What do you need to travel with a family?
Money is probably the main reason for not travelling. If you had £20,000 a month passive income would you be doing the school run and dealing with a boss?
When Keri and I were young, we could travel by saving up or finding work in interesting places that often included bed and board.
Travelling as a family, that isn’t an option.
The way we make money while travelling has to mean:
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We can do it from anywhere.
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Not take up time as a family.
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Make enough to pay for worthwhile experiences and stay safe
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Be fun.
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Benefit the world and set a good example.
This blog, will share the three practical ways we make a living while travelling.
We’ll share the pro’s and cons we’ve experienced.
We’ll also share resources so you can learn more about how to implement the solution that will work for you.
Our main sources of travel income are:
“Wait! How much money do you need to make to travel?”
You don’t need much, it’s often cheaper to live abroad than in the UK.
If you have other questions about family travel, like:
- “What do you do about education?”
- “Where should we start?”
- “How do we not drive each other nuts?
- “What happens if we get sick?”
Sign up for our email series to get more practical insights about travel with a family.
1. Freelance work.
Lots of jobs don’t care how or where you work as long as you get results.
If you are not required to hang around an office or workspace trying to look busy. You can work in a way that’s right for you.
Learn to work around your life rather than the other way around.
I do around 3 x 1-hour consultancy calls a day.
I try to do these early mornings and in the evening so my day is free for the family.
This helps generate cash flow we put into other sources of income.
In our email series, we share interviews with other families that work in different ways.
For now, think about the work you could do from anywhere.
Most often this is
- Creative; like design or copywriting.
- Sales– commission for closing.
- Consulting – valuable insights for businesses or lifestyles.
Pro’s:
- Get paid now.
- Say “yes” to work you enjoy. Say “no” to work you don’t.
- Keeps your mind active if you like a challenge,
Con’s:
- Can limit you.
- You will probably need internet and workspace wherever you travel.
- Will have to miss out on some family time or activities.
- Often requires you to have a specialist skill.
2. Airbnb
What if you have a mortgage or a rental property?
Maintaining a mortgage/rent and bills and funding travelling would require a huge amount of freelance work!
We didn’t want to sell our house, even renting seemed risky.
- What if we hated travelling?
- What if there are unexpected costs?
- What if the world got turned upside down again and we needed to come back quick?
Our solution was to Airbnb our house.
You can do this with a rented or mortgaged property. There are very few hoops to jump through.
We locked all the sentimental stuff that we couldn’t sell and wouldn’t throw away, in a separate room. We can keep most of our furniture in the house. It was a great way to de cluttler
We can open up the calendar for people to stay when we’re away and close it off if we need or want to come back.
Our house isn’t anything special, but for a family wanting to come down to Devon for the summer, it’s a damn sight cheaper and a lot more practical than a hotel or even camping.
Airbnb pays us a nightly rate that more than covers the mortgage and bills. We also receive a service fee for every stay that we give directly to friends in our village to deep clean. We’ve also used profits to invest in fixing all those little jobs that we’d learnt to live with.
We did a test run before we travelled and spent a week with family and used the money to pay for a new kitchen, something we’ve put off investing in for ourselves for years. We cleared out loads of clutter we no longer needed.
On the whole, our house is in a much better state than had we stayed.
You can manage it yourself for more profit or use specialist services that will take care of everything from bedsheets and breakages to bookings.
Admittedly, we don’t need to do this anymore due to the online business but it was a great way for us when we first started.
It is possible to create passive income by renting multiple proerties and putting them on Air BnB. this wasn’t something we felt comfortable with or that benefited our community.
Pro’s
- Really easy.
- Pays all the bills to free up more cash for travelling.
- Cleared out clutter.
- Paid for jobs on the house.
- House gets cleaned and looked after while we’re away.
- Provides affordable holidays for families.
- Most guests are lovely.
- Stop-start whenever you please.
Con’s
- We did have one nightmare guest who kept trying to get discounts complaining about moths and window cleaner (say “no” to long-term lets)
- Can be a bugger getting everything ready to go away.
- Requires admin whilst you are abroad (if not using a service).
- You’ll need to check with your landlord or mortgage provider to make sure they don’t have policies against it.
If you want to learn more about Airbnb’ing your house including earning potential click here:
3. Online business.
Freelancing and Airbnb have been good but limited.
If I do too much freelance work, it defies the point of travelling and spending time as a family.
Even Air bnb often requires us to be on call to solve problems.
Alittlemoreoutdoor.com is our online business. It earns us money for doing more of the things we want to do, like travelling and learning as a family.
Online business is the most alien method to most people. It’s not something we’re taught in schools. It’s certainly something technophobes like Keri and I were uncertain about.
But it’s surprisingly simple, our best bit of advice is to build a business around helping people achieve a goal you are actively pursuing..
It doesn’t matter if you’re not an expert. The reason alittlemoreoutdoor.com works isn’t because we’re travel experts. We’re normal people overcoming the same challenges that normal people would face so our advice is pragmatic, practical and real
As we travel and explore, we make mistakes and we learn.
We share what we learn and recommend what’s worked and not worked for us.
Pro’s of online business
- Near limitless earning potential. Earning is a reflection of how many people we reach, not how many hours we work.
- Passion-based, we get to work around the things we love; outdoors, travel, learning and making the world better.
- A great skill to teach our kids. Learning to build a business online is teaching us to learn an important skill with our kids rather than just trying to transfer our existing knowledge. Encouraging all of us to pursue our passions.
- Passive. The work is creating assets that earn money. We still earn money even when we take a break.
Con’s
- It took us a while to get it right.
- It can involve a lot of trial and error when doing it by yourself.
- Requires investment of time and money to learn or outsource skills and pay for things like marketing or products.
Some business models we use
Affiliate Marketing
Naturally, there are products and services that we’ve found beneficial or essential in reaching our goal of exploring the world as a family.
These companies are happy to pay us for recommending them.
They give us a personalized link that lets them know we sent you. Those companies then pay us a commission if you choose to buy something.
This is called affiliating.
For example the Air Bnb link above looks like this “www.airbnb.co.uk/r/kerii35”
It doesn’t cost you anything extra to click it. Airbnb can see we sent you but only pay us if you take action.
We also recommend useful gear in our online shop and in our blogs.
Pro’s
- Easy, you just get a personalised link. Companies do everything else.
- Talk about what matters to you to people who share your values.
- You can pretty much affiliate anything.
Con’s
- You need a platform, blog YouTube channel etc that people have a genuine reason to visit and a genuine reason to follow your recommendation.
Want to know how Affiliate marketing works is? Watch a free workshop on how it works and how to do it yourself here:
E-commerce and Physical products
We have also developed some of our own products. Bags and shoes and bits that we felt could be better adapted for our audience as you see in our shop.
None of it requires us to be experts.
We speak to manufacturers and say we want something to be made a certain way and they make it happen.
We then send that to distributors like Amazon who deal with all the storage, money and logistics while we get on with living our life.
Watch this short video to learn more about how that’s done.
Pro’s
- You can use platforms like Amazon to sell your products.
- Once you’ve got something set up it’s often rinse and repeat
Con’s
- Requires an upfront investment in products.
- Shipping and packaging were scary the first time.
- Need a way to stand out from the noise.
How do you start your own online business?
Knowledge is only one thing, the hard part is taking action.
If you want help applying these business models into your own online business based on your own interests passions or expertise, We recommend your next step is one of these resources from Launch You:
- Modern Wealthy is a 7-part short course on how and why some online businesses work to make an informed decision on if, howand when to get started (Circa £20)
- Launchpad is a tool kit with every bit of on-demand training and website-building resources required to make an online business work, laid out in a step by step process. (Circa £800)
Worried that you need more able to make that work?
Prepare: Figure out what your business should be and how would it work.
Launch: actually build it and get it online.
Grow: market it in a profitable way
Click Launchyou.com to find out more about the support available.