July was a very busy month for us. We worked two days per week at our travel contracts in Anchorage and used every day we weren’t working to take trips to National Parks, go fishing, do hikes around the area, or work on our business.
The business continues to gradually take up more and more time with the focus recently being on finding and interviewing new companies and recruiters to send new travelers to, along with staying caught up on content, payments due, keeping recruiters accountable, and emails/messages from followers. I’ve also been spending time trying to learn more about optimizing new articles to get the attention of search engines, which has been a challenge but seems to be paying off. Our website traffic continues to increase each year while actually putting out less articles than we used to.
Our weekend trips and adventures all over Alaska were absolutely epic in July. We visited several Alaska National Parks that were breathtaking, and by the end of the month we only had one park left to visit out of the eight National Parks in Alaska. Although the parks in Alaska are amazing, they’re almost all pretty difficult to get to and involve pretty high costs. You’re also at the mercy of the weather for many of them, and tours often get cancelled due to rain or fog which can be frustrating. We were fortunate that we only ran into an issue with a weather cancellation for our flight to one of the parks, and we were able to reschedule for the next day instead of having to miss it completely.
Income
Income from our websites (FifthWheelPT and Travel Therapy Mentor) for July was at a new all time high! It just narrowly surpassed the previous high of April 2022. I also earned a few thousand during the month from our part time Travel PT contracts. I really wasn’t expecting July to be such a high earning month since historically it hasn’t been one of our best. To put this month’s business earnings into perspective, the websites earned 7.5x more this July than July 2022, and 30x more than July 2020! I continue to be amazed by the year over year growth in revenue.
Expenses
In July my expenses were crazy high again due to the expensive Alaska rent, food and gas prices, combined with all of our costly adventures. If I combine my expenses for just June and July this year, I spent more in two months than in the entire year of 2019 when I tracked all of my expenses for the year. Fortunately, I also earned more in those two months than I did in all of 2019 as well due to the business income growth. All in all, my savings rate for the month was around 65% despite higher than normal expenses, which I’m very happy with considering how costly Alaska has been.
Investments
The S&P 500 was up about 9.1% in July, which was a nice reprieve after a pretty rough first half of the year. Bitcoin was up about 16.9% on the month, with Ethereum up much more than that. The equity and crypto returns really helped my investment portfolio recover some in July. I still remain pretty heavy in cash right now, but I did put some more money to work during July with some index fund and Bitcoin purchases. I plan to continue buying both equities and Bitcoin throughout the rest of the year to reduce my cash allocation, but I will still probably keep a decent amount in cash in case this is just a bear market rally before a bigger drop in prices. I’m certainly way more conservative than I need to be right now with such strong income coming in each month from the websites.
Financial Independence Progress
My net assets increased by 11.2% in July which is actually one of my biggest monthly increases ever thanks to the high income and good investment returns. This increase puts my net assets at 52.7 times my average yearly expenses currently. With some luck, I have a pretty decent chance of surpassing 60x this year.
Next Month
In August, we finish up our travel contracts in Anchorage and start our drive back to the lower 48. The time has flown by since we arrived in Alaska which is almost certainly because we’ve been very busy between work, business, and our adventures. We’ll be very sad to leave but also really excited to finally visit Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada on our drive back and to get home to see family.
How was July for you financially? Let me know in the comments!
Fifth Wheel Physical Therapist 