House swapping

[Did]

I thought I'd share my experience house swapping.

When we lived in Ireland, we did approximately 25 house sits - which is really pet sitting. You register a profile on a website (we used TrustedHouseSitters.com), and apply for sits, much like a dating site. Unlike a dating site though you get reviewed following a sit by the home owner. We ended up with a large number of reviews, and eventually we started getting applications from the owners, rather than the other way around.

It is quite possible to travel full time around Europe at least sitting almost all of the time.

It was a wonderful way to see the country and to meet people. The downsides I guess were the pets (you need to look after them), and it is a bit of an unequal relationship, with the home owners in charge. But the price is right and we stayed in some wonderful homes and have great memories of that time.

Our return to Australia was promoted by the Covid lockdowns. Our home there was in a fairly tatty state, and we spent years putting in a pool and replacing the bathrooms and kitchen. Mr Money Moustache would have had a fine time doing this at cost, but in my case others did it at cost plus a vary large margin.

My goal for the past few years was to be able to swap the house out for another - finally ditching the pets and being on an equal footing. The renovations made that possible. I registered with a local Australian site and started working it (it's much like selling). Success! We are currently on our first swap into Cairns, Queensland, Australia. It's a beautiful pole home with views into the local rainforest hills

In fact the view is much like this: https://www.expedia.com.au/Cairns-Smith ... llery-open.

We have a plunge pool, and every modern convenience.

So far on our sit we have:
- travelled up to Port Douglas (https://greatbarrierreef.org/wp-content ... nsland.jpg);
- visited a local tropical island on a day trip (https://tinyurl.com/5da7ch94); and
- travelled up to a little rainforest town where we looked for the world's most dangerous bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary), but ended up spotting the most vibrant butterly (https://visitdaintree.com.au/files/2024 ... rfly-2.jpg),
as well as enjoying Cairns itself.

Today, we are going croc spotting on the Daintree River (https://solarwhisper.com/).

After a long period of being a homebody, it's been a fantastic blast back into travel mode. And with our home paying for the accomodation, and getting a nice distribution during the week that covered expenses and then some, I was quite pleased with myself, and motivated to keep down the path to the good life we are all on.

We have two other house swaps booked for this year. One is to Avoka, a beach town north of Sydney, where they made Home and Away, a local soap, and the other is to the Mornington Peninsula, which is north of Melbourne, and a favourite for wineries and other marvels. We are in discussions for swaps to Queenstown, New Zealand, and Tasmania.

We do still work remotely, but my goal is to create a life we don't want to escape from, and keep pouring money into income producing assets to make it more and more optional as we get older (sliding into semi retirement I guess with a great lifestyle). We aren't as good as we thought we would be at living on the smell of an oily rag, and enjoy luxury experiences like travel. But this is a great way to leverage your home if it's in a desirable area. My goal is for us to do many swaps during each year, mainly domestic (and possibly working remotely if need be), but to also spend a month overseas each year on a swap. So joining an international houseswap site will be next.

I should also say with a house swap we do most of our cooking here, and the local tours have been very reasonably priced. For example, our crocodile cruise today is only AUD$35 each. If you could rent the equivalent of our current swap house (which you can't for some reason - only local apartments come up) - it would be AUD$300 or more a night I would think. We wouldn't change it for the finest hotel - you get sick of the eating out life pretty fast.

I recommend it.

[Jean]

When you say that the price is right, do you mean that you get paid for the house sit?

[Did]

no - we didn't get paid for the sits. We just enjoyed the accommodation.