Finding Cheap ways to Travel Using House Sit Exchanges
Can I really travel around the world for free using websites like TrustedHousesitters?
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Even though it may sound like you can travel the world for free using websites like TrustedHousesitters, you cannot do it for free. It will take money to do it, just like basically everything in this world. However, I can share with you our budget and talk about how we were able to travel through Europe for 86 days while paying less than $3 a day on accommodation. Even though that isn't "free," that's still pretty dang close. But honestly, if I said you could travel for free in Europe, you'd call bs! (At least I hope).
Okay, so now that we know we can't travel through Europe for "free," there are definitely ways you can travel around the world and vacation "rent" free while still traveling and going to places like France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal.
For me, my preferred method of travel is to explore the world in a slow-paced and community-centered way, all while being mindful of my budget. After traveling over the past four years, going to over 20 countries and 4 continents, I discovered that there are tons of platforms that provide you a place to find cheap or "free" accommodation. Some of these platforms you can look into are, CouchSurfing, WorldPackers, or the variety of different pet and house sit exchange platforms.
In a perfect world, I would love to travel and do whatever I want, but financially I would never recover. So, finding a method of travel to match this desire has ultimately changed everything I knew and believed about traveling, especially while on vacation. That’s where how free house sit exchanges changed the way I travel. This type of exchange allowed for us to budget our trip within a reasonable dollar amount for the full 86 days and spend a total of $2.85 per day on accommodation!
Now, the way we travel is likely not the way some people enjoy vacations and that’s expected! We spend most of our money on groceries, food & drink. That’s where we find the most value in our time vacationing, we love going out and trying the local food scene, finding a new recipe and then replicating it at the house we are staying at. We found this to be an incredible way to learn about the local vegetables, fruits, spices, and meats in each place we travel too, which is a great way to acclimate to the local culture.
Keep in mind when you review our budget, our spending habits throughout this trip leaned on the more conservative side, but not completely frugal. An example of where we would save money is, we would opt to walk 3 miles to our next destination rather than paying $15 for a 3-minute Uber ride. But, we would spend the extra $20 to get the audio guide tours at museums. (Unless the Rick Steve’s Free Audio Tours are available).
So, let me show you the break down and show you how we were able to travel the world while spending the least amount of money possible for accommodation.
The Total cost for two (2) people.
Now, it’s a pretty simplistic model of how I kept records of our travel. I used Google Sheets to maintain our budget, tracking our spending through Credit Card (CC) records and receipts. To maintain organization I used industry labeling of each different expenditure; Cash, Food & Drink, Accommodation, etc. To the right, you will find the final budget for our 86 day trip to Europe, where we visited 6 countries, pet sitting in 5 of them.
To me what stands out as top expenses, airfare, cash and groceries. Airfare is going to likely always be your number one up front expense. Things like groceries and cash expenses are always variable and can easily be higher or lower depending on how extreme of a budgeter you want to be. It also depends on what you’re doing. For example, when we attended Oktoberfest, which was a cash only event and we spent more cash than normal.
So now that you can see what our average cost per day and total costs were for those trips, you can gauge what you could expect if you followed a similar model of pet sitting throughout Europe. If you’re interested in learning more about the steps we took to budget our trip, check out our Top 5 strategies to go on your own personalized budget friendly vacation!
Bonus Tip: When traveling internationally consider opening a bank account that doesn’t charge foreign transaction fees and will reimburse all fees charged by ATMS worldwide.
Here you can see the amount of fees we had, including conversion rate fees. Each fee typically was about $5 USD, conversion rates depended on each money counter or ATM we withdrew from. Tip: Always check rates before withdrawing your cash!
Now, $150 may not seem like a lot, but in Europe that is the cost of a flight from Rome to Lisbon! So, finding ways to eliminate unnecessary spending in your budget is so important and can be hard to know where those hidden costs will come from.
To avoid these losses, look into opening a bank account that provides no ATM international transactional fees. Banks like, Charles Schwab and Capital One, offer these types of accounts!
