How I Travel FULL TIME as an Amateur Disc Golfer | Van & $$$ Tour

welcome back to Bonanza disc golf today I wanted to talk to you guys about how I have been able for the past six months to travel full time as an amateur disc golfer now I'm going to be a professional disc golfer my next tournament is going to be Pro I'm going to continue to exclusively play pro tournaments as I try to get onto the pro tour but this right here is my van and my disc golf setup and I want to give you guys my van tour that you've been asking for for a while as well as letting you guys know about my income and the way that I'm able to do all of this but let's start with the van tour because that's kind of exciting real quick speaking of income I would be remiss to not let you know that a bunch of this stuff that I have back here is going to have links down in the description if you want to check it out including all of my camera equipment and everything that I use to film because I know a lot of you guys have questions about that as well but let's just kind of get started with everything we have back here and then we'll move to the front sensor travel wasn't exclusively for disc golf initially it kind of turned into that as this channel became more and more of what our income was but we have a couple paddle boards over here I also have my old soccer stuff down there that I haven't taken out since I was in like Boston over a year we go up here I have another disc golf bag this is the discology OG V2 I also have their Izzo bag I'm testing both of them right now comparing them to my paratrooper to see which I like best and there will be a video coming out on that later but I do have an affiliate link with the skyology if they're not a sponsor of the channel but I am an affiliate with them and I do really like their bags and then over here I actually have a champ cap which is coming for a future video because of a video idea that I have coming also in January so be on the lookout for that and then in the back there we have a lot of my wife's kind of workout equipment and just a lot of more General stuff we have some tools I have some fishing gear back here that I also have taken out one and a half times and now all the Disco stuff back here it definitely is always this clean don't asked to look at it ever unless I'm filming a video okay promise me that but this is kind of what we're looking at in terms of all of the disc golf stuff that I have back here first off the bag that I've been using has been the Izzo bag we've done in the bags before you don't need to see everything that's in there this right here is kind of a work bin it has a lot of my work equipment obviously a lot of it's disc golf but the main thing when you run a disc golf channel like this is not that I'm just playing disc golf all the time it's that I'm editing videos and building relationships and networking and working with Brands like I would say in terms of being a disc golf content creator disc golf is maybe 15 of my work which is still a lot of the work which is awesome that I'm able to play disc golf that much but so much more of it is just sitting at a computer in here I have a couple of my smaller bags this is a bag that I'll put in the description as well one of the first companies that ever sent me stuff out Rogue iron sport if you want a satchel bag I love this one Gateway also sent me one out for some other stuff that we're going to be shooting I also have a rip it grip pad that I'm going to be testing later that I got as a tournament winnings but then just a lot of like shipping materials like shipping scale my soccer ball some old minis like this one shout out James in Tallahassee and then just like shipping equipment because I used to resell on Amazon my hair's crazy one thing that you're not going to notice back here is going to be my basket that's because right now it's Christmas time-ish I'm filming this the same day it's going live and we're with my in-laws they have a little backyard space that I have the basket set up at so that I can intermittently go and put 30 50 times and just make sure I'm getting those reps in one thing that's kind of neat back here is right back there this is all of our electrical equipment now I built this van myself when I was living in South Orlando but put all that electrical equipment and everything together so that we can run off of solar as well as battery to battery power and then this is all the good disc golf stuff starting here these are all the minis that I have just to give away to people I ordered 200 at a time that way I don't have to pay additional fees to Dynamic but if you ever see me please ask for a mini they're always free to you guys they're just basically like this so if you ever see me ask her mini I have them for you and then these are some boxes that I have gotten this many Mystery Box videos can probably come sometime in January and then this is kind of the Holy Grail this is what I built pretty recently to house everything just made out of PVC piping I actually built two but I only ended up needing one and two are way too big to fit in here I probably need a better storage solution overall but in here I'll just kind of run through real fast I have all like my kind of sentimental discs or discs that I'm done reviewing and then I don't plan on touching much I got a couple Aces on both of these this is this Eric Oakley gave me this is a disc Zach Benson gave me uh first ma1 tournament win and then just like some discs that are going to be given away in a doomsday discs video that's going to be coming out pretty soon as a part of a new series up here we have reviews and then my field work discs still need to figure out my bag for next season but right now I'm not really focusing on that I'm focusing on form these are all patreon sponsored reviews that are going to be coming up pretty soon and then these are all brands for a new series so this is how I organize everything and then we'll go into the front of the van and just show you kind of how I've been living for the past 15 months and then we can talk a little bit about my work life and the way that I make all this a reality full time turn on the lights real quick we got two dimmer switches and because of the FPS it's going to look really bad for a second so the front of the van here get us nice and wide this is kind of my workstation area you've seen this a little bit before this is just the driver's seat it's on a swivel which is really nice because you can just turn that around boom and then I set up this desk which is actually on some boat hinges down here that can like I can take this down but we never have because I kind of built it the perfect size and so this is where I mostly work our van is a mess it just kind of always is how it is I clean the back for you guys I'm not going to clean the front too you know that'd be crazy now we didn't build this van for disc golf and I do plan on I would love to build another van for the purpose of travel because this the van that we have here is a 170 inch Sprinter we bought it used and cheap but we're planning on selling it as we move and then hopefully getting just regular vehicles and then eventually another van if things continue to go well because I have lived in a van and I can do the tour like that but it would be nicer to just do it in airbnb's especially as my family grows but first Brokenness these are where we used to have two different things for groceries now it's just one down here we had to put these Lashes in because they kept the opening as we were driving fun of Van life up here is where we keep a lot more equipment so we have some food but we also have a lot of like camera equipment and stuff that keep up there like lights and everything up here is most of our plates bowls utensils inside I took my rice cooker because I was cooking some rice on the other side of things and we'll get to these other cabinets we have the sink where I built two different Faucets in here one of them is extra filtration this one is not this is just for bugs we have it in the front and the back so we can keep our doors open at night gets a lot of air circulation which is very nice and under here is our water system pretty simple don't need to go into too much detail it's just three cans and then there's a sediment filter a pump and then it just gets split between these and we have it on a switch because it leaks slightly very slightly but it leaks so van life here's just a bunch more of these are utensils in here just like tupperwares and everything and then just junk drawers and then like a toiletries drawer which similarly up here is also toiletries and then in here we have our explosives drawer which is just our jet boil as well as our stove and then all the different fuels to keep everything running which is on top of our trash which I think is a little bit over full right now and then these are our pots and pans so pots pans cutting boards and then our fridge which is just a 30 liter little fridge you can maybe keep five days to a week worth of goods in there but to be completely honest with you one of the things I'm most excited about for moving into an apartment is being able to like really focus on nutrition again because it's so hard without eating out all the time which we've tried which we've done that we don't want to do it's just so hard to want to cook in a pan so that's definitely something I'll probably if I build another van we'll want a little bit more power so I can have a microwave because that makes life so much easier and we don't have a microwave and that'd be nice over here we have a couple different Outlets speaking of power this is an ACL DC Outlet if you don't know what that means and it probably isn't super important to use just different ways that you can run power that have less draw because we have a battery back there in case you are a nerd and you like electrical stuff we have a 200 amp hour lithium iron phosphate battery we have a 2000 watt inverter but I realized that the maximum continuous draw on my battery is 1280 Watts so can't even use 2000 Watts if we wanted to because we're short we can sleep this way instead of long ways which is really nice in this van because it's so long and that gives us the extra like 30 inches four seats so we have extra seating areas and what's really cool about that is this is built on some pipes that are under here that basically allows it to swivel out and then we have an eating area for both of us if we'd like we haven't utilized that as much as we could but that's kind of what it looks like down on the underneath oh it's down there no fun and then this is our inverter switch this tells us how much battery we're getting from our solar and then this gives us our overall battery this is our bed these are my clothes up here both of these back here this is my wife's clothes right up here and these are just some books and such and then underneath here gives us access to what we call the garage but this is where we just put our laundry so that we don't have to worry about it in the van and then we can get access to various things that are down there there's also storage underneath all these seats there's kind of storage maximized everywhere but that's kind of how we've been living for a while which I mean we thought we use some apps to help us find places to sleep every night not at this golf cart parks fortunately I've only ever really slept at one disc golf park and it was the first disc golf park that I ever played at Zilker Park in Austin Texas but all of this was funded by money obviously and that's probably a lot of what a lot of you guys are interested in that's how I got to this point which is actually kind of funny because there was a Reddit post that was done on our slash disc golf that was basically what's the deal with badanzas he's just some rich kid who like failed at another Sport and decided to play disc golf which is kind of a mean framing of it but the question in itself was genuine after he got past his mean Framing and then I answered that over there so you can go check that out if you want but let's explain it a little bit here as well yeah we'll stay in the van and do that why not real quick though my future plans with this are like I said a little bit earlier to move probably to Denver have a home base like an apartment that we live out of and then travel from there but however I tour I'm planning on doing that pretty soon and the channel is getting to a point where it seems like that's going to be sustainable so please subscribe because that would mean a lot and I appreciate you for that but I'm just gonna quickly and simply go over my story of how I've gotten to the point here financially because I know that that's something that a lot of people are interested in so I always done like entrepreneurial little things but I never really made any of them super successful and so when I got out of college and I got married pretty quick after college to my wife who was in Orlando I moved down to Orlando and then found a job at Enterprise Rent-A-Cars where I worked for a while and I was in a management training program then their management assistant then I was an assistant manager but I was working like 55 hours a week and during this time I was very interested in personal finance and money and so I was starting another YouTube channel and so my first video there was in like June of 2019 while I was working at Enterprise and then I was like man I really want to do this full time because I saw a lot of people were making good money on YouTube and so I'd always wanted to create content like I had maybe three or four other channels that I had started and failed after like two or three videos before then and so I really was like I want to do this YouTube thing especially in the personal finance Niche channel was not getting a lot of traction at all I think I left Enterprises when I was at like 300 subscribers over there that was because I was like I kind of want some more time because I was working like 55 hours a week as an assistant manager and getting paid all right like kind of fifty two thousand dollars a year my wife works for non profits she was making 30. uh and so I was like I'm gonna take a pay cut so I dropped down to 42 000 a year but work 40 hours a week at a bank and at the bank I was able to work a little bit more on my channel man my boss was terrible at the bank and so I was like I kind of just need to quit this job but I am very like financially responsible person at least I like to think so and very frugal and so I was like okay Carissa is making this much per month which was about twenty two hundred dollars after taxes and then on the other side of things we looked at our expenses which we had been saving and investing with all of our Surplus and we continued to be in the mindset of hey after we paid off all of our credit card debt and everything let's just continue to live like this so that we can save and invest so we were saving for a house which turned into a van fun and the thing that we needed with the van was we needed income Independence so I could work from anywhere but then we also had been investing into Roth IRAs for both of ours maxing both of our Roth IRAs out because we've been living so frugally even on that 75 to 80 000 a year gross income between the two of us in Orlando I looked at what our income was like if we stop saving and investing I only need to bring in a thousand dollars a month 3 300 was our minimum expense I had done reselling on eBay with shoes for a while and then I had always heard about Amazon FBA like tried it and was like okay I can make money relatively quickly with this and so in November 2020 a couple months after I started on Amazon I ended up quitting my job at the bank and doing full-time Amazon not quite full-time because it didn't take me full-time hours I did have to use a zero percent credit card to get started to buy enough inventory that I was able to make enough money because in that business model you have to spend money like a lot of money to make money because you're working on return on investment percentages of what you spend so if I spend a thousand dollars I can reasonably expect there I'm making 300 to 500 if I'm finding good inventory and so I needed to be spending about three thousand dollars a month and so I needed a credit card that was able to sustain that especially off the Jump because I didn't want to pour into my savings and so I started pretty slow but then was able to ramp up relatively fast when I saw the sales coming in but all this time it was a means to an end of being full-time in content creation because that's what I was so passionate about I love making videos up and so I was focused on the other channel which was just my name Anthony bodanza it's still live but that channel actually transitioned a lot more into more like this is my journey this is what I'm doing to do it never like sold a course or anything like that but that channel eventually did get monetized in uh 2021 and then I was able to like start to kind of replace my Amazon income with that and eventually got to a point mostly with affiliate marketing where I was using a bunch of softwares myself and then I was recommending those softwares to my audience and if they signed up I would make a kickback of whatever they signed up kind of similar to if you want to buy those discology bags I'll get a kickback on the purchase price of the bag at no additional cost to you and you get 10 off at this college just saying but I continue to do a little bit of reselling on Amazon but I was more focused on creating content and then there were a couple like seasons of like some like mental health stuff especially being in the van and not enjoying as much as what I was doing and then I picked up disc golf in January of this year but I had this background of two and a half years of content creation and so after a couple months I was like I could probably make some disc golf videos and have some fun with it and so I started shooting videos in May but I didn't post my first video until June 15th or something I started my Channel June 12th but I had this background in my own editing style that I cultivated over years and so bringing that into the disc golf Community I was able to see where audiences were being slightly underserved where I could innovate and do things slightly better than what was out there already and create an audience relatively fast and because of that I had the other channel which was still making me money and at this point I haven't posted on that channel in 91 days but I'm still making about two thousand dollars a month from it from the Affiliates plus the views that those those videos still get and I'm planning on going back to that channel actually at the end of this year and posting two videos by the end of this year and then one a week after that more chronicling my journey as a content creator and just my general business thoughts because that's a lot of what that content was but it turned into Amazon FBA because that's the business that I was doing but here on the disc golf side of things there's not to be honest with you there's not a lot of good sponsorship and affiliate opportunities right now because there's so much breadth of companies that are trying to enter the Disc Golf Market but they're all like kind of startup size and so they're not willing to spend a lot of money which is why I'm not really interested in being sponsored because trying to build more relationships on the front end right now so that they can turn into sponsorships but to be honest with you I'm getting enough views that I don't need those sponsorships right now and patreon is a big help for this as well as my disk sales which I'm right now in the process of Designing that with a designer if I can self-fund everything I don't need those sponsorships because to be honest with you they're not paying what the market rate should be for influencers right now and I'm willing to wait to the point that they're able to do that for a full ad spot but there are still like smaller I have a bunch of packages that if you're a company and you want to reach out I have a bunch of packages that we can talk through to see how we could actually work within one another's budgets and if it's feasible and I'm not going to give you like the raw numbers here but if you want to do just a little bit of work if you take the number of views that I get on a video divided by a thousand and then multiply that number by anywhere between 6 to 10 depends on the video it fluctuates video to video I can't really predict any of that I try to do it as high as I possibly can but there's not really a lot that I can make that's pretty much the number that I'm making so if you look at all the views that I get in a month not including shorts views just regular video views divide that by a thousand multiply it by anywhere from six to ten that's the general range that disc golf content creators are probably making money so that's why I'm really focused on getting more views and growing an average viewer based that for every video if I can get 20 or 30 000 views then I could be making six figures potentially just off of disc golf content and the main reason why I love this business model is because especially in disc golf I don't have to rely on the The Limited ad spend that disc golf companies have because I'm focused on YouTube surfacing Those ads to everybody and they're normally not disc golf ads like if you've got an ad in this video or before this video or after this video it's probably not a disc golf company it could be but if it's not that's outside of disc golf dollars that are coming into disc golf through these videos and so I don't need to rely on the companies who don't quite have the budgets to be able to actually Market to the 10 to 12 000 average people but I'm still able to make a sustainable income so that's kind of how I've done it now and that's why I'm really focused on growing to be the biggest disc golf influencer that I possibly can be and then with that just the the ad rates alone should be enough to cover that so that's why I really appreciate everybody liking commenting even just watching the videos that's more than enough because you're taking time out of your day to come and hang out with me which you totally don't have to do and I appreciate that so much but those are the ways that I've been able to sustain this and this month I made more money than I ever have in my life and if you multiply those numbers and kind of average them out and I'll just let you know December ad rates are towards the higher end not quite all the way at the high end you'll be able to see that like this month I'm projected to make pretty decent money and it's a slower growth month for me because everybody's posting videos I have a bunch of new series that I'm planning to roll out which I think will be a lot of fun and continuing to innovate in the space so that I can continue to grow this audience which I love so much and appreciate all of you guys but I coming into disc golf saw that even though I want to play on the pro tour and be the most competitive I possibly can be the money for the next four to ten years just isn't there it's in having outside of disc golf money being brought into the sport and if I can do that through just YouTube pre-roll and mid-roll ads which are outside disc golf money coming into the sport or by growing my audience to the point where I'm averaging 30 or 40 000 views per video and I can look at an outside company like a manscapes or whoever not that I am necessarily wanting to work with them just outside of disc golf companies they have those ad budgets where they so I'm doing 40 000 views of video to get one ad spot conservatively it would cost a thousand dollars plus and most disc golf companies just aren't at the point where they can do that and I'm not really willing to sell my audience for less than that because of the market return that I'm sure that they will get but if they can't see that Vision then that's not something that's going to happen but I can sell that to an outside disc golf company and bring even more outside of disc golf dollars into the sport that will definitely go to sport because I'm using that money on creating disc golf content going to disc golf tournaments and like doing more things within the sport so that's kind of my vision for the channel and I thought that it'd be important to share that with you guys hopefully you appreciated the van tour hopefully you understand how I made all that money that Reddit post has a little bit more detail about some specific numbers and things but I hope this gives you a good starting point because I want to be transparent with everything that I'm doing in the sport because like I want obviously to make a lot of money but I also want to grow disc golf and I think that those two things happen together necessarily together which is why I'm trying to grow this audience as big as I can be and do a lot of fun and Innovative things that's not a word Innovative Innovative things in the disc golf YouTube face so if you stuck around this long I'm sure that you're either down for that or you're a hater but hopefully you're down for that and I hope to surprise you with some really exciting things that I have coming down the pipeline and continue to put out essentially daily videos as long as I possibly can so I appreciate you guys a lot I know normally plug videos here but this is a video that YouTube thinks you'll like the best I don't know which one it is normally I have a specific on a plug but I don't have one today okay love you bye