It’s that time again for another monthly finance blog. Wow where does the time go. We have had a very interesting month this month, on the one hand we have hit new records on our youtube channel and on the other we have had a change of situation on our house rental.
The reality of renting out your house is that it will not always be rented, and there will be periods when you get no income at all from the rental. In fact in between lettings it costs you money. It doesn’t matter how good your tenants are, there will alway be work to do.
When the tenants left we got a detailed report on the house and realised that if we wanted to rent it again quickly (which we need to do) then we had to get the work done. Lucky for us, one of our sons is in between jobs and he offered to do the work. He and his girlfriend then spent 3 – 4 weeks gardening, staining fences and painting the house. They are both legends and we want to say a HUGE thank you to them. Thanks to their hard work we are pleased to say that the house has just been rented again – which is a big relief to us.
As we have previously explained, we are unable to continue driving east (into Georgia) due to the pandemic and so the plan was, that we would try and wait until next Spring (when the weather warms up) before heading into Georgia and then Russia. With 8 months to wait, we were unsure of where we would be. We wanted to stay in Turkey as it is such a fascinating and interesting country and filled with the kindest people we have met. There is plenty to see for 8 more months and so we wanted to try and wait it out here.
We are delighted to tell you that we have received our Turkish temporary resident permits, which means that we are now able to wait it out until next spring and then at that point we can assess the world situation. It’s a big relief for us, and we are excited at the prospect of exploring more of this wonderful country and sharing it with you.
We are VERY grateful to ‘RentnConnect’ for continuing to providing us with free and unlimited internet. Your support has kept us online and sharing our adventures.
What to expect from future posts
We will continue to share with you our our monthly costs as we travel. When we decided to travel full time, there were very few content creators who shared their finances and social media income openly. In fact if you look, most keep it a well guarded secret, so we wanted to be open and honest about our financial journey as we travel full time. You will get to come on all aspects of our adventures with us, and we hope that if you want to do something similar, or just understand the costs of certain aspects of our travels, that these posts help with that. Hopefully you get to see how our incomes grow, as we increase our online presence and we will share that journey and our decisions with you along the way. There really aren’t many travel vloggers that will share this kind of information with you.
So here is July’s income / expenditure report from the road!
July 2020 - INCOME & EXPENDITURE
INCOME
YouTube £769.15(Last month £318.72)
Last month as we said, we had a great month, well this month has been out busiest month ever! For the first time we had 2 videos achieve over 100k views and this has really helped our channel. Coupled with this, we were chosen by YouTube as one of their creators on the rise. This is a real honour, they select up and coming channels and feature them on their trending page for 24 hours. We went up 1,000 subscribers in a day! Last month we reported that the channel had grown to 191,000 views, well this month we had 741,302 views. When we stated the world trip in January we had 9k subscribers (after nearly 2 years) well we have just hit 30k subscribers and in July alone we went up 9.5k.
With the increased views came increased ad revenue, and we hit over $1000 in ad revenue (approx £769) This couldn’t have come at a better time with no house rental income.
We’re genuinely shocked by how many views and comments of support we have had over the past month. To think that so many people enjoy our adventures is very humbling. We want to thank each and every person who has subscribed and takes the time to watch our videos – without you our Youtube revenue would be at zero !
This graph shows the growth over the past 1 year
Tread Tribe £144 (Last month £118)
We had a few new TREAD Tribe members join us in June. If you are one of them then Welcome to the Tribe and a huge THANK YOU to all Tribe members. Your support is appreciated more than you know ! You are helping keep us on the road, and in turn allowing us to keep making you content.
If you haven’t heard of the Tread Tribe, it’s our private members Patreon page, where you can support us to continue making content and be part of a really nice group. We started the TREAD Tribe to create a platform for like minded people. It’s a place for those who truly love what we do, and want to actually be part of it. We always try to respond to every public comment, message and email that we receive, after all we love talking to everyone. But in reality, as our channel grows we know that it will be hard to keep this up. We are only just keeping up with them now.
Being part of the TREAD Tribe we give you priority – you basically have more access to us. We do live video hangouts on our TREAD Tribe facebook group. Our TREAD Tribe private facebook group is also a great platform for people to chat together, and we are so happy that we created such a great group of lovely people.
At the time of this post we have 41 members and if you are one of them we want to say a HUGE THANK YOU, your support and friendship is really appreciated.
There are various levels of membership and in return we offer some added perks for example, access to the TREAD Tribe’s facebook group where we do live chats, and personal TREAD postcards from us on our travel. Membership starts from $1 (£0.76) per month.
For those of you who joined us for the live hangout on our Tribe Facebook group ($5 members and above), we really loved chatting to you and answering all of your questions – we’ll do another one soon.
If you would like to know more about the Tread Tribe please
click here,
House Rental £o - (Last month £1,281)
As you probably know we rent our house out to help fund our adventures. We wanted to make our travels fully sustainable and the only way to do that was to rent out our house. This way we get a steady income as we concentrate on growing our other lines of income. Well we usually get a steady income, this month the house was not rented and so for the first time since we started travelling we received no income !
Merchandise Sales £231.75 (Last month £183.27)
We started selling merchandise following requests and as a way to generate some additional funds. Each T-Shirt sold funds us for approximately 40 miles of travel and helps us fund this expedition.
This month we have sold £231 in sales (note this is the sales and not the profit – we have to pay for the shirts – you can see details in the expenses below).
We use a print to order service, so we are still able to process orders from the road and we post WORLDWIDE !.
THANK YOU to everyone who bought one, and shared their photos on social media.
If you would like to visit our online shop to check out our exclusive merchandise then please CLICK HERE,
