Travel Support Thursday

Travel Support Thursday episode two, so this is a show where we

take all of your questions about travel or budget or also our

personal lives and finances and hopefully that'll help you

travel the world on a budget. And that's awesome.

If you're new here, I'm Lisa and we're travel content creators

primarily on YouTube where we make, yeah, videos on budget

travel. But we're bringing back a segment called Travel

Thursday where we're taking all of the questions that we don't

always get to answer when we're making videos and answering

them right here. And if you haven't guessed either on

YouTube land, we are doing this in video format here on YouTube

as well as podcast format at a podcast platform near you. So if

you're walking, jogging, just generally walking around your

house, feel free to turn this on as well.

If you have a question that you want to answer, just make sure

to throw it down in the comments below and then the

most uploaded questions every week we're going to answer.

And wherever in the world we are.

Okay, so let's just get right into it. So we got a bunch of great

questions. We've got so many good questions as we thank you so

much for those who submitted them down in the YouTube comments

below. If you're listening to this on podcast and you want to

submit a question, make sure to do it over on YouTube, because

we haven't figured out how to let you do that yet on the

podcast platform, but we're gonna

And we appreciate you.

gonna figure that out one of these days. We're gonna figure

it out. Okay, so the things that we're talking about, first of

all, using points through a credit card to be able to book

free flights and free hotels. We're going to talk about that

entire world, how that works, how much we use it and how much we

rely on it, which is a lot. And we're also going to talk about

how do we pick where we go, which cities we go to, which

countries we go to, and then how do we decide how long we're

going to stay for. And then I think the juiciest thing today

and definitely the thing that I'm most terrified to talk about

for a lot of different reasons is how much money we make as

content creators and is that money enough to allow us to

travel the world indefinitely?

Let's get into it. Okay. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Travel Thursday.

Travel Thursday. Here we go.

Please help us figure out our tagline. No, we heard from all

two of you. They loved it. Okay, listener question one. This

is actually a compilation of several of your questions. So

thanks guys for asking them last week on our podcast last time.

The main question is, do you guys get travel credit cards with

the large sign up bonuses to get yourself some free flights and

hotel rooms?

Yeah, yeah, so sure do.

I have so much to say about this topic. And I'm not sure how

much I should say on this podcast, because we could do this

for three hours if you wanted, where I can talk just about

this one thing, but you're going to go on a very long walk

today, right? Here's what we'll say. Here's what we'll say is

that just in the last year alone, we've saved somewhere

between $15 and $25,000 just booking flights with these

credit card miles and points. And over my lifetime, well over

100,000, that's a lot of money close to a quarter of a million

dollars saved on travel costs alone just by doing this credit

card turning thing. So for those of you out there not familiar

with credit card turning, or travel hacks or credit card

hack, what do you yeah, what do you call it when it's just like

you're getting points and miles from spending on credit cards?

Yeah, let's just call playing the the credit card points game for

now. And then we'll go deeper in a little bit. That's quite long.

It is right. Yeah, succinctness, not happening forever if you

watch our channel, not occurring. Okay, so here's how we

best describe this if you have no idea what we're talking about

right? Have you ever seen those credit cards? And this is

mostly for people in the US, although this exists elsewhere

in the world as well, that say like, hey, if you sign up for

this credit card, it'll give you 60,000 Southwest miles if you

spend $1,000 on this card in the first three months, hashtag

not sponsored by Southwest, by the way.

Yeah, just an example. There are lots of credit cards in the

United States and elsewhere that offer similar giant point

bonuses. And what we like to do is we sign up for this credit

card specifically just to get the point bonuses, and then use

those points to book flights for us for free to be able to

travel around the world. And we do this a lot. In fact, so much

so that I would say most to all of the flights that we've taken

this year have been a result of accumulating these points and

Yeah, they're really, really worthwhile for a long distance

travel as it turns out. I mean, essentially, so I guess the way

I like to think about credit card sign up bonuses and credit card

miles is basically the credit card companies are rewarding you or

us for spending money on credit cards on things that we would

normally buy. So like when we go grocery shopping, we use our

credit cards. When we get gas, we basically try to spend

everything that we can that we would typically be spending on

on our travel credit cards. And anytime there's a sign up

bonus, that's essentially saying, when you sign up, you get a few

months usually to spend a minimum spend usually it's like

2000 to $4,000 to make a bunch of points that you wouldn't you

wouldn't typically get.

Yeah, and then the more advanced version of that, like I would

say most people would start and they just be like, Hey, I just

want to travel credit card and then maybe it'll give me some

points and I'll just get that one and I'll just keep spending on

that forever and slowly accumulate points over time. Totally

fine. Totally safe. We do that sometimes as well. But if you

want it to go into the next level, what you do is then once

you're done spending on that first card and you get the 60,000

Southwest miles or whatever, then you would sign up for

another card, which would then have another minimum spend,

which would say be $3,000 for 60,000 chase points. And then

you would spend those $3,000, get a bunch of chase points and

then you'd sign up for another credit card and another credit

card and another credit card. So there's definitely a way to do

this. If you're careful to be able to constantly get the sign

up point bonuses over and over and over again and accumulate

millions of miles and still keep a pretty decent credit score

and not totally detonate your entire financial well being.

So the short answer to this question is yes, we definitely

are partakers, participants, active players in the credit

card travel game.

And I would say that when we were first, you know, planning

our one year what intended to be our one year full time travel

or honeymoon, we both actively played the game by signing up

for a lot of credit cards. And when there's two players

involved, yeah, you can definitely rack up a lot of

points and a lot of credit cards. I will say I mean, there's a

lot of caveats and there's a lot of rules to this. We're not

your financial planners or your accountants. But I mean, some

good some good rules of thumbs that we have learned to follow.

Is it thumbs or one thumb thumbs multiple? Oh, I'm not so good

with the phrases. The good rules of thumb to follow.

No. Okay, some golden rules. Some golden rules.

We generally try to pay off any spend that we we generally try

to pay off all of our bills, not just the minimum and we try

not to keep a balance at any time. We're always paying off

our bills. And we also luckily haven't accumulated any debt

we've paid off all of our student loans. We don't have any

card car loan. So, you know, this is also one of the reasons

why we feel a little bit more comfortable playing in this

credit card travel game. All that being said, it has saved us

a ton of money while we've traveled, especially in the

last few years. If you're interested in going mega mega

deep on this, like nerding out spreadsheets and all, of course,

we have a Skillshare course that you can check out all about

credit card points, all about miles, how to best tell if your

miles or your points are worthwhile versus just paying

for flights and cash, for example. And we also made a video

last year summarizing how much we spent in our entire year of

full time travel and how much actually we saved by offsetting

our costs with points and miles. We've gotten to stay in some

pretty fancy hotels that we wouldn't have otherwise been able

to and we've been able to take some pretty incredible flights

for free.

Yeah, we also read about this a lot on our newsletter, but

that's enough about the other stuff. Let's talk about like how

we use this today. I want to talk about like how churning fits

into our lives today. So in a couple of weeks, we're heading

to Sydney, and then we're flying to New Zealand after that for

like three weeks, and then we're heading back here to Hawaii at

the end of September, right? So the flight out to Sydney, we

found super cheap using Scott's two flights. They're called

going now.

So we found a really cheap flight to get over to Australia, but

then that flight back home from New Zealand to Hawaii, crazy

expensive, not that cheap. So we figured out, okay, so there's

like Hawaiian airlines that flies direct from there, and then

there's Air New Zealand that flies direct from there, both of

which are great airlines. So we quick looked online, Air New

Zealand happens to be in part of the same alliance as United.

Pretty sure that's right.

Oh, boy. Backchecking.

Alliance.

Star Alliance.

Nailed it. Yeah.

So we went up to United's website and just searched up how

much they cost. And I think it was like 35,000 points per

person one way, which is an okay redemption for this kind of

this like $1,000 per person. So then we had a target, we needed

to find 70,000 United miles, right? So then I looked online

onto a website like doctor of credit.com, which happens to

list all the best current sign up bonuses for credit cards.

We then took that applied to a credit card that would get us

United miles, which for us was this new United Quest credit

card. Fulfilled the minimum spend got the points. And then we

use those points to book our flights for free. Well, I guess

using the points. So mostly for free. Saved us out $2,000 worth

in travel costs for our flight back home.

Spending on stuff that we were already spending on, which is

pretty awesome.

Our normal Sam's Club trips and everything else.

Gas, all that. Yeah, which kind of answers one of the other

questions that's lumped into these credit card travel

questions. People are asking, you know, if you could have one

travel credit card, which would it be and why? And a lot of that

I think just depends on the goal, right? Like, if you're

specifically trying to save for a target trip or a location,

it's always helpful to know what kinds of points you need and

how many points you need. And that can help you see what credit

card sign up bonuses are available. Yeah, how would you

answer that question? If you could only have one travel

credit credit card, which would it be outside of that?

Okay, so man, this is one that I just saw. There's 150,000

mile or 150,000 American Express platinum points. After

spending 6000 in the first like three or four months. That's a

crazy amount of American Express points. That's like six to

$10,000 worth of points depending on how you use them. So

that seemed really exciting. But then you'd have the problem of

if you use an American Express card, it's not really accepted

in a lot of different places around the world. So I don't

know if that would be the one I bring with me. I think I'd look

at something like a chase set by your preferred or a capital

one venture acts, both of which always have tons of different

like regular spend point bonuses. Since this is our only card,

both of them are visas. So that means it'll be accepted almost

everywhere that you go. And they have really nice benefits,

right? Like both of them lounge access, which is sweet.

To answer this question, I think of like the one travel credit

card that I've kept the longest. And I think it was my first

credit card. Like my first credit card that actually gave me

perks and travel travel rewards. And that was chase sapphire

reserve. It's just like, it's tried and true. It's very

popular. They had a great sign up bonus. I think it was like

80,000 when I first signed up 80,000 chase points. And it's

got a hefty it's got a hefty annual fee. It's like 400 maybe

$500 now. But it comes with a lot of perks, right? So with

that annual fee, you get $300 in travel credit, which means that

if you buy flights, if you take Uber or Lyft or anything, you

get $300 credit back. So that's already like, you know, $300 of

that $500 annual fee is gone already, which is great. You get

lounge access. Yeah.

It's true.

These cars with the huge annual fees, I shied away from them for

the longest time. Yeah.

I was always told to one, just be terrified of credit cards in

the first place. Like, I don't know when I was in college or

around that, I don't know if this happened to you. Oh, yeah.

Everyone that I knew as soon as I talked to a credit card was

like this hush whisper. Oh, my God, don't do it. Or it felt like

a scam because right, people would stand outside and flyer you

for credit cards, college students of all people, you

know, massive student debt, but, but no income. But they're

like, Hey, you want a free t shirt? Sign up for this credit

card. And you're like, I can't trust you. You're trying to give

me something for free. And my dad was always like, never spend

money that you don't have. And in my head, I thought, well,

credit cards aren't physical money or cash, so I shouldn't.

But I feel like now I've learned like this is a thing that I

shouldn't be afraid of. I should be, I should take it

seriously, but not be afraid of.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that like, you know, the fear of

God was put into me around credit cards since I was looking

like it was talked about as though like, if you received a

credit card, you just like couldn't stop yourself from

just like buying so much random stuff like a Porsche. Yeah,

you end up with like a Porsche and a yacht somehow. And then

you'd end up like a billion dollars in debt. And this would

just like happen as soon as you receive the credit card, you

just like lose all hope of not just spending a million dollars.

And after I sort of like got past that a little bit, you

start to realize that credit cards, yeah, they're scary for

sure. If you don't, if you're not good with your money, credit

cards are a tool that you can use to very easily financially

destroy yourself. Absolutely. But if you can have a little bit

of restraint, if you cannot buy a portion of Ferrari, if you

receive the amount of money to be able to buy that, if you have

a little bit of if you have like a good head on your shoulders

with finances, these can be used as a tool to unlock 10s of

thousands of dollars worth of like free travel or free other

stuff. Unfortunately, all that's the director's all like all

these super generous bonuses exist specifically because

there are so many people that the credit card industry is

actively haranguing into these like 17% to 22% APRs that

they're just like taking the money. And that's why these giant

bonuses exist. And there's like as like this moral weirdness in

the middle of it. Also, yeah. And which is why which is why

we're very, very careful to make sure that we pay off our credit

card balances as soon as we get them. You definitely always

have to be able to pay off your full balance every single

month. On my first trip, I saved up enough to be able to

literally get a 16 stop trip around the world for free with

American Airlines miles. That's wild. Same things you can

unlock with this. But obviously, there's a little bit of risk

involved too. And we'd be remiss if we didn't talk.

Definitely. We're not trying to say you should definitely do it.

But we're trying to say yes, we partake and we appreciate and

are grateful for the benefits that come with it for sure. And

just to circle back around on the one travel credit card. Oh,

we like concise to say that. So I would say for me, Capital

One Venture X would be my pick if I could only have one right

now. Mine would be the mine would be the Chase Sapphire

Reserve. I just think it was like an all around good card. You

get three times I think points every time you spend going out

to eat or on travel and you get a lot of perks. So the points

are so transferable with cards. So generally when you get these

credit cards, spending the points directly on their travel

portal that they have, like as in booking flights directly with

the points with Chase or with Capital One, that'll be the worst

use of points available to you. You'll almost always want to

transfer them to one of their like 15 to 20 transfer partners

like Hyatt or pretty share ways or United or any of the other

ones available to you, you get a much higher value.

The other the other question that's kind of grouped into this

credit card points, miles, conversation, someone asked, how

do you amass points when you don't bulk shop? Is there a trick

or plan? This is I mean, I mean, I think the one thing that

like, you can count on us for is is always being willing to

cover the bill for things when we have when we have a new

sign up bonus, when we have a new credit card, we're always

like, Oh, can we can we pay this restaurant bill? Or can we

will ask our friends and family, hey, do you have any large

purchases coming up? Do you need to go to Costco or Sam's

Club? Do you need to fill up on gas? Because we can take care of

that for you. And then you can, you know, if you're willing to,

can you pay us back on Venmo? I mean, it's the way that we've

been able to like, if we don't have any big spends coming up,

we just offer to pay for other people's things just so that we

can make make that minimum spend.

And then there are some of the more morally ambiguous ways to

do it. Oh, boy.

This term is called manufactured spending. And I'll tell you the

story about this guy. Okay, so the timeframe was 2011. And at

this time, the US Mint wanted to get the $1 gold coin into

circulation. And they wanted to do it so bad that they made it

available to buy these $1 gold coins in 1000 coin increments on

a credit card. Oh, boy.

So my friend had all these credit cards. And all of them had

these minimum spends like 5000 spend to get all these chase

points and like 1000 spend to get these Southwest points or

whatever. So then my friend received all these gold coins

that were purchased using a credit card took these gold coins

to a bank, deposit them into their bank account and then use

that money that was deposited in the bank account to pay off the

credit card bill. So manufactured spending is one of those

gray areas, obviously. And it's a way of like creating credit card

debt, but without actually spending any money to do so. And

some other like lighter examples of this are let's say that you

go on to Amazon and you buy a TV or something really expensive

that's really small and really cheap to ship. You buy that it

comes to your house, you then return it and instead of getting

the money back on your credit card, you just take the Amazon

dot com gift card balance or whatever you just have a deposit

into a gift card balance. And then that amount of money is still

like a credit card charge on your card, but you still have that

exact amount of value available in a store that you would shop

at frequently. I mean, couldn't you do that? You could do that

with any any gift card really. So this is a good point because

generally cards will not count buying gift certificates

towards that like minimum spend exactly for this reason. But

this Amazon.com thing is a bit of a loophole because it looks

like a real transaction. It's just the money kind of like

shifts from one thing to the other. Again, would not recommend

doing this only under extreme circumstances. But those are

some things that exist. And you can decide whether or not you

want to use a manufactured spending. It's a real thing. You

can look on Reddit about it more or check out the course we

talk about it a little bit.

All right, I think we answered that pretty thoroughly. Okay,

moving on. Listener question to how do you pick where to go and

how long to stay for this comes from impalagation? Impala like

Impala like the car impalagation? That's a really that's a

really fair question. And I would say complicated, I think

depends again on yeah, so many factors. I feel like the like the

first step when we decide any trip that we're going to take

though is I feel like just always budget. It's always the

budget like

that's true.

a bad trip that we could take you know, there's not like a bad

decision, we could go back to a place and we have done that

multiple times. But each time we go back to Tokyo or Seoul or

Paris or whatever, we have a different time and we do different

things. So it's never the same going back twice. We don't I

don't know, we don't feel like that's a bad thing. But also,

if the cheapest flight happens to be to somewhere we've never

been, even better, probably would be awesome. Yeah, I do feel

like I do think we use like things for inspiration, like

things we see in movies or TV or in photos. I love looking at

photos of places to give me an inspiration of where I want to

go next. But I think ultimately it starts with the budget. We

love using Google flights, the explore tab if you've never seen

that before, I highly encourage you to check that out. It's this

amazing tool where you can go to flights.google.com, click the

explore tab, put where you're starting destination is pick a

couple of weeks and you can choose like a rough estimate of

dates. And they'll show you an entire map of the world and

prices for flights to some major cities in the entire world,

which is a great starting point because then you can see, oh, I

can afford this area. I can afford this area. I definitely can

afford this area.

Using this tool has found us some really crazy deals that we

would have passed up on.

Definitely.

When we were going to Japan, just this past year, we were

looking in Tokyo and Osaka right like the normal places that

you would fly into. And then we hovered over to Fukuoka on the

west side of Japan. And flights that were like $200. Yeah,

every other flight was like $600. We would have never thought to

go there, but it just happened to be close enough. So we're like

sweet, we're flying in there. Fukuoka was great. Awesome.

Yeah, we're gonna head there instead. And then we'll just

finish our trip in Tokyo. So then the other tool that we use is

scotch cheap flights are going. Yeah. So this is an email

service that sends you really super cheap, sometimes even like

mistake fair level cheap flights directly into your inbox. And

it's great. And you'll find some of the craziest deals that we

found like a $74 flight to Japan two years ago. And we

found this most recent trip we're taking in a couple weeks to

Sydney and we found for like $170 to get there from Hawaii,

which is nuts. But as soon as you see these flights, you have to

book them immediately like within 20 to 30 minutes of

receiving.

I can't tell you how many calls I've received and how many

emails I get from Josh every time, every time one of these

emails come through, he's like, want to go to Fiji, but it is

true, you have to act pretty quickly to at least book the

flights. They don't have to be like you travel next week to

set destination, but they do go quickly in that if you see the

deal, you kind of just have to know, okay, I'm going to be

free sometime in December. So I'm going to book them.

Yeah. And then you just kind of schedule the rest of your life

around whatever this insane flight deal is. Yeah. And it's

either though, it's either one of those two things, or we look

to where we can fly for free using our points using either

like the least amount of points, we've never done a

life lab business class together. So someday, I'm sure

we'll start looking to do that maybe once I don't know, I

kind of feel like we're going to be like budget back forever

basic,

backseat basic.

What I have a feeling that we're just going to be economy

flying people forever.

I don't mind that. We're just we're going to be backpackers

forever. I will I don't know I say that now, but I love carrying

my backpack. There's like a point of pride in me that I

won't I don't want to carry around a suitcase. It's like

part of me now. Yeah, it's part of my identity. You're a

teenage mutant Ninja Turtle. What? I used to have this green

backpack. It's like huge thing when you filled it up and made

you look exactly like a teenager. But I would say after we

kind of figure out our budget and our timeframe of where we can

go reasonably and we have some options. I think we like to talk

about like what kind of trip we actually want to have. I mean,

there are certainly lots of places that are on our bucket

list where like we definitely have to visit, you know, South

Africa someday, we definitely want to I mean, I want to go to

Peru someday. There's all these places that we aspire to visit

someday. But when we when we're on a budget and we have a

certain timeframe and we have a few options, then we like to

think about yeah, like what kind of trip do we want to have? Are

we looking for an adventure? Are we looking for some

downtime, some chill time, some time to solve some problems? And

so I think we've used this method quite a bit in the last few

years. I mean, it's how we decided to go on our second

Camino in Portugal this earlier this year, because we were just

looking to have just a long walk. Just that's all we wanted.

That's what we needed at that point in time. Things were just

stressful and we were in over our heads. So we decided that the

right vacation for us would be something very straightforward,

something simple and a quest. Yeah, that's definitely the way

that we decided. But also now YouTube is in on the mix. That's

true thing where we're, I would say we've learned a couple

things along this whole YouTube road. We've been doing this

for like three and a half years now. And I think we've learned

one thing is that we're not actors. And by that I mean, we

can't manufacture excitement about a place or a thing. We're

just not good at it. It's immediately visible to us and

probably also to you out there like when we're not really into

something. So that means that we have to choose these locations

not based on like what would do best on YouTube. I sure wish

that we could just do that because that would probably be

good for our business. But we can't because every time we try

to do that the videos end up like hold and kind of like weird

and distant and I don't know there's always like weird words

to describe it. None of them good. And we found that if we we

found that like if we look at these locations and we're about

to book the flight and we're about to do this and we're going

to like make this trip for us and it's because something we're

really excited about and also it's something we're really

excited to share to tell everyone about like oh man, I

can't wait to go and experience this like super cool thing in

Sydney or this like awesome camper van trip in New Zealand like

we're about to do that we're so pumped up about that when we

make those decisions they always feel good right away. They

always feel like the right thing right away. It's not like a man

maybe I should go on to like Google Trends or go on to

YouTube and see if anyone made like a banger viral video about

like the ice cream rolls in Thailand banger not that we've

ever made that video before trying to chase stupid trends but

every time that we do we just feel so we feel like so empty

when we make those videos and I think that as a result of that

those videos end up doing poorly so there's just I don't

know we we've just found this thing that like we need to be

naturally excited about the the destinations that we choose

and we're also we're generally naturally excited about a good

deal. Yeah. Oh for sure. Yeah. And we're also the kind and we're

also the kind of people that like we love traveling anywhere

even if we've been to the place before I mean I know there are

a lot of people that say oh like so many YouTubers they go to

Tokyo or they spend so much time in Korea and go somewhere

different which we totally appreciate that and if we had

all the time and all the money we would but we also just

appreciate being able to go back to places because there's

something fun about rediscovering places again and finding

hidden gems that you didn't see the first time. All that being

said I think we're just trying to say that there are a lot of

different factors that help us decide where to go next or where

to go in our travels. I think pre YouTube it was definitely

budget first and time constraint first because we were

living that like nine to five we've got a two week vacation

how do we maximize. Now fortunately we've been able to

build towards a life where we can we can do a little bit of

both we can spend some more time in a place we can go back to

places but also now where our business is travel our travel

is our business so we kind of have to make those decisions

too. Yeah and I mean we definitely both remember the

sting of like the American never ever give you any paid time

off for vacation time like that's not that long 15 days man

where you get the 15 days some jobs I got literally zero. No

that's not legal. They would just shame you forever taking

vacation so you felt like you never could and then every

time you'd ask for it they'd be like no it's not a good time.

Yeah. Yeah. It's never a good time. I remember that like when

you finally get that window that like 10 days a join two

weekends to try to make it like 10 days or eight days or

whatever and then you'd be like okay we're gonna go like six

frigging countries we're gonna fly to you in two minutes later

we're gonna be out of there and then bam we're gonna go to

Portugal. Well do you do you remember? As fast as you

couldn't you wouldn't experience anything you'd be jet

leg the whole time and you come back home and you'd just be

exhausted. Like that one time for Thanksgiving this was

pre-YouTube we went to the Midwest like on a red eye we

got to Chicago rented a car went all the way to the Midwest

for for Thanksgiving dinner I think spent one night with your

family and then hopped on a plane flew to Taiwan to spend

some time with my family and I think we're there for three

days and then we went to Bangkok because we were like I

want to go to Thailand because we're so close and we only

have a week off so we came back and we're so we were so tired

the next day at work. Yeah. So all that being said we're very

very fortunate and we feel very lucky that that yeah we have

some flexibility now that we have some choice too. We do a mix

of things but it's always still like budget and time and then

what kind of adventure are we looking for or what kind of

trip are we hoping for? Yeah. Yeah. And I think now the way

that we do things we have the ability to just stay for a

week in every place that we go and that's kind of the pace

that we like to travel at now. That being said when we're

back in those you know we only get like four days of vacation

per year off I totally get why people would just go as hard

as they could. Oh yeah. Just try to fit it all in but

knowing what we know now which we only know because we've been so

lucky to be able to travel as much as we have. Yeah. I would have

done the seven days in one place before because I think I

would have actually experienced it more but the only way you

know that and feel good about that is by having been able to

go to these places a bunch of times. Yeah. Yeah that's true.

So yeah it's kind of a double edged sword and I do totally

understand both sides of that. So how do we decide how long to

go for? We just we try to do a week in each place and we just

try to go to places that feels comfortable but we're in a

very different position. That's enough of that. So what should

we talk about? Talk about this cruise. Yeah. Do you want to

talk about this cruise? Okay. Okay. So our friend Jess sent us

this interesting article the other day and I just the

headline you just you just can't ignore it right? So it's

she she was like I just want to know Lisa and Josh's hot take

on this and it's want to live on a cruise ship a two-year trip

around the world from Florida will cost you this much. Two

years on a cruise ship is basically what what she was

asking us. Would we would we would we do a two-year trip on

a cruise ship? How much was it per year? What was the cost? So

if you choose the two-year option, two years on this cruise

ship, it costs you $5,119 per month per person. Okay. So that

would be that's like $60,000 for two people to be able to

that's quite a bit of money. So it turns out these live aboard

cruise ships are really common. They're popping up a lot

lately. I found two articles. One of them our friend sent us

and if you there's like tiers, if you spend two years on this

cruise ship, it's like $60,000 per person. Okay. So like $5,000

a month. If you spend one year on a cruise ship, it's about

$6,000 a month, which is $72,000 a year. They also have a

three-year option, which is a lot cheaper, but it's like

$2,400 a month, which is what like the just under $30,000.

So they're both about the same, but a three-year. Yeah. Three

years or well, like one to three years. I don't even I can't

even think about like what we're doing next weekend. How can I

think about what I'm gonna do every single day for a whole

year? Because you imagine that like, okay, inside

stateroom, right? So like, you're probably on the lower

part of the show. You're just I mean, yeah. And I mean, the

meals would be great. You get, yeah, there's a lot of

different amenities that come with this too. So I'm just

looking at this one right now, which is $30,000 a year. That's

cheaper than it costs to live in almost anywhere. It's so

affordable. So like this CNN article specifically says like

you can now live on a cruise ship for $30,000 per year. And I

like went deep on this on this cruise ship. It's actually

really luxurious and it looks really nice and it comes with

a lot of amenities. So it's all inclusive. It includes access

to all the dining venues. You get medical consultations. You

get you get access to their gym. You get dinners and alcohol

for free. You get high speed internet. I know some people

in the United States that pay $30,000 a year just for health

insurance. Well, I don't know that see, you get that just by

Well, no, I don't think you get health insurance. You don't

you don't get health insurance. You get free medical

consultations, but it doesn't cover like pharmacy doesn't

cover medications. They do have some they said they have some

medical surgeries available. I don't know what that means, but

it doesn't it's not inclusive. But you do get gym and fitness.

You get laundry, housekeeping, entertainment, of course, but

high speed internet. Do you believe that? No, I do not believe

that you get high speed internet, especially with the high

speed internet we got on our last cruise. But but the fact

that you can get rent, you you're basically renting and

renting life aboard a cruise ship. Okay, so would you do it?

What would you do for any amount like for context, we went

on like a two week cruise last year for from Alaska to Hawaii.

Yeah, from Alaska to Hawaii. Yeah. Had a great time. Kind of felt

like we were over the cruise ship experience. Yeah. At the end of

that time, would you my $30,000 a year would you sign up for

a year? My first answer is definitely not. But then I

started to see this is the problem. Yeah. Good value.

Seems kind of like a tell me more. I mean, it's just well, the

more it's like a gym membership, like the longer you sign up

for, the more valuable and the cheaper the prices. I mean,

like, all the stuff that you get is pretty incredible. All your

meals are cooked TV, Wi-Fi, gym, pool, spa, access to medical

care. And then you are stopping at all the different ports that

you are getting to travel. But I think ultimately, I won't do

it. I wouldn't do it because I don't think I could be on a

ship for that long. Yeah. No, I was just thinking the same

thing like you get used to it. But I think I think the life

aboard a cruise ship for that long period of time would drive

me crazy. That's so funny because I totally thought you

were going to say yes. I don't know. I just what if I change

my mind? What if I don't want to go where the cruise ship is

going? What if I go back home? What if I want more space in my

life than the like, you know, eight foot by eight foot room

that they give me? What if I mean, there would definitely be

some advantages. And I think at the end of it, I would be in

the best shape of my life. No, really? Yeah. It'd be a coin flip.

It'd be one of those two things. Either like the extreme

boredom would lead me to becoming the best shape in my

life. Or I would just eat everything. I mean, I mean, the

food on the cruise ship. I mean, this is not we went on. I

think what was it? Norwegian cruise ship? This is I don't

know. I don't even know what the cruise lines are that do

this Victoria cruise line and this very real one called

Mire cruise is the MV Gemini. I mean, the food seems like a

thing that they're doing just to like get this new cruise

line off the ground and trying to get a bunch of

attention. So this might be like a one time offer, which

makes it slightly I will say like the pictures make this MV

cruise line and Mire cruise line. This Mire cruise line

actually looks really, really nice. And I mean, we went on

Norwegian cruise and I think it was one of the older ships,

but the amenities were nice. The food was excellent. I

don't know. You get to go to some pretty cool places. I

was looking at the itinerary too. So for Mire, you're going

to wow, you're going to South America. You're going to

Antarctica. I just that's a $10,000 cruise right there.

Just do it. Is this really Caribbean Central America? You

go to Hawaii. It's like everywhere. North Asia. Wow. You

go to Japan, Taipei, South Pacific, Australia. I don't

even know, but if I somehow had like a bunch of money and I

was like 20 or I just got out of college and I wanted like a

gap here that this might actually look pretty semester at

sea but this is like a full year of just like cruise

shipping it around to all the cool places that I wanted to

go and that would have been pretty ball of thing to do but

it's a lot of money too. I don't know. I'm still talking

about this. What do you guys think of that? Tell us what

you think in the comments below. Would you go on a three

year long cruise or two year per person or two years for

$60,000 or one year for how much was it for one year? Like

close to like 70 or 80k per person. Yeah. I just don't know.

Actually viable one is the three year because probably that

cruise line may not exist at the end. I mean, yeah. Also, you

have to really, really like your neighbors there. Oh, man.

You could see them for three years. I don't know how awkward

it would be if like, oh, yeah, all the weird relationships that

would form of three years stuck on this little boat together.

I'm so fascinated. I feel like I hope someone makes a

documentary about this or does a YouTube blogging of this

because I'd be really fascinated in watching it. I

completely understand why. I mean, I can see the draw and

why people would be into this. It's a great deal. You don't

really have to do any planning. You just show up, which is

why I think why cruises work, especially for a lot of

families, a lot of people who are retired and digital nomads.

So like this article that our friends sent us, I mean, there

were a lot of people that were really, really excited to do

it and mostly because of this. Like you get all of this

laundry, all of this taken care of and it's oftentimes cheaper

than renting or having your own home. So

Tell us what you think out there. Put it down in the

comments below, please. Oh, I also wanted to say

one of the other things that I thought was surprising about

this cruise was you can invite family and friends aboard the

ship. Oh, man. That's a game changer. I don't know if they

can like sail with you or go, you know, go on the waters with

you. But like imagine if you were docked anywhere and you

wanted your friends or your family to join you and just

say like, come aboard my ship. Come hang out in my room.

That's that's pretty awesome, right? Like I could totally

see the benefit of this and why some people like love cruises.

I don't know. Tell us what your thoughts are. Would you do

this? Is it something you'd be even remotely interested in

one year, two year, three years, or nah, I can't even think

past next weekend like me. And there might even be someone out

there who's already signed up for this. Oh, for sure. If you're

watching this and you signed up for this, write us a

dissertation in the comments. You want to know everything

about how you made the choice, what you're excited about,

like how the science part is what I want to know every

time. And can we come visit you on the cruise ship? Yes, please.

Can we come forward? Okay. All right, let's move on. Let's move

on to the juicy question. Spicy. Honestly, I've been putting off a

little bit. That's why we're talking about a cruise ship for

20 minutes. Is that like our YouTube financials? And I

don't know why I feel so weird about this. I don't know. It's

like the talking about money thing. We never really did

that growing up. It was just kind of like a forbidden topic.

And I think I'm open to, I mean, this is a fully

transparent channel, I think, as much as we possibly can, but

it's so interesting because I have another job where you're

like expected to share how much you make from some

totally. Really? But like for you two, it's just like this, I

don't know. I'm so afraid that you're gonna like hear these

numbers and then you're gonna think about it weirdly or

differently or whatever. Why? Okay, I don't know. Okay, I'm

hoping, I'm hoping that by us sharing this information, it

helps anyone else out there who might think about starting a

YouTube channel or is just curious because I do think

there's a huge misconception generally that travel or any

content creator really, but travel content creators

specifically have a butt ton of money. Well, and I think

that's a misconception because I used to think that I used to

watch people on Instagram. I used to watch people on

YouTube and I thought I could never do that because I don't

have money. I have to work. How could you just travel? And

we've been fortunate enough where we have turned part of our

passion into a business, albeit still a very growing

business. Not not like not not mega successful, but like it's

actually anyway. So this question, these questions come

from men PDX eight who asks, has the success of your YouTube

channel allowed you to continue traveling for the foreseeable

future? Okay, so let's just talk about that one first and

we'll go to the next one. Sure. So I would say the answer to

that is is kind of so on any given month, we're making

somewhere between like $2,500 and $6,000 and it really

depends on which month it is and how well our videos are

doing that month as well as a lot of different factors.

This is honestly a lot. The wind, how our hair is looking that

day. So we don't we haven't run a brand deal on this channel

for a long time. Yeah. A long time. So almost all of our

revenue is straight up just YouTube ads from you guys

watching this. So thank you very much for doing that if

you're watching or listening to this. Yeah. So for those of you

who don't know, generally the way that content creators on

YouTube make money is when someone like you watches a

video, you might see like after X amount of minutes, a

couple of ads come up like if you happen to click them or you

watch them or if you skip them. Anyway, those ads are what

generate revenue for YouTube and then we get a chunk of that.

So for those of you that watch our videos, thank you for

watching. For those of you that click on the ads or even just

like, yeah, spend any amount of time interacting with them.

That helps us keep doing this. Yeah. And the the money varies

widely depending on the video and lots of other things. So for

every thousand views, that's how it's calculated in YouTube,

we'll make somewhere between two and like $11 for each one of

those thousand views. Yeah. If you extrapolate that out, you'll

get somewhere between like $2,000 and $6,000 depending on the

month, right? So the other part of that question, is that

enough for us to continue traveling for the foreseeable

future? Kind of, we're still definitely eating into our

savings. Yeah. And we have been, it's slowed down. We're

almost at the point where we're like evening out with our

travel expenses that we have each month. But we're pretty far

from the point where we're like, are you making any profit?

To kind of set some context and and give you a little bit of

history of like our channel and how this even began, right?

Like the origin story, if you will, of our channel. When when

we got married or when we got engaged, we decided we would

take a one year honeymoon. That's like how this travel

story kind of began. We were working nine to five and we

decided, you know, we really want to experience the world in

in not just like a two week vacation, we wanted to travel

for a set amount of time. So we spent two, three years just

saving aggressively, eating a bunch of five dollar rotisserie

chickens, you know, I don't know, not going out to eat,

saving a lot of money, stashing away money, selling a bunch of

stuff. Starting up side hustles of like buying busted

appliances on Craigslist and then fixing them up and then

reselling them and like anything we could do to start

accumulating as much cash as we can. And that's also when we

started building up points and miles through credit cards,

travel credit cards, just so that we could take this one year

honeymoon. So we had no expectation or thought that

we were going to make any money over this year of travel. We

quit our jobs, we quit our jobs, we let go of our

apartment and we were supposed to start our trip after we got

married and then of course, you know, the pandemic happened

and that kind of put everything on hold. But during the pandemic,

one of the cool things that started was we started making

YouTube videos for fun. Good morning. Hey guys. I'm Lisa.

Hi, I'm Josh. And we're here to talk to you about what we've

been doing in these crazy times. And we started to keep going

when we built out the van and started van lifeing and then

when we started international travels, we just thought, well,

this is fun. Let's just keep going. And while we're doing it,

let's do it with the intention of trying to help others

travel as well. We got some traction, but like definitely in

the year of travel, I think was, I don't know when we even

started making money because it does take quite a bit of time

to get to turn on the money, the money like button from

YouTube. Add sense. So there's something I got to say here,

which is that if you want to make money on YouTube, the

stupidest way is to try to become a travel creator. I mean

that in like every possible way. It's so high risk. The only

way to start is you have to literally leave your employment.

Like in most other YouTube things, you could like practice

making some videos at home or you can make them with your

friends or in your spare time or whatever, but you can keep

your job. But you can't just go on a two week vacation one

time and have that be your start of your travel channel. It

has to be this consistent thing and travel itself pretty

expensive. You also have to quit your job and any YouTube

thing or any new thing anyone starts is going to take a

couple months to years to get traction. Yeah. And the travel

creator lifestyle of this thing or at least the expectations

around it are like make a bunch of videos every week,

sometimes three, sometimes four, which we later on learn just

as the bad fit for us and we shouldn't have done that in

the first place and then all these other sort of

expectations around quantity of release and how much you

tell people and how real time the information is to when

you're actually releasing it. The only way to do it is by

quitting your job. The only way to even come close. So the

risk is super high. The return is generally super low for

this for a very long time and you have no way to practice

up your skills in the meantime before you actually launch

and quit your job. I don't know. Have you seen any of our

quarantine videos up at the cabin?

Please don't watch them. Don't watch them. They are terrible.

So we've made about 350 videos so far over three and a half

years and I'd say we're just at the point where we're

starting to feel good kind of about the things that we

mean. You know, we're just at that point where we're like,

yeah, we're like our you know that skill gap has started to

get smaller and smaller because we didn't we didn't know how

to do any of this. We started I know that's a common story

here but we literally had never edited a video.

No. Never or talk to a camera intentionally or

intentionally. If you used any of this stuff to edit these

things or released something on video or put ourselves out

that we've done none of that before we started. Yeah. It's

our full-time jobs now and that process no matter what that new

skill is whether it's like learning how to code a website

or learning how to be a dentist again or learning how to

like um I don't know learning how to did I say websites

already um what else would a person learn everything like

how to build a house and carpentry skill that you would take

on you'd expect it to take like a year or two before you're

like good at it. YouTube is no different. The only problem

being a travel creator is that to do it you gotta quit your

job first which means you are fully just jumping off means

you gotta save up a bunch of money and you have to spend

very very little as you're in this learning phase. I mean I

know it and it sounds like I mean we're just trying to keep

it real right for the people that are thinking about

quitting their jobs to travel the world and start a YouTube

channel. We're grateful and we're super super lucky that we're

even like I look back at the last three years and I don't

regret any of them like I didn't think never in our wildest

dream that this would be our lives and it's amazing that we

even get to call this our jobs but it is like we're trying to

keep it real. It's not it's not a get rich. It's not a get rich

scheme. It's not even close. We've been at this for three years

and we're just barely getting to the point where we're like

not sinking actively. You know we've got most the holes in

the ship and we're almost blown. Yeah I would say yeah so I

think like the context was to say that we didn't anticipate

making any money at all in the year that we took off to

travel. We thought we were just going to travel but we enjoyed

making YouTube videos. We enjoyed doing it and editing it

while we were traveling. It gave us some like sense of

purpose and we thought that maybe it would help other

people do the same. Um and and that and then eventually I

don't know when we started making money from it. It

probably took a year and a half like six months ago. Yeah

well like I mean yeah making like real real yeah actual

so then it started to help and the nice the really thing

the thing that I think I feel the most fortunate about is

that like we didn't intend to make any money and we did and

it helped offset the costs from the year of travel which

meant that we still had some savings which means that now

that we're like really really excited about this and and

traveling and making YouTube videos and and continuing to

do that with the goal of hopefully getting others to

travel and hopefully someday being able to give a trip

around the world like we have savings for that so that we

can keep trying. Yeah and also I think that there's this huge

element of luck not in just like finding traction on

YouTube but in that both of us on accident found this job of

creating videos that we love and we're going to do for as

long as we possibly can you know that we absolutely love and

we just kind of like stumbled into that and I think a lot of

people come to YouTube without fully understanding like

just how much it takes and just how time consuming it is and just

how much you may not even like the work that you're doing.

It's true. A lot of people editing videos like for me

editing videos is a nightmare but Lisa loves it. I love it.

And for a lot of people like writing is a nightmare. We love writing.

Yeah. Diving into all these topics and figuring out all the coolest places to go.

And teaching yeah and and that's just kind of a happy

accident that happened to us and I think for a lot of people that

happy accident doesn't happen. It's totally and that's totally okay.

Like yeah you may choose this lifestyle and you may look into this

YouTube thing you'd be like that looks awesome and it is without a doubt the

best job I've ever had. I love it and I want to do it for as long as

possible but I think for a lot of people just like anything else you'll start it

and you realize maybe the same for me. Maybe this is not for me.

And then there's a lot it's a long game. It definitely is a long game like

we're now three years into this and we're just

barely kind of reaching a point like like you said

where we're feeling comfortable with what we're making our purpose

and and what we're trying to do but that being said it's it's not very

predictable. So to answer the question I mean has

the success of our channel allowed us to continue traveling for the foreseeable

future? Kind of. It's extended our runway.

Yeah. It's extended our runway significantly. No question but we're still losing on you.

I mean all of that we spend a lot of time going deep on that

but I think the short answer is kind of right the success of our channel has

allowed us to keep traveling. I don't know for how long we're going to

keep trying. I think the main thing is that it's given

us some more runway to try to keep trying

because we have found something that we're really excited about

and we love that we get to do this that we even get to try.

So we keep we will keep doing it until we can't we can't anymore you know like

I think it's YouTube is strange in that like

I think one of the other questions that this viewer asked is you know have you

noticed any types or countries or videos that are most

popular and I was just going to say I think we touched on this a little bit.

Yeah. Popular would generally insinuate profitable

but they're not always directly connected to. That's true but I would say

you know in general what we've learned is that YouTube is just mega

inconsistent you know. I think some months our income is

two thousand to three thousand dollars a month just from

YouTube ad revenue and then some months like as of late

five thousand dollars a month which is pretty exciting

for us but like it's hard to know if that will stay that course or if it'll

you know go down and a lot of it does depend on

which places we visit where our viewers are watching from

how many viewers watch all of that. Yeah it's entirely based on where your

viewers are watching first of all so it has how how much money you make per

thousand views. Remember we were talking about that

before like that two to eleven dollar range. To get to that higher number has

nothing to do with the country you filmed in but the viewers that are

watching your video where they're from that determines how much money you're

making per thousand views. Yeah it's a very fascinating world I think.

We didn't know any of it. No. We're still a little lost.

Yeah. But I think really that goes back to the point of this whole thing like we're not

making this YouTube channel just to get like unfathomably rich and then not yet.

That's not the intention of this thing at all. What we're trying to do is be able to support ourselves.

Definitely. Get health insurance. Get health insurance. Maybe start

stocking a little bit of money away for retirement. That'd be nice.

Yeah. It's a thing that people do and then

after that we just want to take all of that shove it into something that we haven't built yet and

then use that thing to be able to give around and then use that thing to be able to give trips

around the world to as many people as we possibly can. And eventually hopefully if we get to the

size where we can pull this off we're going to give away a trip around the world to one person

and then hopefully create like a world scholarship-y thing where we can do that for as many people as

possible because both of us believe in this thing so strongly that if everybody got a

chance to take a trip around the world we just think the world would be a better place.

Totally. And that's all we're trying to do here. We're just trying to support ourselves.

Maybe stock away a little bit of money on the side so we can retire

and then the rest of it is just we just want to give it back to you in the most direct

way travel related possible. Travel related possible. Travel possible.

Anyway thanks for asking that question. That wasn't that wasn't so bad to talk about right?

I don't know how you'll feel up there.

I mean it is what it is and the truth is we want to keep doing this for as long as possible

and we appreciate those of you that watch and actively participate because it definitely

helps us and hopefully we reach a level of success where we can we can give directly back to.

I think that's it.

We talked a lot about a lot of different things but if you have any thoughts or any

questions or comments feel free to throw them in the YouTube video comment and if you're

listening on podcast thank you for listening. Feel free to visit that video and also leave

a comment if you'd like. You can always send us an email as well. We're enjoying doing these

every Thursday and we hope to hear from you next week. Yes so please leave comments down below.

We'll answer your questions on next week's travel support Thursday. Thank you so much for watching and we're listening. Bye!