My husband and I started traveling pretty much full time in 2011, started housesitting in 2014, and up until 2020, we had a home base at my mom’s house in New Jersey where we would spend at least a few months at a time. She died that year and since then we have truly been full-time nomads.
For those 6 years, we would often do sits in NYC to break up the time at her home–we didn’t have a car so could only do sits that didn’t require one and we were only a 40 min bus ride away.
Since we started doing this 10 years ago, our accommodation is almost exclusively courtesy of housesitting. Last year, we spent 8 months doing sits in 7 different countries, and for the first time in many years, we ended up paying for accommodations for longer periods–a month in an AirBnB in Turkey and a 2 week gap between sits in South Korea and Thailand that we spend traveling around the latter. Besides these rare instances, accommodation costs pretty much consist of very short gaps between sits.
We are from the US, and usually will spend at least several months there at a time. Between having a car which allows us to go pretty much anywhere, and having so many opportunities available, it is very easy to find back to back sits.
Besides not having to pay for housing, we live a pretty simple life that doesn’t cost very much. And while costs can sometimes fluctuate depending on where we are, we generally spend a similar amount of money no matter where we are.
We eat most meals at home, and unless there is some sort of touristic experience that seems really unique and interesting, we don’t spend very much money on stuff like that at all since most of it isn’t worth it to me. The thing I enjoy most about a new area is just exploring and living more like a local.
While international travel does increase our costs compared to sitting domestically, it still usually works out to much less than if we were paying rent somewhere.
For example, our fight costs from last year–US -Greece- Turkey -Prague-London-Vietnam- Korea-Thailand-US-- divided by 8 months probably worked out to less than 500 USD a month. That isn’t much at all considering all of the places we got to stay–luxury villas in Thailand and Turkey, a huge riverside apartment in Prague, an apartment in one of the most central areas in London to name a few.
We came from the US to Central America in the middle of March and those travel costs have been minimal. With points, our tickets from NY to Costa Rica only cost a little over 100 dollars and we were in the same spot for almost 3 months. We started a sit in Panama last week and those travel costs–bus tickets and a couple of nights in a hotel–were only about another hundred.
We are kind of lazy travelers who don’t like to do a ton of sightseeing, who don’t like to move around much, who don’t like to stay in hotels or smaller AirBnb accommodations.
We are actually kind of homebodies so the responsibilities of housesitting don’t really feel like any sort of hindrance to our travels.
We have never really had any truly bad experiences housesitting–we rely strongly on intuition, are very selective about the sits to which we apply, and we have a very strong sense of our preferences and deal breakers, which we adhere to consistently.
Sure it can feel challenging sometimes always moving around but we have been doing it for so long and I can’t imagine living any other way. And if at some point we decided it wasn’t for us, then we would just stop. But I don’t see that on the horizon any time soon.
, but very quickly that changed and it became based on trusting our intuition for profiles that gave us a feel-good factor, it’s more important than anything else to us.
