Welcome to our Resource’s page.
We created this page to share information and suggestions for products and services that we use and love. These products or services help us live our dream of traveling full-time, save money, and/or run this awesome website 🙂 . There is a lot of great information in this section and we know that it can help you to achieve your goals and follow your detours. Take a look around and see if anything sparks your interest. As always, feel free to ask us questions about anything on this page!
Disclosure: Some of the links contained below are affiliate links. This means that if you make a purchase, we would receive a small commission (at no cost to you). Keep in mind that we won’t put anything on this page that we don’t personally use or know to be valuable!
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Bluehost
Bluehost is one of the most popular and reliable hosting providers available. Our number 1 reason for choosing Bluehost is that they offer amazing customer service. We have called in for help on multiple occasions and a real person has always answered and promptly solved our issues! Also, installing WordPress is a breeze with Bluehost, you literally click one button and WordPress is automatically set up for you. Click to get a great deal and to get signed up today!
Theme Forest – Envato Market
WordPress is probably the most popular content management platform in the world and is trusted by 28% of the entire internet! With WordPress, you don’t be any coding experience to build a quality website, but you will need a theme. A theme is the visual front end of your website – the thing that makes all of that code look really pretty and do really cool stuff!
While there are many free options, we chose to pay for our theme because we wanted to ensure that we could get support from the theme developer if we ever needed. Also, we wanted to make sure that the theme received frequent updates. We’ve been extremely happy with Themeforest and its options. We receive a lot of compliments on the appearance of our site and we truly believe that Themeforest’s features are what make it stand out. Our theme is called “Fenix” by Evolve Themes, in case you’re interested.
MailChimp
MailChimp is a very popular service used to manage email list and email based marketing campaigns. We love that it is free (it is free up to a certain point of emails per month or subscribers) and that setting up different templates is really easy. Best of all, there are many different WordPress plugins that can integrate your website directly to your MailChimp account. Within MailChimp, you can create campaigns, set up automation for tasks that you don’t want to do (i.e. email a welcome message to anyone that subscribes to your list) and report on how those campaigns are doing!
ThriveCart
ThriveCart is a wonderful cloud-based shopping cart platform that delivers your customers a beautiful checkout experience. ThriveCart integrates with popular membership platforms, payment processesors, and autoresponders. The carts are fully responsive and the company prides itself on providing excellent customer service and support. We switched from SamCart to ThriveCart because we didn’t want to pay fees for sales or a monthly subscription! We paid a one time fee and have a lifetime membership to the platform. Also, ThriveCart offers each member full access to the Affiliate Center. This means you don’t need another plugin or service to manage your network of dedicated affiliate marketers!
WishList Member
WishList Member is a tried and true plugin that turns your WordPress site into a full-blown membership site. We use WishList Member to restrict access to our Finance Your Detour Budgeting Course to only those that have paid for the course. It is a very powerful plugin with lots of options, but we have found it easy to use and meets our needs perfectly!
Tailwind
Pinterest is our blog’s biggest source of traffic. We spent 8 months using Pinterest as a social media platform instead of a search engine. Once we signed up for Tailwind and started utilizing their pin scheduling service, our traffic skyrocketed. In fact, we tripled our traffic in only 3 months and gain 80-100 new subscribers each week from our highest performing pins. Tailwind only requires about an hour one time a week to schedule our pins to be repinned to our boards and group boards throughout the work. Another huge benefit of using Tailwind is joining “tribes” of other bloggers who engage with one another and share each other’s pins.
Create Content that Inspires
Adobe Creative Cloud
Creative Cloud gives you the entire collection of Adobe desktop and mobile apps. You’ll get Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Illustrator, Adobe, and more. You also get built-in templates and step-by-step tutorials to help you with all your creative projects. While we have a great camera, Lightroom drastically improves the look of our photos, which has been huge for our social media presence and blog posts. We also do all our video editing using Premiere Pro which gives us so many features to make professional looking videos. They have a variety of different membership options available so you can choose which package fits your needs best.
Canva
Canva is an incredibly powerful online tool for creating content. From images and banners to charts and infographics, what you can create using Canva is practically limitless. We use Canva all of the time for creating feature images for our websites. It is really easy to use and there are lots of templates to help you get started, best of all it is free! Canva does offer a paid version that unlocks extra features and templates, but for many people, the free version works great
Unsplash
Unsplash is a great website for finding copyright free photos. They have beautiful photos from wonderful photographers. All photos published on Unsplash can be used for free. You can use them for commercial and noncommercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible.
StockSnap.io
StockSnap.io is a wonderful, free website that provides thousands of high-resolution images, free from copyright restrictions. We use this site all of the time when we need to find the perfect image for one of our blog post. All photos on StockSnap fall under the Creative Commons CC0 license. That means you can copy, modify, distribute any photo on the site, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission!ugh it is appreciated when possible.
RV Resources and Memberships
Passport America
Passport America is a popular RV membership that is a must-have for any full-timer and a great idea for anyone that owns an RV. A Passport America membership offers several benefits, but the one that we use the most is the 50% discounts that you receive at over 1800 campgrounds across North America. In our first year of full-time RVing, we saved $700 using our PA discount! We wrote a full review of Passport America that you can read here.
Outdoorsy
Outdoorsy is an RV rental company that will help you rent the perfect RV for your next trip! Renting an RV is a great way to take a memorable road trip or as a way to try out someone else’s RV before buying your own. We wish we would have rented a couple of different RVs before we purchased our first one because we think we would have learned a lot about what we find important in an RV. If you own an RV, listing your RV with Outdoorsy and renting it out is a great way to make some money when you are not using it!
Weboost
Our jobs rely on good internet service and staying connected is extremely important to us, no matter where we are on the map. WeBoost’s Drive 4G-X is a powerful, professional grade 4G vehicle booster. The Drive 4G-X ensures that you get better voice and data with fewer dropped calls, improved voice quality, faster uploads and downloads, and allows up to 2 hours additional talk time in weak-signal areas. It boosts cell signals up to 32x and enhances 4G LTE and 3G signals for Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Straight Talk and more. All components needed for installation are included and all you need to do is plug the Drive 4G-X into the car’s power supply and place the magnetic antenna on the roof.
Must-Have RV Equipment
There are so many different products and accessories that you can buy for your RV that it can be overwhelming! Fear not, check out our list of must-have RV equipment. These products will help you get on the road and enjoy your RV to the fullest!
Camera Gear We Love
Sony a6000 Mirrorless Camera
We absolutely love this camera. We purchased this camera for several reasons. The first reason was that it was far superior to a point and shoot but was less expensive, and much smaller than a DSLR. We aren’t photography experts but we know how important good photos are for our website so this was a great choice. Â Secondly, we loved that the camera has interchangeable lenses so that it can grow with us as our skills develop!
Sony Underwater 4K Action Cam
Action cameras are amazing. They take crystal clear video and are small enough that you can take them with you almost anywhere. We chose the Sony Action Cam and are totally excited about it. We feel that it takes better quality videos than any of the GoPros. It comes with an underwater case and shoots in stunning 4k. The only downside is that there are fewer accessories than the GoPro which can make it more difficult to mount it to bikes, surfboards, helmets etc. but we thought the video quality was worth it!
Flexible Tripod
We like this tripod because it fits with our active lifestyle. It’s small and lightweight so it is easy to transport, but it is sturdy enough to hold our camera. The legs are flexible and can be wrapped around things to give you the best angle for your shot. This Joby Gorilla is the most popular, but we chose this product because it was half of the price and they offer a lifetime warranty. So far it has worked great for us!
