Money

How much money we spent while slow traveling the world

2021 End of Year Travel Rewards Report

If you’ve been following us, you know that Travel Rewards is one of the core strategies we use to travel the world for less than staying at home in the USA. 

After accumulating about 1.5 million of Travel Rewards points in 2020 (worth about $25,000 in redemption at current valuation), we managed to accumulate some more and was also able to spend them again to enjoy some free international flights.

In this blog post, we will give you a quick introduction to travel rewards before digging into how many rewards we accumulated in 2021, which credit cards we opened, how much money we saved by redeeming these precious points and what our plans are for 2022!

Our Travel Rewards Balance history in 2021. Keeping a strong momentum!

Are you ready to talk about free travel money and see how much we got in 2021 by using Travel Rewards?

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By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

2021 Year End Spend Report – big life, small spend

When we decided to sell everything to travel the world in 2018, we knew that this new lifestyle was going to be fun, exciting and also full of unpredictable surprises. We did not know that we were going to go through a global pandemic.

While 2020 was the year of the pandemic, 2021 has been the year of hope with the vaccine that has been saving many lives. I predict that 2022 will be the year of adjustment where we adjust to live with the reality of the virus and resume more normalcy (including adding much more international travel for us).

We started 2021 in Taiwan, a place that we’ve been calling home since the pandemic started. We left in May to visit family in California and catch up with them, before doing the same in France while making a stop in the South of the country to explore the beautiful Calanques as well as visiting friends in Switzerland for a small week getaway. Finally for the last part of 2021, we decided to come back to Taiwan which has more or less sheltered us from the virus since they have managed to keep it away from its borders in 2021… Let’s see how 2022 goes

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By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

Year 3 Nomad Travel Spend Report – Unplanned Pandemic Year (Part II – The numbers)

We learned a lot from our very unplanned third year of slow travel. We discovered wonderful places, people, and cultures (make sure to read part one to learn more about that). This year was also filled with so much uncertainty – we didn’t even know which countries we would be staying in, let alone how much budget we would need. We were able to still save a lot as we continued applying our money-saving strategy (through tactics such as booking long-term Airbnbs, eating locally, living slowly, applying for credit cards to travel for free, and more…) to keep our budget to a very affordable number. In this post, we are going to share and dive into every single penny we spent (because we love tracking that stuff!).

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

Blog Income Report – Q2 2021

We don’t blog for a living but that doesn’t prevent us from monetizing our blog because why not? This quarter our revenue was flat but we had significant change in our source of revenue. In this post we explain how we monetize our blog, what works, what doesn’t, and how much money we made in the second quarter of 2021 (which covers the period from 4/1/2021 to 6/30/2021)

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

2020 End of Year Travel Rewards Report – Are travel rewards still relevant?

With nearly 1.5M Travel Rewards points accumulated by end of 2020 (worth $20,000 in redemption) are we sitting on useless money during a pandemic?

In this blog post, we will give you a quick introduction to travel rewards before digging into how many rewards we accumulated in 2020, which credit cards we opened, how much money we saved by redeeming these precious points and what our plans are for 2021!

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

Detailed Look at Quarterly Blog Income Report – Q4 2020

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know how much we love numbers and since we ourselves enjoy reading about others’ blog income, we thought we would share our blog income on a quarterly basis.

Since we are still a modest blog, our numbers won’t blow your mind but you might be interested to see that there is still a bit of income trickling in that requires little effort to maintain once they have been properly set up. And you might also appreciate seeing how much progress we have made overtime.  

Don’t be fooled though! Living off a blog requires a LOT of work that includes:

  • publishing quality content on a regular basis (consistency is your friend) 
  • promoting your content (and your identity) on other platforms that will help amplify your story (ie. guest posts, podcast interviews…). 
  • building a newsletter to get your 1000 True Fans (a concept Kevin Kelly talk about in his book: 1000 True Fans: Simple Idea to Earn A Living Doing What You Love.)

This is why you should first and foremost blog about things you are passionate about before thinking about how to monetize your content.

In this article, we explain how we monetize our blog, what works, what doesn’t, and how much we made in the last quarter of 2020 (which covers the period from 10/1/2020 to 12/31/2020). Are you ready to dive in?

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By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago