Ways to make money travelling Australia (legitimately)
There are more people travelling Australia today than ever before, and every single one of them needs to have money to pay for fuel, food, a place to stay, and many of the other expenses that we are all familiar with paying.
If you are travelling on the road, there’s a huge number of ways in which you can earn money, with some being much less desirable than others, but we get onto that later on. Travelling Australia can be quite expensive, but if you need to it can also be incredibly cheap. There are pensioners doing it on not much more than their pension, and it is possible if you travel slow and are very frugal.
If you want to know how much it costs to travel Australia, we have a comprehensive post on that too.
How can you make money when travelling Australia?
Stop and work
Like your work at home, its entirely possible to base yourself somewhere for a few weeks or months at a time to top up the piggy bank. If you have a trade, or sought after skill this is often much easier than people realise. This includes anything from a mechanic to cabinet maker, nurse, truck driver, heavy machinery operator, management and tourism experience and the list goes on and on.
I know a number of people who travel for a few months, and then stop and work for a few months, and they’ve picked up some random jobs over the years. If you are willing to give anything a crack and have a positive attitude its remarkable what you can pick up, and if you combine that with low cost camping you can save a bucket load pretty quickly.
Centrelink
Yes, I’m going to mention this touchy subject. Some people get so antcy about it, but to me its really simple. My personal opinion is if you are entitled to money from Centerlink then you have every right to take it, and there’s a variety of ways in which you can receive some funding from Centrelink.
Family tax A and B are the most used, and then you have a range of other options. The best thing you can do is read the PDF from Centrelink, called ‘A guide to Australian Government payments’.
Remote work
With the recent events, more and more companies have turned to remote work. I have family that have hardly returned to work since it all began, and have been doing their 8 hours a day at home. As long as you can do your job, and your employer is happy for your physical location to move around there is no reason why you cant travel your way around Australia.
I know of people who stay in regions with good reception during the week so they can work, and then they move away from reception during the weekend to enjoy their travels.
These days, with Starlink becoming hugely popular and more affordable, its literally changed peoples’ lives in the way they ‘report’ to work. You can be in the middle of no where with fast, reliable internet and still do your work, then step out of your caravan onto the beach when your shift finishes!
Fly in fly out
This one is a little less common, but there are people who fly in and out of where they are travelling and working. If your work covers a flight, usually its not hard to change where that goes, and on your off swing you can fly back to your vehicle and setup and continue your travels.
There are even families who do this, where one partner heads off for their swing and leaves the other partner and kids camped up in a caravan park, and they just move around exactly like this.
Working online
There’s a million ways you can make money online, and I’ve been in this space for more than a decade, and know just about every way possible. Unfortunately there’s a lot of dodgy schemes out there that rely on others joining in order to grow, and can often be referred to as MLM, or multi level marketing.
Some legitimate ways to make money online include YouTube, blogging, affiliate marketing (although this is so often done in an unethical way), lead generation, social media management, content creation, group moderation and the list goes on and on.
This very blog makes a significant chunk of money online through the ads you see scattered around the site, and has been a labour of love for coming on 14 years. It does absolutely work, but its been incredibly time consuming and difficult, and is not a pathway I would recommend to the faint hearted (and that’s not what this blog is about either).
Positively geared properties
If you have a family home, you can choose to rent that out while you travel, and in many cases it can make a fair chunk of money each week, even after costs. Of course, there’s all sorts of things you need to think about before doing it, but if you’ve paid your mortgage down some, or all the way there’s often no problems walking away with $300 – $600 a week, and that pays for a lot of travel!
Investment properties are in the same boat, although there are plenty that cost money to own and don’t make a cent, so be careful what you rely on.
Income from investments
I’m not going to go into too much detail here as its not the area of expertise, but you can make good money from shares, ETF’s, LIC’s, Crypto and a whole range of other assets that generate money. If you have a decent nest egg spread across a variety of different, reliable places you can make a huge amount of money each year by doing virtually nothing; its all about getting the nest egg in place, and working away for you.
I know at least one travelling family that sold their family home and used the money to invest, and have come back from being on the road for more than a year with significantly more than what they left off with, and its entirely possible for you too.
Again, no expert here, and you should take advice from those who are, but it might be something you hadn’t thought about, so we mention it.
How do we make money when travelling?
We’ve worked seriously hard over the last 15 years and saved as much money as we could, and paid our house loan down to a very low level. That means it makes us several hundred dollars a week in income as its rented out, and we have the money available to draw off as needed.
From there, we run this blog and I spend at least 20 – 40 hours a week working on it, and that excludes the time taken to get photos and videos and research places to go and so on.
The flip side of it for us is simple; we are very frugal, and if you can do this then your need to make money when on the road is hugely reduced. By learning to make your money go further on the road, you can go a lot longer on a lot less. You can read our 100 day costs post, which breaks everything down, along with our cost to travel Australia post, and our 400 day costs to travel Australia.
Some of the ways we do this is by skipping most caravan parks, unless we want to go in, or have a need to. Instead, we free camp or low cost camp where possible.
Our setup is relatively fuel efficient compared to many bigger rigs, and we don’t really spend any more on food than we would at home. We do our fair share of catching seafood, and are happy to buy in bulk and freeze food to use later on.
How do you make money when travelling full time on the road?
