Living Together On $81K A Year Across The U.S. | Millennial Money

Karen, 32, and Sylvester Akpan, 41, travel across the country in their RV and earn around $81,000 a year as content creators. Karen created her blog, The Mom Trotter, in 2016, cultivating a devoted fanbase. Since, her writing has been featured in Camping World as well as The Points Guy, detailing topics like family travel and RVing with kids. They also have many social media channels that document their lives on the road with their son Aiden, 8, and sometimes their niece and nephew.

This is an installment of CNBC Make It's Millennial Money series, which profiles people across the globe and details how they earn, spend and save their money.

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It’s hard to get hold of Karen Akpan. One week, the 32-year-old might be visiting family in Florida with her husband, Sylvester, and their son Aiden; the next, the family is sunbathing in Aruba or sightseeing in the Dominican Republic. In the past month alone, their travels also included Colombia, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, where CNBC Make It caught up with them.

The family wasn’t always so mobile. But at the end of 2019, Karen and Sylvester, 41, took a hard look at their finances and decided to make a change. They sold both of their homes in California (they lived in one and rented out the other), used $14,000 from their savings to buy an RV off of Facebook Marketplace in early 2020 and started traveling around the U.S.

The family — yes, even 8-year-old Aiden earns a paycheck — now make a living from Karen’s blog, The Mom Trotter, and by creating ad campaigns for the likes of Camping World, Circle K Stores, Hilton Hotels and Disney, among others, for Instagram and TikTok. Income has varied from month to month since they started in 2020, but last year they took home around $81,000.

“There’s no way we’re going back to a house or careers or anything like that,” Karen says. “We love the freedom that working for ourselves, being entrepreneurs, has given us.”

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Living Together On $81K A Year Across The U.S. | Millennial Money