Wow – what a month June was, we finally got the news that we were able to leave the carpark in Istanbul after a whopping 95 days.  Funny as we had only originally planned to spend 3 days in Istanbul.  In fact as we are driving around the world, we only planned around 3 weeks to cross the North of Turkey, before entering Georgia.

Ironically getting ‘stuck’ in a carpark in Istanbul helped us get exposure for our adventures.  We had numerous TV and radio interviews, actually at the last count we had around 20+.  The prospect of driving around the world didn’t get this much attention when we left, but spending 95 days in a 6m van caught everyones attention.  I think it was the fact that we remained happy and positive throughout the experience.  Why wouldn’t we?  After all we were in our home, in a secure safe environment with everything we needed and surrounded by some of the kindest people we have ever met.

We used the time in the carpark wisely, sharing our experiences on our Youtube Channel and social media.  We watched lots of Youtube tutorials to improve our filming and editing skills, and we hope that you can all notice the improvements in the latest videos.   This experience has helped us grow our channel.

As we said in last months blog, there are numerous reasons why we are currently unable to continue driving east on our around the world drive.  The result is that our trip is on temporary pause.  We want to reiterate that we are still driving around the world and have no intention of heading back into the EU or cancelling our trip, it just may take longer than originally planned.  So the plan is that we are going to hopefully stay exploring Turkey until next spring, and when the weather starts to warm after the winter,  we can head into Georgia and beyond.

We are VERY grateful to ‘RentnConnect’ for 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 June’s income / expenditure report from the road!

June 2020 - INCOME & EXPENDITURE


INCOME

YouTube £318.72 (Last month £184.27)

 We have had a great month on Youtube and this is one of the best months we have had.  Views on the channel have grown to a whopping 191,000.  We started travelling again this month and I think we are one of the few travel bloggers who are actually still travelling in foreign lands.  Many travel creators either chose to or were forced to return to their home countries.   

We then increased our views, we have seen an increase in ad revenue.  We earned £318 compared to £184 last month which us one of our highest months ever!

We had another 1,600 new subscribers to our channel in June.   So welcome if you are one of them, and to everyone else who has taken the time to watch one of our videos (and the adverts), then THANK YOU!,  because without you watching the adverts, our revenue would be zero. 

Tread Tribe £118 (Last month £94.94)

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 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 37 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 £1,281 - (Last month £1,356)

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.  This month is slightly lower than last month as we had some minor repairs to carry out.

As we mentioned in last months post, our long term tenants  are leaving and so from next month we will temporarily loose this stream of income.  We will also have to spend out to get the house back up to renting standard.  The routine repainting and doing up the garden.  This is normally something we would do ourselves, but as we are unable to return on this trip then one of our sons and his partner are coming to the rescue.  So we want to say a HUGE THANK YOU to them in advance for their offer of help – you rock !!

Merchandise Sales £183.27 (Last month £1,331.91)

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.  

Last month we had the highest T shirt sales we have ever had.  A  whopping £1,331.  These sales were a one off as we created new designs.  This month’s sales of £183 are  back to normal levels.

(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,

 

Contributions £0 (Last month £200.33)

We are always so overwhelmed by your kindness and generosity no matter how small or big your contribututions are, or be it joining the TREAD Tribe, buying us a coffee, using Amazon links or a PayPal donation (on our web site) It is very humbling and nice to know that you enjoy coming on this adventure with us.

This month we didn’t receive any contributions  – Last month was so high due to a very generous donation from a family member.

 If you want to see how you can help us then Click Here

Buy Me a Coffee £38.36 (Last month £94.28

Yes that’s our coffee and caffine sorted out for another month.  This is a necessity to keep the concentration for driving and editing videos!  We both love coffee and so added a link on our website where you can buy us a coffee.  This month we received  £38.  

Someone asked us if we can drink that much coffee.  Although we do LOVE coffee donations, this is a way that people can support us and it doesn’t necessarily mean we drink it all in coffee !!   

We love it when we receive a message saying “We loved the video so much we bought you a coffee to say thanks for taking the time to make the videos and share them”.  It takes us around  8- 12 hours to edit a video.  

Sometimes when we are rushing to get it finished and uploaded,  it’s easy to wonder why we do it, but we get so many messages and comments on the videos, that it keeps us going even if we burn the midnight oil to make sure they are out on time .  

So thank you to everyone who takes the time to tell us what you think

Amazon Affiliate Links £19.81 (Last month £16.96)

We receive a small amount from our Amazon links, this month was £19.81.   If you’re one the the people that used our links then thank you! 

Lots of you have asked about which products we use or recommend, so we have recently create an Amazon shop.  If you would like to look at this, then please click here.

This is a very easy way for you to help us, and it doesn’t cost you anything.   If you want to buy another products, then just use our link then shop as normal.

TOTAL INCOME: £1,959 (Last Month £3,279 )

EXPENDITURE

Merchandise costs £80.99

Unfortunately to sell T shirts, you have to buy them and this is the cost of.  T- Shirts sold.  This month we generated a profit of £102.28

Vehicle Running Costs £222.18 (last month £180.65)

This month we have started travelling again, so with that comes some extra costs. We had to renew our vehicle insurance, top up with fuel and we got a ferry to save a long drive ! Here’s this months costs

Parking: £64.36 

Fuel £56.17 

Ferry £20.28 

Insurance £81.37 (covers us until the end of the year)

TREAD Expenses £147.26 (Last month £407.86)

These are expenses that are specifically for TREAD the Globe. Whether it is for our website or to be able to publish content. Last month was so much higher as we had to buy a new GoPro 7 as the one we had was faulty.

Tube Buddy: £15 Monthly

This is a google chrome extension that makes any Youtuber’s life a lot easier.  It allows us to bulk change elements of our end screens and descriptions of all our videos, as well as lot of other perks. 

Tech Insurance: £12.49 (Monthly)

We have our Mac Book Pro insured – just incase.

Canva Pro: £10.69 (Monthly)

This is an online image creator and is great for us, we create all of our thumbnails using this software and effects like the diary cam on our videos.  

Epidemic Sound: £7.49 (Monthly)

This monthly membership which allows us to access lots of music for our videos, without having to worry about copyright issues.  We spend a lot of time listening to tracks to match the video.  We hope you agree, it really makes a big difference having good music.  Normally it’s £10 per month however if you do have Tube Buddy then you get a discount – it all helps.

Site Ground Web Hosting: £14.35 (Monthly)

This is an ongoing cost, once you have a website built, you still need to pay a company to host it for you.

Mobile Phone sims / Internet: £10.27 (last month)

The reason this is so low is because we have been sponsored by Rent N Connect for our internet. This charge is to keep our UK sim going so we keep the same number and can whatsapp call our friends and family.

Cloud Storage £0.79

Site Seeing £19.12

To be able to show you our travels we have to sometime pay an entry fee to a tourist site. This was the entrance fee to Pamukale so that we were able to film it and share it with you

Web Design £42

In order for us to maintain our web site sometimes we have to do some updates – this is the charge for our web designer

Other Tread Expenses £15.06

As part of our TREAD Tribe membership we send some members postcards and stickers. This is the monthly postage costs.

Living Expenses £580.45 (last month £335.27)

Self isolating has helped us reduced our monthly living expense but now we are back on the road they are a bit higher.  We both had some dental work done. Fabulous service at a great price! We also stayed in a campsite near Pamukale so that we could film it and get our washing etc done.   

Clothes: £15.15

Groceries:  £174.26

Eating out: £205.77

Netlix: £11.99

ATM Fees: £11.88

Dentist: £129.50. 

Campsite: £31.90

Other Expenses : £0

This month all of the charges fitted nicely into a category so no other expenses 


Total Expenses: £1,030(Last month £1,496)


Monthly Profit / Loss

Yipee!! We underspent this month by £928.12

It is great to see we continue to underspend.   

It was always planned that we would live under our means, so we would be able to pay for the expensive shipping costs and cope if our house became unrented, which it is for next month.

To give you an example shipping from Russia to the States is approx £5,000.   In addition with the unpredictable future we need to continue to underspend to ensure our trip is sustainable.  The 2 year around the world drive, is now going to take at least an extra year.  We are going to have extra costs such as visas, as we will have to fly back to the UK next year to reapply for our Russian visa.  There will be other additional costs as a result of the world pandemic.

We hope you continue to find our expenses interesting.  If you are planning to make a living being a full time Youtuber, then make sure you have additional streams of income – for us it’s our house, because as you can see from the figures you are not going to get a decent income quickly.  If you looked at the hourly rate of being a travel blogger you wouldn’t take the job!  That being said, if you are able to generate enough views, then Youtube does give you the possibility of earning a good income.  Also take note that the views and income are unpredictable and out of your control.

If there are any more details you want to ask us, then go ahead and send us a message, email or leave a comment.

We want to keep sharing our adventures with you.  The good, the bad and the ugly !!   Any funds donated or generated go back into our adventures so we can bring you greater, more varied and exciting content.

Thank you for your ongoing support and most importantly, stay safe.  Sending you all virtual hugs 

Chris and Marianne

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