Life on the Road: Where Our Income Comes From

Life on the Road: Where Our Income Comes From. 

We’re diving into one of the most-asked questions we get: how do we afford full-time RV life? With Jeremy out on the road, Misty takes the lead alongside Justin to unpack the different ways our family makes it all work.

From Jeremy’s RV transport job (our main source of income) to the creative side hustles we’re building through Patreon, podcasting, and YouTube, we share a transparent look at what keeps us rolling. We also chat about future income goals, like building more passive revenue through book royalties, growing our platforms, and supporting Justin as he pursues his music career.

This episode is an honest, practical, and personal conversation about funding the RV lifestyle, perfect for anyone curious about making travel sustainable long-term.

Transcript

 Welcome all to part two of our little miniseries that we are putting out about our financial strategies as far as how we afford to travel and where our income comes from.

Now, these have been a part of our Patreon page for many months now, so if you want more information, more detailed in depth of how we do our traveling, then check out our Patreon. And become a member and be a part of the full-time deep dive into our adventure. So I hope you enjoy this

as we talk about where our income comes from.

  We're the Esri family and we're exploring America one destination at a time. Today we are doing our second bonus episode for the month of September. I hope you guys enjoy this. Let's chat. Welcome and thank you for joining our bonus episode today, our second bonus episode. As you can tell, whenever I say welcome, that means Jeremy is not here.

He is not recording with us, but I am. But we do have Justin. Again, I know Jeremy is going to be sad that he missed this one. He actually had no idea. I was recording this today, or he didn't know what my topic was. He knew we were doing a second bonus episode for this month, but he has no idea that I'm gonna talk about what we're about to talk about and he's gonna be like, really, babe?

I wanted to talk about that. Yeah. So, oh, well, he's not here. So today we're going to kind of keep up with the same topic that we did in our first bonus episode for this month. That first one was, you know how we are going to make travel affordable, like what we're doing to keep costs down and you know, basically what our monthly expenditures are going to be.

Today, we are going to talk about where that income comes from while we're on the road. You don't know too much about this, Justin? That's correct. Because you do not pay our bills or make our income. Yeah. But at the end of it, we wanna talk about Justin's plans and what he has going on as far as income streams and things like that.

We're gonna bring that in here in a little bit. Before we do though, I wanted to talk about this because again, like with our, how we're going to afford to travel a bonus episode, we just have so. Many people who don't understand what we're doing, I guess they don't understand the logistics of how it's going to work.

Whenever we've been told something our whole lives like, this is how you make money. This is how you pay bills, this is how you survive. It's really hard to think outside of that box. Right? Yeah. So, you know, the American Dream, and I'm doing air quotes, because the American dream is not necessarily our family dream, is you have.

A steady eight to five job, weekends off, two or three weeks of vacation a year, white picket fence, your sticks and bricks home and you know, a pet of some kind and, and a 2.5 kids and a dog or whatever it is, you know, 2.5. That is the typical American dream and we're taught that so much in our lives that.

It's really hard sometimes to find another way of looking at life. Well, we have done that. It took a while. Yeah, we found that way. Well, it's not that we didn't want to, it's just we didn't know how. Yeah. But you know, there's so many opportunities these days outside from a typical eight to five job, and we are taking full advantage of those opportunities to promote this travel lifestyle that we wanna do.

So I'm gonna be answering some questions that we have been asked a lot lately. Whenever I'm on Facebook, a lot of the people that are on a full-time travel Facebook page, or they're, they're looking into full-time travel, and the main question that gets asked at least two or three times a week is, what do you guys do for a job that enables you to travel in your RVs full-time?

So today I am gonna answer that for our family. Super excited. So our main income, main income stream, the meat of what we bring in and what pays our bills every month is Jeremy's new job. Yes, his RV transport job. You know, he can make as little or as much as he wants, basically a month. You can do one hall a month, which is the requirement for his job, and that's anywhere from one to $2,000 for a hall, but it only takes three to four days to do a hall.

So you do the math, you can make quite a bit. There are men. Who'll make over $10,000 a month hauling RVs. And then Yes. But they're usually doing it all month long. Yeah. They're doing it quite often. Yeah. Way more often than what your dad's wanting to, the whole point of us traveling is to travel together, so it wouldn't make sense for him to do that that often.

We don't need $10,000 a month. Yeah. And then, you know, you can make two to $3,000 a month if you just wanna work for a week or 10 days or something. So. I am not going to get into numbers. Really, today I am just gonna talk about the different streams of income and what they're for. Our main income stream is the RV transport, like that.

We are very, very dependent on that right now. Maybe there will be a day when we won't be so dependent on that. It's definitely goals, definitely, definitely goals. I would love that for my husband. For him to be able to spend even more time with us while, while traveling instead of being gone for, you know, a week or two at a time.

But that is our main income stream. It pays the bills. It makes sure that we're eating, sleeping, we have gas, our cell phones are paid, Internet's paid all that jazz. Then we have some secondary streams. Now some of these are not bringing in income yet, and some of them are. So I'm gonna break down the different streams.

So the first one we have, which our next main one I guessed, is right here on Patreon. Oh yeah. Yeah. So it's right here on Patreon. That is our second main source of income. For now, I'm gonna talk about something that's about to surpass Patreon. But we're not there yet. Hmm. I would love, obviously for our Patreon to continue to grow, you know, through our postcard subscription that we have, you know, that's starting to take off and grow, and that's $10 a month.

We take about, you know, two of that, two purchase postcards and mail off postcards and things like that. And so we profit, I guess about $8 per subscription every month. When it comes to the postcard subscription, so you know, that adds up all of the Patreon subscriptions add up. We're very thankful for it because without you guys, we would not be able to do the extra things, right?

So Patreon pays for the extra. What do you think the extra is? Like little trips. We can go on here and there. Restaurants that we want to try out, but maybe not have the money for or repairs, but I'm not entirely sure what that one Oh no, no, no, no. Repairs is covered by something else. Makes sense. Yeah.

That's your dad's RV transport. We actually take a percentage out of every check and put that behind for repairs, but no, you're absolutely right, especially about the restaurants. Because with Jeremy's RV transport job, we have a grocery budget. Eating out is considered part of that grocery budget. Yeah.

So yeah, we want to experience a lot of different restaurants and stuff. We do enjoy eating at home, though, don't get me wrong. Even if we could afford it, we could never just eat at restaurants. Yeah. I don't think I'd went to live that way. Could never do it. We really enjoy cooking at home and cooking outside and we just, we love.

I love to cook and they like eating my food and Jeremy likes to, I will not complain. Yeah, Jeremy likes to cook on the Blackstone and we enjoy that. So however, with our current, if you were just to take what we have coming in for Jeremy's RV transport and what our budget is for groceries, that enables us to eat out once every maybe 10 days.

To try a new restaurant the rest of the time we would be cooking here in the rv. So what Patreon does it is allows us to, to narrow that down to more, like once a week we have a goal to where every Sunday afternoon we can try a new restaurant. That's our goal. Maybe with some friends in that area. Yeah, with some people that we've met.

I don't know if you guys can hear Jasper proceeding in the background, but he is going at it. I'd love to be able to try two restaurants a week. Right now we are not there. We are not there yet because we don't wanna take all of our Patreon money just using it for restaurants. We also wanna use 'em for maybe theme park tickets or to get into a state park or something of that nature, maybe.

There's a museum, there's a zoo. So Patreon helps to pay for all of those extra things that we want to do. I'm not gonna say all of the exploration because a good 70% of what we do is free. True. Like we try to find the free to low cost as much as possible when traveling. Yeah. But for the extras. We are definitely appreciative of every single Patreon member because that helps us to explore those areas.

Another form of income that we have is through our podcast, so we do appreciate every listen on our podcast, every download. So for you guys here on Patreon, we upload ad free podcasts, but on. Spotify and Apple Podcast and everywhere else it's streamed. We actually get paid per listen because there are ads and such in the podcast.

It, it is a very low income stream right now. So low, it's not even significant. It might buy us a cup of coffee to at a coffee shop every month. Nice. Who drinks coffee in this household? I like a good latte. I like some matcha latte, man. The state chai latte, you know they have frappuccinos. I like a good coffee shop, so that gets us a cookie at of bakery every month.

How about that? Fair enough. Is that better? That's better because we do love our bakeries. That is very true. In fact, I've been researching, you know. At least one place that we need to eat in every of the places that we're going. And in one of them, out of everything that I saw in the area, like I've chose a bakery.

Nice. Because we just love bakeries. I think the last bakery we went to, I got a croissant. Yeah. That was it. Good to, I know. You know, it's been so long since we've been to bakery. It has, because since we sold the house and moved into the rv, we've been stationary. We haven't been able to travel as much, which I think is why I am itching so bad to get on the road because we were taking a trip once a month.

Yep. And then starting in like May, I think since May, we've taken two trips Sweet. In five months time. So yeah, I am, I'm ready to hit the road. We're itching for an adventure. Yeah. All of us. So yeah. Our podcast not a super. Productive income stream. At the moment, we are still building and growing, and then of course we have our YouTube, so our YouTube's not even monetized yet.

We don't have enough subscribers, of course. We're fairly new to the YouTube game. We're just now starting to where we're releasing content every week, but we are slowly building that community as well. The goals are that eventually between our podcast and our YouTube. We will also be able to use those incomes for activities, which would be amazing because then we would be able to do more of the activities that cost money.

We still definitely wanna focus on what's free, because that's part of like what we're wanting to show people is what you can do for such a low cost. But yes, that will enable us to hit up more restaurants and try local cuisine. I would love to be able to get to a place where. Every time we're somewhere for long term, for like three to four weeks that we're able to support that local community through purchasing from local shops and things like that.

Right now, it's definitely not a possibility to be going and spending because, you know, especially when you purchase local, it does tend to be more expensive, understandably. But, uh, right now, financially, we are definitely not in a place where we can do that. Not without Jeremy having to work. Way more than we want him to have to work.

We could do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted, if Jeremy worked three to four weeks a month. But we don't want that to happen, right? We, we don't want him to have to work more than 14 days a month, if even that much. I think his goal is like 10 days a month of working, and that should bring in everything we need.

So although our. Second income streams. Our passive income streams are low in this moment. We have faith and we have hope that those will continue to grow. If they don't, it's no skin off of our back. We're still gonna do what we're gonna do. Jeremy is RV transport. Job pays the bills, and we will just continue doing a strict budget and.

Not eating as many restaurants as we want to and things like that. But you know, I do believe that it will grow pretty significantly as we travel. And then a new income stream that will be coming in soon is the royalties from my books. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So. I just have the one book right now. I am working on a second and I even have part of a third.

I have like probably a quarter of a third book already written and ready to go. Really? I do, yeah. I've been working on it for years, many years. Off and on, off and on, but I will not get my first royalty trek, I think, until the end of October, and then I'll get one at the end of every month after that. So I really don't know what that's gonna look like yet, how much that's going to be.

And of course I know that's gonna be something different every single month. And then as I add more books to that, that will continue to increase as well. At this moment, I'm not really sure what that income is going to go towards. Again, it just really depends on how much it is. But I really think what I'm hoping to do with it is use it to pay some of our bills, to take even less of a load off of your dad, less being away from us that he has to do.

So that's our goals, and right now that is exactly how we're able to travel and do what we do through those different income streams and through making everyth. As affordable as we possibly can. So in the future, what our content is going to look like, uh, will really kind of depend on you guys, the people who consume our content.

I don't believe our Patreon tears are going to change. I don't think I'll ever change that. I may add to the tier what each tier has and what's available, but I don't think I'll ever change that. We'll continue putting out YouTube episodes every single Saturday. We might even increase that to twice a week as we're traveling.

It really just depends. We will have a episode every Friday on our podcast. Absolutely. We'll continue doing bonus episodes. I don't know if the frequency of our content will change too much, but hopefully it becomes better and better quality over time. And then, yeah, our vision is to have those income streams, those passive income streams to really grow over the next few years.

You say passive income, but it's not very passive at the moment. Eventually it might be, yeah. I mean, we do put work into it every week, right? Yes. But really the passive income is just to help dad with not doing as much work. Right. So I think it's gonna be interesting. Like we, we live comfortably not making that much, right.

Because our bills aren't that much. We talked about that in our last bonus episode. We don't have that many bills. We've worked it out to where we can live off as as little as possible. And like you said, live comfortably. Yeah. I think it's going to be fun one way or another. Oh yeah, absolutely. Okay. So whenever you said the content might be different depending on the viewers.

Mm-hmm. So if some people were to watch Spotify more, or some people like YouTube a whole lot, then like we would lean into. Whatever has like the most, but right now we're kind of just going on all of them just to like get in the waters at the very least. I don't know if I would lean into one more than the other.

I think maybe the type of content is what would change, like specifically for YouTube, right now, your dad's RV transport videos have thousands of more views than our travel videos do. Right. So if that is a trend that continues, even once we go full time, then we'll lean definitely into the RV transport side of YouTube for our podcast.

Not that we're going to work on one more than the other podcast or YouTube. For instance, our podcast episode that to this day still has the most downloads is how we afford to travel. Oh. So people like knowing things like what we're talking about now, the money aspect. Um, the practical side of what we're talking about.

Breaking down numbers, breaking down strategies, breaking down, you know, statistics. They want to see if it's doable for them and their needs and their family. You know, your dad and I researched the same type of things before we got into this. You know, we did several months of research and then we started doing.

A year and a half of preparing, but before they're preparing, we did all the research. So people definitely are looking for more information than they are travel stories on the podcast. So that's what I mean when I say it depends on what our listeners are. Content consumers want, you know, what they like, what they listen to the most.

Then that tells us, Hey, they, this is what they're wanting. It doesn't mean that's all we're going to do, but it does mean we'll lean towards that. Gotcha. That's what I mean whenever I say it might change a little bit. Understood. So let's talk about you. Oh, so you're 18 now. Don't remind me, you're 18 now.

You're finished with school, you're about to go travel the country, but. You're not gonna be able to have a normal job, like a normal eight to five type job or good, or even a part-time job, right? Never wanted one. So let's talk about ideas and what you're currently working on, what your future plans are.

Let's get into your hopes and dreams for your income streams. So mine's a bit different because over the years I've tried different things. I've tried making games, writing tt RPGs, board games, even did art at some point. Like I've tried a lot of different creative aspects to see what I could do. And two things.

Over the years have stuck out to me and something I'm still passionate about, even though I'm not the greatest at them. One of them is music, right? Which I'm still trying to get better at. I've come to a slight hill where it's become like the learning curve is going more up than to a plateau, and it's a lot that I gotta figure out.

'cause of reasons I won't get too in depth right now. And the second one I have been. Proud of, I guess might be the word I'm looking for. And I don't really know how to use this as a means to acquire income, but I'll figure it out over the years. We'll figure that out. Actually, let's save the second one.

Save the second one? Yeah, let's not tell anyone yet. Okay. We're gonna save it because I think it's gonna be good. I don't wanna give that one away yet. 'cause that's something you've been working on for a few years now. I was like 13 or 14 when I started. Yeah, it's a long time. Yeah. I think we're going to hold on to that one because that'll give us something to introduce later.

But yeah, we're currently working on taking Justin's passions, the things that he enjoys doing and that he's passionate about and turning them into income streams. You've already started with your digital music, like you talked about. We are using it right now on our podcast now. I think that's amazing.

If you want Justin to create something for you music wise, you know, podcast intros, YouTube video songs, things like that, hit him up. That way you won't get copyrighted. He's still learning, but you know, I sat down with him. I told him what I wanted. Like about what BPMs I wanted, what kind of moods I wanted, and he worked on it.

He got it to us. And then there are a few things that Jeremy and I didn't like and we were like, you know, this one part, it's too high. Like the notes are a little higher than we prefer listening to. And he changed those and then it was, it was just great and it was perfect and it fit our happy travel themes so much.

So we're very proud of him. And. Proud of what he is doing. He still has a lot to learn. You've only been doing the digital music stuff for like six months, right? Six months, yeah. Yeah, so he still has a lot to learn in that area. He's willing to learn though and put in the work. The goal for that is to eventually start to where we're putting his music out on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Podcast and.

Things like that and bring in those royalties. Yeah, but I don't, I don't wanna talk about the second one yet because it's got some serious potential. We're gonna wait on that one until it's out there. Like your music is and, and go from there. I think sometimes we just gotta keep the people in suspense.

We can't give away all of our vacuum on the edge of their seat. Yeah. And so that's what Justin's doing. He is working on. Building those communities and building his skills right now. Mainly skills, right? And then putting that out there. Yeah, I think so. I've not told you this. This is gonna be interesting because what I think the music I'm gonna lean into the most might be ambience and Break Core.

You might not know what Break Core is, but that's fine. It's basically. Really fast songs. Oh, we can listen to it after the podcast, but those two are, I'm maybe thinking of going for, yeah, I like good ambiance music in the background when I'm writing my book or something like that. I love putting on ambiance music.

No clue what the other one is, but you'll show me. We'll listen to it. There's one I really like that's a mix between ambiance and break core, and so yeah, also for. The second thing, I'm trying to introduce that into my music and make songs with that in mind. Oh yeah. We had a long discussion the other night.

You know, we're, we're getting really good as a family as far as like finding passive income streams and building upon them and then figuring out how to like market them and things. And Justin and I had a long conversation and we think we have. Really found a good way for him to mesh the two passions and the two things he's been working on.

So, and you might get a clue if I ever release any of it. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't think I would ever, I would never know. Just from your music. I feel like people would get it after the first three or five. You really think so? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know really. Heck, I definitely wouldn't put the two together.

But once the second one was out, then I would be like, oh, I get it now. Gotcha. I don't know if I could come to that conclusion on my own, but once I knew, then I could definitely put 'em together. Yeah. I feel like we're being so secretive with because it is, it's kinda like A-A-N-D-A. Is that what it is? A non-disclosure?

Yeah, that's the one we're under contract with ourselves. Yeah. So as a family, we're just really putting in the research and the work for building as many passive income streams as we can because our goals is to explore and travel. And then work on our own time so that we can have that the means and the time to get to travel, which it's like, it's still kind of surreal to me that we're even to this point in our lives that we are now.

Because five years ago, I never, ever would have believed that we had passive streams of income. Like you said, I don't know if you can really call them passive other than my book. Okay. That's truly a passive income stream at this point. Yes. But you know, the podcast, the Patreon, the YouTube, we are putting in hours and hours of work every week into those things.

We're creating them, we're editing them, we're uploading them. Like sometimes just to do like two things, two forms of content I'm spending an entire day on, like today, I will be. Editing this podcast, I'll be uploading it and doing all of the things and then doing all of the marketing on our social medias.

And then we're gonna make a YouTube video and then I gotta add that and I gotta upload that and I gotta market that. And it will take me the entire day because I have a 2-year-old and Jeremy is not here, which that'll be another great thing when we're traveling is Jeremy will be home more often, which means I can pump these things out faster.

He is helping take care of Jasper and we'll be able to explore more because I won't have to be spending so much time behind the computer working on all of my passive air quotes, stream of income. You know, we've even been starting to ponder on things that Ariel could do whenever she turns 18, and we still have.

Almost two years, a little over a year and a half to figure that out and, you know, break all that down and what her passions are and what she wants to do. It definitely looks different than it did, you know, for our family five years ago, as far as income and money and expenditures and everything goes.

It's like we did a complete 180. Nothing is familiar anymore. I think that's a good thing. Yeah. It pushes us out of our comfort zone a little bit, which I think it forces you sometimes to get creative, and it's a little bit scary and a little bit exciting just because this thought concept is so new to us.

But we have complete faith in it. It's working and it's growing, and we see that every day. So I'm just. I'm really looking forward to see where it all goes. Yeah. I'm really excited too. I think I've already stated how I am, uh, to meet people and all the stories that they have and the general adventures, but I'm also excited to actually be able to do what we like to do and not, not be stuck with a job that you hate.

Yeah, because I'm gonna be honest, that was my big thing when I was younger mm-hmm. Is I do not want a job. I do not like. Yeah. So being able to have a passion that that can have income is great. And that's awesome. Yeah. And you know, in this day and age there, there's just so many opportunities that are out there that you don't even think about pursuing.

Like until you do, I guess. But it's, it's just. So out of the ordinary from, well, especially how I grew up being the generation that I'm in. So completely different. Maybe not so much for your generation. It's, it's kind of the norm. Like it'll be very much the norm for Jasper's generation. But, uh, yeah, I, I think you should share all of our travel ry stuff with your friends and family.

Soon we'll be sharing Justin's stuff out there with the world. We're working on that right now and working on getting it out there and being, and getting it sound good, and getting it to sound good and, and getting it monetized and, you know, for him to be able to pursue the passions that he has had for a while now.

Thank you guys for supporting us, really and truly without every single listener, every single viewer. Every single person who is interested in this crazy life that we're diving into, really without y'all, we would not be able to do any of the extra stuff. And so we're, we're very grateful for every single one of you.

I hope this month's two bonus episodes have added a bit of clarification financially how we're doing things. We just had so many people questioning our sanity because they just, oh no, we're crazy. They just did not understand the logistics of how we were going to make all of this work. They didn't understand being able to bring in money while being on the road.

You know, vacations are expensive and most of our friends and family look at staying in an RV as a vacation, but that's not what we're doing. We're not doing it. Vacation style, Nope. So it's not as expensive. If you have any more questions about any of this, just ask us, let us know. We will very soon, at the end of October, be breaking down numbers as far as Jeremy's RV transport income, and I know he's definitely excited to share that with you guys.

He's, he's gonna be so sad he wasn't in on today's episode because. I know he would've had so much to say. True. Yeah. But your dad always has so much to say. So make sure you guys stay tuned. Next month when we do our bonus episode, it will be in a new location. It'll be in our first stop on our full-time journey.

So you will not wanna miss that one. Let's go.