Some of you may have noticed that the last time I posted an income report here on the blog was February 1st. I’ve been sharing my income and expenses here on the blog since I first started with this full-time digital nomad journey.
I knew that reading them from other bloggers had helped me immensely when I was first getting started and I wanted to offer that same sort of help to budding travel bloggers, especially because there is so little information out there (still!) about how to make money as a travel blogger.
Recently, I’ve been getting a few emails and questions about why I’m not writing them anymore and whether or not I’m still a Digital Nomad or if I’m still making money blogging.
The answer is yes to both.
So why did I stop writing them, then?
It Was Causing Me Un-Needed Stress
The biggest reason that I stopped writing these reports is that they were SERIOUSLY stressing me out. For those of you that don’t know me, I am a relatively anxious person. I hate letting people down and the stress of getting these up each month, of being totally honest, and of not having achieved certain targets or beating last month’s income was causing me SO MUCH STRESS.
I was saying yes to jobs that I didn’t want to do and that I didn’t really need the money for simply so that I could say I made more money than I did last month. I let the income reports dictate my work rather than doing what I really wanted to be doing, which was to take a step back from the copywriting world and spend more time working on my blog.
Mo Money Mo Problems.
I Wanted to Take a Pay Cut to Focus on This Blog (Without Judgement)
Last year I spent almost all of my working hours doing copywriting work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so grateful that I was able to get steady work for so long. All of the copywriting work allowed me to save a ton of money and I still take on a fair bit of it to keep those checks coming in each month.
But I wanted to take a huge step away from it and that meant making less money. Some months that means making WAY less money. I’m okay with that, but I didn’t feel okay with it when I was writing my income reports. I wanted to be able to focus all of my energy on building this blog, on writing my Mexico City guidebook, and on building relationships with people in the travel industry rather than the copywriting industry.
I felt like I really needed to stop spending so much time on work that didn’t thrill me so that I could really focus on the work that I truly love. That meant making less money so that I could start earning more in the long run and I simply didn’t want to deal with the backlash of that on the blog.
They Were Getting Incredibly Repetitive
I felt like I was writing the same exact thing every month – copywriting, freelance work, affiliate income, ad income, etc. I felt like each month wasn’t offering any better information than the month before, so why was I wasting precious blog-writing time? Now if people email me about how I make money blogging or as a digital nomad in general, I can direct them to those older posts and still not really worry that they are out of date.
It Started to Feel Like Maybe This Wasn’t the Safetest or Smartest Thing to Do
I love helping people and I’ve never really minded talking about how much money I earn or how I earn it. I’ve never been shy about that and I still don’t feel shy about telling people if they ask me directly, however sharing my income reports on the internet started to worry me slightly. I’d read some horror stories (still not entirely positive if they were true) where people had been tracked down or bothered because they were sharing how much money they have.
I’m not so self-centered as to think that someone is going to come after me because I make over $2,000 a month or anything, but I worried about what might happen further down the line as my income grew. I didn’t want to put the people I care about in any jeopardy simply so that a few people could see how much money I was earning.
Will I Make Income Reports in the Future?
I haven’t totally ruled it out. I love writing the yearly roundups of how my year as a Digital Nomad went, so I will definitely be writing another one this July to give you an update about how year two as a digital nomad went.
After that, I’m not sure. I think if the way that I earn money changes drastically to the older posts on my site, then I will probably write an updated version of how I make money as a digital nomad so that people can see what’s changed and how I got there. However, I don’t think that in the future I will be sharing my exact income figures here on the blog.
Thanks as always for your interest in my journey. It really means a lot to me!
Like this post? Pin it for later!
