This journey is about more than seeing new places and volunteering. Rather than continuing to trade our time for money we are putting all of our emphasis on enjoying as much of our time as possible, in the moment. Rather than working longer hours to get enough money to buy the latest and greatest things we are going to be streamlining our lives so we can take advantage of the one resource we cannot create more of, time. That being said we both enjoy our current lifestyle and need money to maintain it so we have set up some income streams which continue to support us while also giving us the freedom to pursue our passions. I know passive income is a hot topic in the digital nomad world so I will keep this blog updated on our progress.
We have experienced first hand how giving more, volunteering and donating to worthy causes has come back to benefit our lives 10 fold. That is one of the reasons why we started giving and volunteering more as we began to save and gear up for this move. I will also keep a running update of the projects we are involved with or donating to so you can follow along. Currently we are pretty spread out with the causes we support (we take turns picking each month) but I could see us getting more focused in the future.
“How are you going to pay for it” is the number one question we get after explaining our crazy dream. Although we still do not have it all completely figured out here is what we have so far…
Rachel was a school counselor in San Diego before we started traveling. She now sells her resources on a site called Teachers Pay Teachers. You can find a link to her online store here. She also has a blog focused on school counseling which helps her stay relevant and drives traffic to the TpT store. You can find a link to that blog here. Thankfully TpT alone brings in enough money to keep us going every month. That being said we have also started trying to earn income from additional sources…
We were then able to take Rachels success on TpT and spin it into a new brand Elite Edupreneurs. Elite Edupreneurs focuses on helping other teachers start stores on TpT. So far we have not found a consistent way monetize Elite Edupreneurs but we do have a podcast with over 100,000 downloads and have had a few podcast sponsors. Eventually we will launch a course and potentially e-Book directed towards this audience.
We signed up for the Amazon Affiliate program which provides us with about $50 per month. The money comes from “Affiliate Sales” which just means people clicked from one of our blogs to Amazon and then bought something. The price stays the same for the user but we get a small referral fee from each transaction. We would need a LOT more traffic for this to be a real source of income but a lot of people do it.
We also use Google Adsense which is why you see ads on this site. Adsense pays even less than Amazon but it is super easy to set up. Again, if we are able to increase our traffic (significantly) it could turn into a real source of income.
Not all of our attempts have been successful. We used to sell Spanish learning labels on Amazon but they didn’t really fly off the shelf as I had anticipated. In the end, we did sell out but I am not sure that we really made a profit.
So there you have it. I will post more updated and a detailed budget for our lifestyle as I get time.
Enjoy,
-Grant