Planning Family Travel: Three Months To Go.

Nine months of planning family travel down, three to go.

In just under 3 months we will be on that plane to freedom. So what has changed since I posted about the first six months of planning?

My husband has resigned!

The worst kept secret in Port Douglas is out, we can talk about it now. By some miracle his boss hadn’t heard, he obviously isn’t one of my readers. Chef has started chuckling to himself about having a life:life balance rather than a work:life balance, he is free from the start of July.

School is out.

I’ve almost completely stopped trying to educate my kids by conventional means. My untouched stockpile of printed work sheets went in the recycling, work books are finished with and packed away. No more formal work from now on, but that doesn’t mean the learning stops, far from it, you can’t stop children learning, they do it every day, all by themselves. I’m writing our homeschool report at the moment, I put this learning plan together for next year, it gives an idea of how much they learn through real life exposure. It’s one of the hoops I have to jump through to stay legal in Australia, not my idea of fun at all.

Money, not going so well.

Despite sticking to my weekly budget of $350. The savings aren’t going up. We’ve had a lot of big expenses, car stuff, house stuff, insurance, taxes. But I’m not worried, we can manage with whatever we have, we will have enough income to get by on from house rental, interest on the money in the bank and blog income, I hope. We have around $17000 saved up.

Boxes are packed, stuff is gone. This is one of the most interesting parts, we’ve sold a lot of stuff, that’s the obvious way to de-clutter, but stuff is vanishing through natural deterioration. Anything that has worn out or broken,  we haven’t replaced, we’re down to 3 glasses, both vacuum cleaners died, we have far fewer clothes. But it’s good! I like having less stuff, there is something really enjoyable about having empty cupboards and a feeling of getting by with what we have.

New stuff has arrived. Backpacks, padlocks, cable locks, cases for Kindles and tablets, hard drives, all sorts of gadgets keep arriving in the mail. It’s fun! I have bought everything on the internet, I refuse to pay local prices, so far everything has been good. The money I’ve made from hosting with AirBnB has paid for all this.

Blogging

The World Travel Family blog is now almost 7 months old.

I have 77 email followers ( not many, please sign up, if you would, it’s important!) (30 more than 3 months ago)

I may have more followers through RSS , I still totally don’t understand that.

423 Facebook fans on the page, all real, not through advertising. (265 more than 3 months ago)

344 Twitter followers (130 more than 3 months ago). I try to use Twitter properly but I just don’t get it, give me time, I’m old.

I joined G+ but I don’t understand that, either.

My Google page rank is 1.  There is a page rank update in the next week or so, they happen every 3 months. I’m keeping everything crossed for a 2.

My Domain Authority is 28 (was 24) and my Page Authority is 40 ( was 36).

How much money have I made? About $780, all in the last month, a day rarely goes past without some advertiser contacting me, which is encouraging.

Traffic to the site is increasing steadily, it jumped when we got our first page rank in February. So far we have had 8,291 visits from 5,221 unique people giving us 34,821 page views. Not bad!

I can taste freedom!

Can you imagine what it’s going to be like? We have the first week of our trip planned, Kuala Lumpur and Legoland for Boo’s Birthday, after that, nothing! We can do whatever we like, go wherever we like. If we fancy Vietnam, we’ll go there, if we feel like some cooler weather, we’ll head for Nepal or China. How absolutley, completely awesome is that? I still have a few worries, what I posted in am I scared to travel the world still stands. But there’s only one way to find out if this thing will work or not, to try it. Not long now!