Funding an Overland Adventure Lifestyle

As much as we like to think of camping and outdoor adventures as a free activity, there’s a harsh reality that it costs money to overland. Funding those adventures while overlanding takes a lot of planning and creativity.

Wait, back up. What is Overlanding?

Overlanding is a term that gets thrown around a lot and used in many different contexts so I wanted to clarify what we mean. To us, it’s a way of life. A life of experiences and challenges seeking out culture, nature, and the unexpected. A fully self-contained vehicle capable of taking us to the places we seek is our method of travel. Whether it’s down a country road, up a mountain trail or across continents we’re confident in Hermès, The Adventure Cruiser’s ability to get us there. We define boundaries not by borders and hearsay but by opportunities and curiosity.

Maybe a bit long-winded, but it’s special to us and we wanted you to know.

Generating income from off the grid

Probably the most challenging part of any long-term sabbatical is paying for it. It takes some creativity to figure out what works for different people from different walks of life and everyone’s situation is unique to them. What has worked for us was selling our home and belongings and investing in short-term rentals. We have experience with Airbnb and have found success in the past so we stuck with what we knew we could pull off in a reasonable amount of time as we transitioned from our Colorado home to our new adventurous lifestyle.

The Ames Retreat located in Ames Iowa

We spent quite a bit of time seeking out a home we could convert into a short term rental. We started looking in markets that were already saturated in rentals and even went under contract on a few. We were looking in places like: Joshua Tree, CA; Kona, HI; Whitefish, MT; along with many areas in our home state of Colorado. In these markets we faced the pressure of big investor money and simply couldn’t compete with the highly inflated prices people were willing to pay for real estate. With our plans for travel starting in the summer of 2021 we were getting tight on time without anything coming to fruition around January 2021 and began expanding our search to smaller unsaturated markets. We ended up finding a great charming property in Ames, Iowa for a great price that we could put some sweat equity into. With the help of friends and family we were able to put the finishing touches on right before taking off for our adventures on July 1.

Here are some before, in-progress, and finished product photos. To see more you can visit the live listing: https://airbnb.com/h/ames-retreat

Let us know what you think in the comments below!