Recently we got a message from someone on our Instagram who asked “You both lost your jobs and now travel in your van, how can you afford it, what do you do for money? How are you making money on the road?”
It’s a great question and one I’m sure you’ve asked either us or yourselves whenever you see people travelling in vans. You’ve probably sat there an thought that you can’t do that because you don’t have the skills to work online or you’ve just drawn a blank when trying to work out how to make money on the road.
When we lost our jobs we realised that we no longer wanted to work full time and so if we wanted to stop working five days a week we would have to look at jobs differently and came to the conclusion that we didn’t need to replace our 9 to 5 job with another, we just needed to replace the income you get from a 9 to 5 job. We can do this by doing a number of little things which add up to replacing most of our income. We know that not everyone will want to do what we do but below are things which have worked for us;
Matched Betting
By far our biggest income stream is through matched betting which has brought in around £500-£1000 a month each. Matched betting is a technique where we are able to utilise bookmaker promotions to guarantee making profit. We first heard about it in the Guardian newspaper and thought it looked too good to be true until we tried it and found that it wasn’t. Rather than me explaining it poorly for you we recommend you take 5 minutes to read a website we use called Profit Accumulator which has tonnes of tutorials and information about matched betting as well as offering a free trial where you can make your first £45 for free. We can’t recommend it enough to people and it is one of the main reasons we can travel so freely.
Since we first mentioned matched betting on our blog, Instagram and on YouTube we have found so many other van dwellers who also do it and even more satisfyingly we have met and heard from literally hundreds of people who have been introduced to matched betting through us which blows our mind!
Freelance Work
While matched betting brings in the bulk of our income we supplement this by doing freelance work on a number of websites. Fiverr, People per Hour and Take Note Typing offer us the opportunity to offer our skills online to people. Whether that be transcription, copy writing, proof reading, data entry or virtual assistant work we are able to use our skills to be able to work location independently and as much or as little as we want. These marketplaces can be very competitive but are fantastic if you have saleable skills.
More recently we have been making money using Click Worker, which is a fantastic tool for getting regular unskilled work online. The way it works is that you are assigned a small fraction of a larger task, for example you may be required to film a 10 second video of you saying “Hello” in your native language, they will assign this out to 100’s – 1000’s of people and pay a very small fee. The money for each task is significantly lower than on the other sites however you are able to achieve large volumes of tasks in short periods of time which soon adds up!
Work Away
Work away is one of the most popular way for travellers to travel. With most work away you are required to do jobs in exchange for accommodation and food and on occasion the hosts may offer a small amount of money as an allowance however we have found that some places are more than willing to pay for a tank of diesel in lieu of accommodation which suits us just fine seen as we have that with us at all times.
Our website
When we started our website it was intended as a collection of how to articles about van living as well as interviews with other vanlifers, we never considered that we’d ever make any money from it, it was meant merely as a helpful resource and inspiration for friends and family as well as the few Instagram followers we had.
As the years have gone on it has started to make very small amounts of money, some from donations, most from affiliate links. We go through the ways in which we make our money and the ways in which we are supported via our support us page here
You can learn how we made our website here.
How we make money on the road
We make enough money with a combination of the above to be able to afford to travel however the biggest secret we have is that travelling in a van is just so much cheaper than going on holiday plus its just so much more fun!