A Personal Update & The Future of Romania Experience

This is the second in a series of three personal articles I’m posting before the year ends. However, if you only care about the future of Romania Experience, the conclusion is that, while changes will occur, I am not shutting down this website and will continue to maintain it.

But to understand where we are going, I need to tell you the long, difficult story of the past eighteen months.

In May 2024, I wrote an article titled “Help Me Keep Romania Experience Alive” – a post I never imagined I’d have to write. But life is full of surprises.

I explained the situation in depth in that article, but here is the short version: following a trend seen by many independent creators like myself, the number of visitors Google sends to Romania Experience (and my other sites) plummeted, down by 90% in some cases, with devastating results on my family’s income.

This happened mainly because the online publishing ecosystem was changing (and it is still changing), mainly because of AI.

I won’t bore you with technical details as that isn’t the point of this story (and I believe this article will be read by regulars who already know it).

The point is that now, a year and a half later – after months of stress and uncertainty that haven’t ended – it is time to look at the numbers. It is time to make decisions about a future that intertwines this website with the well-being of my family.

What I did to recover

The lowest point hit us in June, July, and August. My family’s net income dropped to around 850 Euros a month. My wife also runs a website, and she was hit just as hard. For context, that total income is less than the minimum wage here in Romania.

Since the drop happened quickly, I had to pivot, adapt and not lose my sanity equally fast. Fortunately, the decisions I made (some very tough) helped us recover somewhat:

1. We moved back home.

We decided to leave Constanta and move back to my hometown. It was one of the toughest decisions we had to make, but the cost of living is lower here and more importantly, we pay no rent and have no liabilities.

It was a retreat, it was a defeat, it was difficult as we were finally settled in nicely, but it was a necessary move.

2. We cut expenses to the bone.

Aside from absolute essentials, we basically stopped spending. One of the biggest expenses we had was on food, and we managed to bring that to a minimum by doing this:

1. We stopped buying name-brand items almost entirely, switching to supermarket brands (mostly Lidl and Kaufland, some of the cheapest options in Romania).
2. we started to prepare all our food at home from base ingredients (before, we would buy some “ready to bake” types or sliced cheese/meats/whatever instead of whole).

As a result, without skipping on fruits and vegetables, we still managed to lower our food costs for a family of three to around 490 Euros per month, down from the ~700 we used to spend before “the drop.”

We also stopped eating out. After returning to our hometown in June 2024, we ate at a restaurant exactly once until the year ended. That was to celebrate my son’s entrance exam for the 5th grade. He scored 99/100, placing second overall – an achievement that deserved a celebration.

In 2025, I believe we ate out three times in total (excluding a vacation in Romania which I haven’t even had the chance to write about yet). This keeps expenses to a minimum, as eating out for the three of us costs around 40 Euros.

(Note: for full honesty, we have started to order some pizza every now and then, and that usually costs us around 20 Euros, but it feeds us for dinner and there are leftovers that we usually have with some extra vegetables for lunch the next day.)

3. I re-evaluated my business. It was bitter to watch visitors vanish overnight, but it forced me to face some hard truths:

• I was maintaining too many websites to give any of them the FULL attention they deserved.
• Not being a native English speaker, my English is far from perfect. While the information is still useful, beyond typos, awkward phrasing, and grammar errors, the articles were not as pleasant to read.
• all in all, my articles were not the ultimate, most useful guides you could find online for their topic.

I decided to change that and while do so, I realized that it is impossible to keep working on the same number of websites.

As a result, I decided to only focus on a few that were either close to my heart (like Romania Experience) or were still making some money, while the others were simply ignored or merged. I considered selling the ones I couldn’t work on anymore, but realistically, nobody would’ve spent any money on them.

And I am still trimming the fat, based on results after one and a half years of extra work.

For example, here on Romania Experience, I published 174 articles in 2024 and 2025. Most were heavy edits of existing posts to make them truly complete, but even an “edit” often meant rewriting from scratch, taking three hours or more per piece.

4. I looked for new income streams.

• I launched a Patreon page for Romania Experience. A handful of loyal readers stepped up to support me with a monthly contribution, despite getting little in return other than an ad-free experience on this website. I thank you from the bottom of my heart!
• I wrote and launched a book about a specific health condition I deal with, and this his helped a lot by bringing in a couple of hundred dollars a month on average.
• I tried various other tweaks, changes and improvements, but most didn’t even move the needle.

5. My wife doubled down on work.

This is the hardest part to write. A few years ago, I suffered a burnout I haven’t fully recovered from. I simply cannot “grind” the way I used to. If I push too hard, my body shuts down, and this means that I still struggle to consistently get 8 hours of work in a day.

It is infuriating. My mind wants to do a million things, but physically, I can’t. While this is extremely frustrating (I was always both a workaholic and an overachiever), I have had to learn to accept this and work on my slow recovery.

Fortunately, my amazing wife has the energy and power to grind and she really upped her game, usually working 10 to 12 hours a day.

I feel a lump in my throat writing this, but it is our reality. We both do as much as we can and fortunately her hard work started to pay off (although it’s made a bigger impact starting just three months ago).

The Results

I will share the exact financial breakdown on my Patreon page as I am uncomfortable posting all the numbers publicly, but the trend is clear.

2024 was, financially, our worst year since I became self-employed back in 2008. We made only slightly more than we did back in 2012 (!!!) The difference is that the cost of living back then was at least half of what it is today, and our son wasn’t even born yet.

But things are slowly moving up. We are still in a tight spot, but we are on track to make more this year than we did in 2024, bringing us close to our 2014 earnings (so it’s still far from good, but at least it’s progress).

The best news is that the last three months have been good, mostly due to my wife’s incredible effort. Until August 2025, we were barely covering our stripped-down living costs but since September, we have been generating a surplus of about 200 Euros a month.

While we obviously hope that this trend continues (or at least things remain where they are now), we also know that just a couple of years ago we lost almost everything overnight. We also know that, traditionally, Q4 earnings are the best of the year, with January bringing a massive drop.

So we need to do at least two things:

1. Future-proof the business, as most traditional blogging and text websites are being replaced by AI – it’s an “adapt or die” situation.
2. Milk whatever still works for as long as possible.

I have considered pivoting entirely, from YouTube or other video platforms, to a completely different business model, but the problem is two-fold: my main expertise is in traditional text websites (so I have to learn new skills, which takes time and money); my burnout prevents me from grinding as much as I should to successfully launch something new. Without a guarantee of success, I think it’s too much of a risk to take right now.

I am basically choosing the relative safety of doing what still works (but I don’t think will work on the long term) over the risks of tryings something potentially more rewarding, but also more risky. If I were younger, I would jump head first without a doubt. But now, this situation is different.

Quick answer: How did we make it work in the past 18 months?

Fortunately we had (and we still have) some savings that helped us a lot. Even now, based on our current budget, we have enough saved to cover six months of living expenses if our income drops to zero tomorrow.

For the most extreme of situations, we also have our retirement investments (since our Romanian social security will be around 200 Euros per month, we truly need not touch those which are still somewhat in their infancy).

What about Romania Experience?

I launched this website in April 2013. Back then, it was a completely different beast – mostly a personal blog focused on my financial journey rather than the travel and lifestyle guide it is today.

While I have deleted most of those early posts, the very first article I published is still live. I like to revisit it every now and then as it reminds me of a time when life looked and was completely different.

Back then, my net worth was around $7,000. Shortly after, it would dip into the negative when our son was born and we bought the apartment we live in today, but I had big plans to reach a net worth comparable to Western standards.

Fast-forward 12 years: while my financial situation has improved, I am nowhere near the “Western Standard” I dreamed of. At least, not for my age.

But throughout these 12 years of building Romania Experience and turning it from a personal blog into a brand ambassador for my country, I never truly earned a real income from it. It was always a passion project, it was always my way of trying to give something back and promote my country.

The real wealth came from the people. Thanks to this website, I have met several people I now consider close friends. I have met a couple of you in person, exchanged emails with many more, and connected with the rest of you in the comments here or on Patreon.

Even though I never reached “influencer” levels of website visitors, that handful of dedicated readers helped me keep going when everything else was falling apart.

And I will keep going, even though I can’t ignore the current situation and reality any longer – changes have to be made.

The Math Doesn’t Lie

Romania Experience had a promising run in 2022 and the first part of 2023. It finally started generating decent income, making me hope that I will finally be able to make it my main source of income and do what I love the most.

The earnings were getting close to the national minimum wage which, combined with my other projects, was more than enough.

Then “the drop” arrived and everything went down (from around 1,400 visitors per day – not including the spike of 4,300 in August 2023 – to around 200 today):

In 2025, despite the help from my dear Patreon supporters and the trickle of visitors still finding this website on search engines, and despite me updating and publishing over 170 articles since 2024, as well as me doing a ton of behind-the-scenes fixes and changes, the website earned 37% less than it did in 2024, which was already a bad year.

Worst part? There are no signs of recovery or that things will improve in 2026.

Fortunately, keeping the website alive doesn’t cost much. Here are the estimated costs:

• Domain registration fee: ~$14/year
• Tools: ~$10/month (various premium plugins, cost of the theme and others)
• Hosting: ~$20/month for its share on the servers

Fortunately, even with the huge drop in traffic, the website still generates enough to cover those bills. a monthly income well above the expenses needed to keep it running. In fact, your Patreon support covers the running costs entirely, and for that, I am incredibly grateful.

What the monthly income doesn’t do is cover my labor. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is still relatively OK, because Romania Experience IS a passion project above everything else.

Still, I did a quick calculation for 2025 based on estimated hours spent writing, editing, or doing any other type of work directly related to the website. For every hour I worked on Romania Experience, I earned $6.60.

On paper, this isn’t bad at all. If I could work full-time at that rate (40 hours a week), it would amount to roughly $1,056 per month – a very respectable salary in Romania.

But here is the catch: scaling my hours does not scale the income. The reality is that if I worked full-time, the monthly revenue would stay the pretty much the same, crashing my hourly rate to around $1.00.

After all, in 2025 I worked MORE HOURS on Romania Experience than I did in 2024, but I still earned 37% less.

Moving Forward: Hitting the Brakes

This means that, as much as it pains me to do it, I will have to hit the brakes a bit with Romania Experience.

While I will continue working here, updating articles and publishing new ones, I must put my active working hours into something that actually pays for the bills and the food and my family’s future.

January will probably seem busy, as I will update a lot of articles for 2026 (like the cost of living, salaries, recommendations and so on). This will be relatively fast, though, because I already have updated those articles recently.

But from February onwards, I will most likely stick to a 1 article/week schedule. Ideally, those will be new and more personal articles.

For example, this year we took a short 6-night vacation to Deva, Hunedoara (visiting the stunning Corvin Castle), and my favorite city, Oradea. I haven’t published a single word about that trip because I was too busy trying to “fix” the old articles. (Here’s a photo from our booked apartment in Deva, though – what a view!)

I also have a massive backlog of notes from our time in Constanta and plenty of other stories I want to tell. I will get to them, just at a slower pace.

Final Thoughts

I tried my absolute best with Romania Experience. For most of the last year, it was my main focus. But it simply didn’t work. Google refuses to show my website to people searching for it, and there is nothing I can do to change that.

I tried, I failed, and I no longer have the luxury of banging my head against a wall.

If you are still here reading this, thank you.

It is for people like you that I keep this site alive and up to date. I will continue to do so until the day nobody reads it anymore. And if the tides turn and things improve, I will gladly make this my main focus once again.

PS: If you missed the previous article in this planned trilogy of personal articles, read it here: I Wanted to Sell My Village House in Romania (And Why I Didn’t Do It).