I have received lots of different questions about money matters. I’m going to bunch them together into one post. I’ve written extensively before about how I earn money.

When I first started out, I did my own tax returns, with the help of my accountant girlfriend who found my disorganisation and disinterest very annoying! It was painful and tedious for all parties. So now I pay a local accountant to do everything. She tolerates my ignorance and utter disinterest in exchange for billing me. It is definitely money well-spent!

Every three months I give her a big envelope stuffed with receipts and bank statements. I do what she tells me to do and pay what she tells me to pay. I do all this without an iota of understanding or interest.

I have been in the habit of saving money ever since I was a kid on a mission to save up £100 for all the NatWest pigs. I’m very happy to live well within my means. When I began working as an adventurer I simply transferred all my ‘spare’ money to my wife’s account and she chipped away at our mortgage (I think).

Eventually I got my act together and started a pension. It only came about because I did a talk for St James’s Place and everyone in the entire room nagged me that I needed to get on with it. So now a very nice man comes to speak to me about once a year. I scrabble around trying to find him all the figures and answers he needs, we have a cup of tea, and after about an hour he says, “I can see that you are glazing over. Don’t worry, we’re almost done.” And I feel reassured that my future is a little more organised than it had been before.

Here is some very boring, but very useful advice to anyone beginning life as a working adventurer. Each tip has been learned the hard, painful, boring, slow way:

1. Start a separate business bank account straight away.
2. Hire an accountant straight away (unless you’re a numbers geek).
3. Start saving for your future immediately. You’re entering a high-risk, zero safety-net career that doesn’t favour the old or infirm. (On a separate note, I always take out good medical insurance for my adventures.)
4. Not an immediate issue, but an important one: get VAT-registered nice and early.

OK, I’m pretty sure that noooooobody will still be reading this post. But just in case, let’s jump on to the next question!

In one sense my income doesn’t vary much, in that it’s pretty much always gone up each year. That’s what self-employed people hope for, I guess.

It took years for me to relax enough to trust and believe that I was heading in the right direction. Speaking work is always very seasonal, so you have great gaps in the year when everyone seems to have lost interest in you.

On top of that, much of my income is sprinkled with randomness: you don’t know when the next speaking request / brand campaign / commissioned article will land in your inbox.

For that reason, the annual stipends I now receive for being a brand ambassador are helpful and reassuring. Ditto the royalty cheques I receive for my books. None of these are large, but the more books I write the more substantial a stream those passive income trickles become. 

Whilst my book royalties are reliable if not large, and hopefully will remain reliable as long as anyone is interested in me (plus also for 70 years after my death), I see the brand ambassador world as fickle and fleeting.

Brands change their marketing teams more often than I change my pants, and just because I’m interesting and “on message” this year does not mean that will be the case next year. Therefore I always consider a brand asking me to stay with them for another year as a bonus rather than a given. (This, by the way, also raises another issue and a pressure I feel a lot: the need to keep visible, interesting and relevant so that you remain a marketable ‘product’. Much of that last sentence makes me uncomfortable!)

Because of the haphazard nature of not knowing when my next chunk of income will come from, it is necessary to plan and save on a yearly scale, not a monthly one. Some months I earn nothing at all. Add on to that the times when I go away on trips: not only are you spending money on the adventure, you are also missing out on the earning opportunities which arise in that time period. Sod’s law particularly enjoys filling my inbox with lucrative offers coinciding with whenever I’m up a hill in my tent.

Talking about money makes me cringe, but I have tried with this newsletter to be honest and make nothing taboo. So I’ll say that I began on a mission to match or beat the junior teacher salary that I gave up in exchange for spending my days on Twitter and calling it ‘work’. Over time I built up to earning a comfortable six figure salary. That is (as the chart below shows) until 2019 when my income dropped off a costly cliff! (Apologies that the chart only runs from 2014: that’s when I began working with my accountant who could quickly email me the figures for this article. The earlier figures, when I was in charge, would require either a ouija board to find, or some rage-inducing spreadsheet searching that, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered with!)

So what happened in 2019? Simple answer: I gave up flying for work. This meant a huge drop in speaking and brand work.

Over the past few years I have also been significantly reducing the amount of time I’m willing to be away from home for. This is problematic for an ‘adventurer’ (see this post) who needs to go places to do interesting things that eventually earn money!

And then, of course, 2020 happened, with all of its delightful catastrophes 😉. Speaking events all cancelled, publishers in disarray, brand campaigns curtailed, adventurers confined to barracks etc. etc. etc.

When I first started out there was never any dilemma about whether or not to accept work opportunities: I needed the money plus there were very few people knocking on my door, and none of those were controversial.

As my profile has grown I get offered more money for the work I do. This sometimes makes the temptation hard to decline! On the other hand, I remind myself, I earn sufficient money and need not be greedy.

I don’t ever recall having a dilemma about whether or not to do a speaking event. They simply boil down to whether I am available and whether the fee is high enough to feel worthwhile or if the event sounds fun.

I’m picky about the articles I write (unless the fee is high, which it literally never has been for me) because they take time and I don’t enjoy doing them. I prefer to focus my time and effort on book writing. So I choose articles if the pay is tolerable, if the audience reach is large and relevant, or for the pleasant ego boost of writing for a publication I admire. Sometimes I write them for free if the subject sounds fun.

I don’t do affiliate sales because I always feel tacky flogging stuff. So when I do it, as I must, I want it to be worthwhile: either books that I really want to reach an audience, or something well paid. Not earning a few pennies every time someone buys some sunglasses.

I don’t get paid for these, but I have a rule (established after one-too-many cringes) that I won’t do any interview that insists on doing a full photoshoot to get the portrait for the piece. Far too awkward!

So far, so simple. The dilemmas arise once you enter the murkier waters of endorsing products, promoting brands, and generally being an ‘influencer’. That I never do these things for free shows that this side of things very much feels like work.

The best situations here are when I genuinely like a brand and I believe in what they do. Those that I’d happily pay for their gear if I was not being paid by them. These can grow into mutually beneficial long-term partnerships. I love having these working relationships.

Several years ago I went on a mission to try to find five non-competing brands and persuade each to pay me an annual ambassador fee. My thinking was that this would free up time spent chasing low-paying articles or talks so that I could concentrate more on what I love: being out on adventures and telling the stories properly. I did not fully succeed at the idea, but the ambassador roles it resulted in have been great to be involved with.

But what about when the brand asking you to work with them is less perfect? In these cases I consider my reputation first and foremost. “If I advertise this, will it harm the reputation and goodwill that has taken years to build?” By and large, my audience does want to have me flogging them stuff. So whatever brand it is, they tolerate as little of that as possible. (This is another reason why appropriate, long-term partnerships are far better than single flash campaigns.) Some products that I am happy to promote, others will not approve of. That’s the price I must pay in order to get paid.

Without doubt there have been times when I’ve swallowed my pride, sucked up the imagined sniggers of my peers, and done an ad for something that doesn’t really fit who I am. Simply put, if you have ever laughed or rolled your eyes at a brand campaign I have done, then I have decided that the pay cheque was worth that. It feels a bit grubby to write that!

There is also a moral choice to the things I choose to advertise. After all, the world really does not need more ‘stuff’. Saying ‘no’ to requests often entails a hefty financial hit, plus missing out on a cool trip to somewhere fun. But so be it.

I’ve never promoted cigarettes, for example. And the sectors that I am willing to advertise also change over time. I would no longer endorse the diesel-guzzling cars, airlines, or polluting coffee pods [see para above] that I have done in the past.

In short, I need to feel able to look at myself in the mirror, and that’s probably not a bad deciding factor for many of our decisions in life.

This is such a good question, because I have somehow intrinsically felt that money is a tarnishing thing, and adventuring-for-money does not sit well with me. Thinking that you might wrinkle your nose at something I have done and sniff, “he’s only done that for the money” does not feel nice.

But this question has made me see that needing to earn money from adventuring has also spurred me on to be more productive, focussed, creative, thoughtful, and imaginative. I have not considered this before.

Thinking over the things I do, I can say that making money was not a factor in any of these:

• Every trip I have ever done.
• The first years of giving school talks.
• Speaking events that are fun, for charity, or an honour. One example.
• A lot of my blogging.
• A few of my books, such as Moods of Future Joys, the first instalment of The Boy Who Biked the World, and My Midsummer Morning.
• My film, Into the Empty Quarter.
• My Living Adventurously podcast.

Earning money was a factor in doing these things:

• My other books, in particular my notebooks (I think they are cool, but they are also an unashamed effort to sell blank paper!)
• My other podcasts (There Are Other Rivers and The Doorstep Mile). These came about because I recorded them as audio books and it was easy to convert them into another format as well.
• The My Midsummer Morning film – a total disaster in terms of money as barely anyone has watched it!
• Adverts for brands.
• The huge numbers of blog posts I spent years writing to build content / SEO / expertise.
• Most corporate talks. They are usually fun events, but they are also a job.
• My newsletters.
• Social media.

Whilst it has always been important to keep myself in check by asking, “Would I do this if nobody found out about it?“, I do feel that the need to earn money, because ‘adventure’ is my ‘job’, has made me a “better” adventurer.

I say this because it has motivated me to grow communities, evangelise about participating in adventures, thinking and reading and writing more deeply about subjects, and writing more books (which I hope are helpful in encouraging others. Which, I hope marginally tips my life as a working adventurer into the realms of useful rather than merely pointless and self-indulgent…)

Being a working adventurer has forced me to be more imaginative. I have explored different things, different places, different types of journey, different ways of communicating. And all that has raised adventure, for me, above being a hobby, and above the simple fun of riding my bike and going camping.

In conclusion (he says after thousands of words to answer simple questions), trying to earn money has certainly made me more productive. Whether that is of lasting benefit to me or the world I am not so sure of!