I met Esther through the blogging world this past year and quickly fell in love with her blog! I love to see all of the adventures that she and her husband, Jacob, are able to go on together and she gives me great things to add to my bucket list with every post. A lot of the reason they are able to go on these adventures has to do with the flexibility of both of their jobs and I'm excited to have her as a contributor to The Perks of Being Married to My Spouse series sharing more about what Jacob does and how it benefits her!
When I first met Jacob, he had a regular 9-5 job that he enjoyed for the most part, but I knew that he had a really creative side of him that he didn't get to use very much. After we got married, he ended up quitting his job and helping me with my wedding photography business and around that time, he started to dabble in YouTube with his brother.
Fast forward a few years, and he's grow his channel to over 100k subscribers, created a kid's puppet show, we've moved across the country to pursue his YouTube career, and we both work in our living room.
The YouTube world has been really fascinating and when most people find out that Jacob is a YouTuber, we get tons of questions. How do you make money? Do you know so and so? Etc.
I know I'm very lucky to have him, and here is some insight to my married life and perks to being married to a YouTuber!
Flexible Schedule
Besides having to make sure he has a video ready every week, he has a flexible schedule. We can travel when we want to or change our "weekend" days to some time during the week. Here's him working on a plane.
Famous Friends
I'm definitely more of the TV generation than the YouTube generation, but YouTubers are apparently the new celebrities. Since Jacob and his brother have gotten to know a lot of other YouTubers and are good friends with them, I guess I now have celebrity friends. We've even gotten to know some folks in tv and movies as well since there is some cross over in the entertainment industry in general. They're a talented bunch, and it's good to be surrounded by such creative energy.
Free Stuff
YouTubers get a lot of free stuff and even get paid to talk about it. Out of everything he's gotten, my favorite was getting to travel to New Zealand with him.
Fans
Fans, or Funatics as they call them, definitely spill over into my online life as well. Because YouTube viewers connect so much to YouTubers, they want to know about everything that happens in their lives. They think I'm especially lucky to be married to him. :) And they send fan mail and awesome gifts - like these beautiful cookies from a fan in Thailand!
Filming
This isn't really just in YouTube, but Jacob didn't start doing video until he started posting videos. As he's gotten better at his craft, we get to integrate video into our daily adventures as well. We even started up a channel to post videos that correspond to some of our blogs.
Cons
We work for ourselves and on our own schedule, so sometimes we don't have a very good work/life balance, which means most days we are working from the moment we wake up until after midnight. Because we enjoy the work we do, it's not such a bad thing, but we do need to work on the balance so that we can make intentional time for our marriage.
