Hi.
Do you want to travel with your family? Are you are having trouble in trying to figure out how you can get started? Are you in debt and want to travel? We had $70,000 of debt that was holding us back, and this is our story of how we figured out how to travel with kids.
Lane and Krista (the parents of The Travel Vlog Family) ... this is Lane typing these words ... loved to travel together when they were dating and courting to get married. We traveled to New Orleans, South Africa, Germany, Atlanta, Oklahoma, and taking road trips any chance we could get.
We were married in 2006, and we continued to travel, but in 2010, we became pregnant with our daughter, Amelia. We knew that we loved to travel, we just didnβt know how much we loved to travel. Two days before Amelia was born, Lane lost his job, and we had to figure something out to make ends meet.
I (Lane) am a pretty resourceful guy, so I started to do some freelance work, doing odd jobs and finding ways to create additional sources of income but still being able to create video content online because that is my passion.
In December of 2011, we found out that we were pregnant with our second child, Jacques, and we knew that we needed to tackle a mountain of $70,000 of debt. We decided to start the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover January 1, 2012. This was hard for us because we knew that we wanted to travel and we wanted to take our kids to have experiences and go exploring the world, but the $70,000 gorilla on our back was holding us back.
We did everything we could to tackle that debt, from couponing and scraping to selling used dental equipment and selling the stuff that we thought that we needed but really didnβt need. In fact, we had 5 garage sales in 2 years.
In April of 2015, we took a road trip to Nashville, TN to do our debt free scream on the Dave Ramsey radio show. This was the first time that we had traveled as a family, aside from a business trip to Seattle. It felt so good to do something as a family and to come together as a team to prove to ourselves that we can tackle anything.
I (Lane) had been running a few YouTube channels. In fact, this whole story is documented on a YouTube channel that was called TheFunnyrats and will eventually be rebranded into The Travel Vlog Family. BUT I didnβt know what I was doing in the online space, although I had been creating content since 2009. I started to upload our travel vlogs from 2016-2017 to a channel called LaneVids because I was looking to only have to run 1 YouTube channel, but since my previous content had nothing to do with travel, these travel vlogs did not work for that channel, and I needed to create a BRAND around family travel, which is my passion.
In 2018, I made a decision to niche down TheFunnyrats YouTube channel so that it is not just another family vlog channel, but focus on one aspect of the family videos that I love to create, a family travel channel. I did a complete rebrand of TheFunnyrats and turned it into The Travel Vlog Family, which was born in May of 2018.
Since The Travel Vlog Family has been established, we have added one more member to the family, Becket. We also hope that you will also feel like you are a part of our family so that we can help you to travel with your family, even when you think you canβt. I know that you can because we did it after overcoming all of our obstacles and figuring out how to make life work.
Our mission for The Travel Vlog Family is to show you how we build a stronger family bond with our kids through travel by experiencing, exploring and doing good deeds together as we travel and to take your on that journey with us.
I hope you will join us, and happy travels to you and your loved ones,
Lane Fournerat - The Travel Vlog Family
