The hardest part about full-time travel is figuring out how to make money on the road. You want to travel for as long as possible. So you need to be a trust fund baby or you need to work a bit on your travels. We’ve found that you need multiple sources of income to keep things ticking over or you need to do semi frequent stints of full-time work between travel. This list covers the way we travel currently, plus a few things we’ve done in the past to help keep our adventures going.
Be sure to check out our Instagram to see all our adventures along our travel journey!
Locum/Temp Work
This is the way we have chosen to fund our travels, and it works wonders for us! Tiff is a qualified radiographer and uses an agency to find short-term work around New Zealand. Like any healthcare industry, hospitals and radiography clinics around the world are short staffed. Tiff helps out by working at these places to fill gaps in staffing or give permanent staff the ability to take a well-earned break.
The best thing about this type of locum work is that she gets accommodation provided. The people hiring her usually cover the cost of getting her to the location of the placement. This means that work paid for her flights to New Zealand! We have to cover the cost of getting Nathan around if flights are involved, but they pay for fuel and covers us both. The accommodation we get is usually in a hotel. This varies a lot from place to place, but we’ve only had to pay extra for Nathan once and even then it was only $5NZD a night.
Look into finding out if your current qualifications will enable you to be a temp or locum whilst you travel. There are agencies out there that will help you find work for any number of professions.
Farm Hand
This one is along the same lines as finding locum work however, it doesn’t require any previous qualifications. We worked as farm hands during harvest in Esperance and, whilst it was tough, it is definitely a well-known way of making money on the road while in a different country. Accommodation on the farm is usually provided. They also gave us dinners when we were harvesting, as the hours worked are quite long.
We enjoyed working on the farm prior to harvest but found the stress, long hours and minimal days off during harvest to be a bit much for us. We probably won’t be doing this one again, but it provided work for both of us and housed us for free! If your current job won’t translate well to locum work, then this is a good one to pick up whilst you travel.
Farmers need extra hands during harvest, so they are always looking out for people to work during this time. Given that it’s only a couple months until harvest is over, you are then free to go exploring the region or country you chose to work in.
Captioning/Transcribing
This is one that Nathan has started recently. It’s a service platform that people upload videos to that need captioning or transcribing. These can range anywhere from random YouTube videos to sports commentary to TV Shows (Nathan’s favourite). rev.com is what Nathan uses and there are usually plenty of jobs on there. There is an application you have to fill out and pass a test following rev.com’s style guide to be accepted.
Once you’re accepted, you have a rookie status where you only have access to a small amount of jobs. You must complete 60 minutes of work and maintain a score of 4.5 across your metrics to level up where you get full access to rev’s content. The pay isn’t amazing (Around $10-$15 USD an hour once you get up and going) but it’s very easy to pick up work and there is no minimum required work on the platform, which makes it a great option.
Selling Prints/Crafts
Markets, Etsy, Facebook Marketplace or even your own website are all great ways to turn your hobbies into money. Check out our Print Store for an example and feel free to buy one if you like it enough! We are both really crafty people and often spend time sitting outside in nature doing our chosen crafts. We have talked about selling our wares instead of just gifting them to friends and family for a while now and plan to put this into action in the new year. It’s a great way to make some money off the things you love doing in your downtime.
Paid Surveys
Everyone talks about using paid surveys as a way to make money on the road. We always thought it was silly and a bit of a scam, if we are being honest. However, we have since come across Octopus group, a survey provider for Australia and New Zealand and we love it! Tiff started off doing it and now Nathan is on board, too.
They give you the option of receiving vouchers or transferring money right into your bank account for each survey you do. They are marketed as being the best paying survey provider in Australia and honestly, it’s pretty good. Obviously we aren’t making big bucks on it, but last week we used only vouchers from our surveys to pay for our grocery shop at Woolworths. For us, that’s a big win!
If you’d like to give them a try, here is our link. Using it helps us out as they give everyone a small incentive to invite friends! Once you are up and going, you get your own link to tell your friends about too. Or if you feel like helping us out even more, you can give your friends our link!
Turn Your Lifestyle Into a Full-Time Gig
Isn’t this the dream? Like many others, our goal is to turn our hobby of travel blogging and photography into a more profitable income. There are many income streams you could use to turn this into a reality. YouTube, affiliate marketing, paid promotions, paid tourism trips, press trips, etc. But it does take a large amount of time and dedication and quite a bit of luck.
We’ve been slowly ticking away at this goal and sadly haven’t gotten too far with it yet. The main thing for us is that we enjoy taking photos and sharing our travel and vanlife knowledge with others. We aren’t making much off of it, but it’s been a fun adventure. If it starts making us more, then that’s a bonus for us.
There are countless ways to make money on the road!
These have all helped us to keep our travel dreams going much longer than we had ever planned on doing it for. We saved up to buy our van and have had to budget to stay on the road this long. But we couldn’t have done it without working during that time. The free accommodation and travel expenses that come with locum work have definitely made it easier for our money to stretch further. We are always mindful of our spending when on the road and have a few tricks to keep this down and make the work we do go further.
Check out 10 Game Changing Vanlife Money Saving Tips for some money saving hacks we use constantly on the road. Ultimately, though, if you want to live this lifestyle, we really believe there are ways to make it work for you. You just need to sit down and think about what you want from it and figure out the best way to get there for your particular skill set. At this time in the world, so many industries are short staffed so finding short-term work, no matter what your skill set, is an easy way to start living life on the road.
Keen for more inspo? Be sure to check out:
- 10 Game Changing Vanlife Money-Saving Tips
- How Eco-Friendly is Vanlife?
- Campervan Essentials For Your Next Home on Wheels
