Because I'm not very wealthy at all (my family makes a combined amount of less than $20,000 per year gross pay) I have to rely on other means of acquiring funds for my travels. This often includes looking to others for support, and while normally I am very prideful when it comes to this, I realize I simply cannot expect to be able to do this alone. I need the support of others if I am to make this a possibility. This is why I've opened up a donation pool.
Your donations go into a special fund called "the reserve" which is used to pay for travel expenses, special purchases that are required for the trip, and basic necessities. I DO NOT TRANSFER THE MONEY OUT OF MY PAYPAL ACCOUNT. I have access to those funds by using a PayPal debit card. It all stays in that account, and I post totals on a bi-monthly basis as well as a publicly available spreadsheet of finances, so that you may see where exactly the money is going. I keep a receipt and as soon as I put it in the spreadsheet, I destroy the receipt so that I don't have to carry a bunch of receipts around.
In the coming months, I'll have to shift some of my focus off of trip expenses in exchange for student loan expenses. I have four years of college debt piled up, but luckily three of them were at a junior college (Vincennes University) so the debt isn't as much as it could have been. But once the grace period wears off for those loans, I am required to pay them by law. So I must keep some amount of money in excess in order to start paying that back in January.
I've been selling some of my things in order to make some amount of money, but it's not as simple as others make it out to be. Not many people want to buy what I'm selling, so I may have to start setting up a mini-site for selling some things. Only time will tell on that matter. However, this is a better way of going about it, I think.
Thank you very much, and I hope you continue to have life and love.
