it also has a much lower floor. By renting the house, we will be able to budget more accurately since we’ll know how much income is coming from the rent that we collect.
Social Media Partnerships
One of the benefits of chronicling your travels and experiences through social media is that you have the opportunity to develop and grow an audience of fellow travel lovers! And while the first purpose for our social media channels is to serve and provide value for our audience, we do have a unique opportunity to seek partnerships with companies in the travel and hospitality industries. We dream of partnering with companies such as Airbnb to provide fair marketing services of their family accommodations in exchange for reduced or comped stays. This allows us to shine a spotlight on the unique stories that hosts have to tell that would not be covered through traditional media methods.
Photography Services
I’m happy to share that Jessica is a PHENOMENAL photographer (she’s too humble to admit that herself 😊). We also plan on taking advantage of her talented eye for images to provide services to companies that would like professional level photography within the travel industry. Our goal is also to populate our Instagram accounts with appealing images that not only feature our family and the locations that we visit, but help us tell the stories that our audience is looking for!
Blog Sponsorships
Last, but not least, we are going to seek opportunities to partner with brands for sponsorships and affiliate marketing on our blog. Don’t worry though! We would never recommend a product, service, or company that we don’t use ourselves, and we will be fully transparent when we are using links that would provide us with a commission if you purchase a product from that company. Our goal is to be completely honest with you, and while you’re always welcome to just purchase a given product from the main page, just know that purchasing via affiliate links from here or any other blog helps promote and sustain our efforts so we can continue to provide your with high quality content!
So there you have it, these are the five ways that we plan on generating an income that will sustain our full-time family travel. While it will take time, determination and discipline to grow our business and achieve influencer status, we are fully committed to the process and excited to go on this journey and share our highs and lows with you along the way!
