We were on our cross country road trip throughout almost all of September. We left Virginia shortly after the beginning of the month, planning to take about 3 weeks to make it out to Las Vegas for the Traveler’s Conference at the end of the month. Along the way, we visited several national parks and did a lot of hiking. We spent the majority of our nights sleeping on the platform we built in the back of our minivan, but we also had a few stops where we stayed with friends and family across the country. This part of the trip was a lot of fun with some amazing sights, the highlights of which included Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and Zion National Park in Utah. Being back at the Traveler’s Conference and catching up with all of our travel friends that we hadn’t seen for two years was great. The conference was just as much fun as 2019, and it took us a few days to recover from all the Vegas fun once it was over. TravCon is the conference we look forward to the most each year, but once it’s over we’re glad it’s an entire year before the next one!
Income
Income from our websites (FifthWheelPT and Travel Therapy Mentor) was just at about half of what it was for August. This mostly had to do with us being on the road and not staying on top of receiving payments. We also put out only minimal content on the websites while we were on the road and instead relied heavily on updating followers via Facebook and Instagram. Lately we’ve been traveling so much that we reduced our live video frequency to two per month instead of weekly and have been writing articles much less often. We plan to do better with content while at home, but we still have at least a couple more trips planned this year, so our time at home might be minimal.
Expenses
Expenses this month were relatively low despite us being on the road. Besides our hotel in Las Vegas, we didn’t have any lodging expenses while traveling in the van. We did eat out a lot since we don’t really have any way to cook food in the van, and we quickly get tired of protein bars and trail mix. We planned to try to eat more healthy on this trip than on last year’s trip, but that didn’t really happen. After long days of hiking, it’s very hard for us to make ourselves eat healthy or have small meals. Luckily we burned a ton of calories with all the hiking. Our biggest costs for the month were definitely food and gas.
Investments
The S&P 500 was down about 4.76% in September. Bitcoin was also down about 7% on the month which was not a huge surprise after July and August were such huge months. The majority of my wealth remains concentrated in crypto (mostly Bitcoin) so my investment portfolio moves a lot with its fluctuations. September is historically a bad month for crypto, but Q4 is historically very good and I think that trend will continue this year, so I’m very optimistic about my investments going into the end of the year. Besides equities and crypto, the housing market continues to be crazy in our area with prices increasing steadily each month, which is increasing the value of our house.
Financial Independence Progress
My net assets decreased by about 2.3% in September. Coming off of an all time high in August, this drop didn’t really bother me much at all. With the decrease, my net assets are now at just over 48.5 times my annual expenses, which is still insane. I expect that this multiple will increase significantly by the end of the year despite my spending becoming progressively more lenient over time.
Next Month
We have a couple more weeks of the road trip in October before returning home around the middle of the month. I also turn 33 years old next month! October is looking like an absolutely huge month in terms of income and about average in terms of expenses. We’ll see how investments go during the month, but as I stated before, I’m very optimistic especially about crypto going into the end of this year.
How was September for you financially? Let me know in the comments!
Fifth Wheel Physical Therapist 