The pro’s & con’s of housesitting

This post is all about the pro’s and con’s of housesitting – common issues, benefits and perks and things you should consider before housesitting full or part time. I’ll go into any issues we’ve had or have heard about other sitter’s having, as well as the benefits and perks we get from our housesitting lifestyle.

Let’s start with some of the obvious pro’s..

You get to travel the world at your own pace virtually for free!

Housesitting allows you to travel and visit other places by staying in other people’s homes and looking after their pets. It’s practically free because you don’t pay any accommodation or utility bill fees, so your only overhead would be the membership fee of around £120 a year (£199 for premium on Trusted Housesitters), as well as food, bills you have such as a mobile phone bill, transport costs and any activities you want to do.

We’ve found housesitting the best way for us to travel, continue working full time and be able to save money towards epic trips we want to take in the future – African safari’s coming soon…

Another pro of housesitting which stems from this is financial freedom. We finally feel able to buy things we want to – super duper running clothes for Tom, or yoga gear for me, and neither of us feel guilty spending the money. We’ve earnt it after all.

Another huge positive is that our environmental impact has lessened since we started housesitting – we now stay in one place for longer meaning less physical travel and less carbon emissions released. We’re able to shop local and reduce our food miles as well as support local businesses. We travel over land between sits and try not to fly at all.

Our personal health and wellbeing has improved tenfold since we started housesitting full time. Slower travel and financial security has allowed us to feel more relaxed than ever in our travels – taking our time to get to know smaller places we’d never have otherwise visited, as well as spending time with animals and in nature more than ever. Our physical and mental health are in great form as we now have the time to prioritise the things we never could before such as going to the gym or local exercise classes, walking more, eating healthier foods and interacting with locals.

Housesitting can enable you to work on your career if it’s something you can do remotely such as Tom’s work, or to try something that you’ve wanted to do for a long time – I had always wanted to give writing a go but I never thought I’d be here, with a published book and many articles written for magazines, working away on book number 2.  Because of the financial freedom it provides, by trying housesitting you could reduce your outgoings so much that you may be able to quit that job that isn’t quite allowing you to flourish and look for something that you can do remotely and feels more “you”.

One of the biggest gifts that housesitting has given us so far is time. We simply feel as though we have more time. More time together, more time to explore the place we’re visiting, more time to work on ourselves and our goals, more time to plan our adventures, more time in nature, more time to spend with family and friends whom we often invite to stay with us at housesits, more time to enjoy each day. Because of the slower pace of life and longer housesits that we’ve chosen to go for, we’ve been able to maximise our use of time and spend less time working and more time playing.

My favourite ‘pro’ of housesitting is without doubt the time we get to spend with animals by looking after people’s pets. I’ve always been an animal lover and I find great comfort and solace in pets – bonding with them very quickly and enjoying every second I spend looking after them whether that’s walking them, mucking them out, feeding them, playing with them, making funny meme’s of them, whatever it is, I love it. Animals are so pure and loving, all they want to do is spend time with you.

Starting off the con’s whilst on this subject I’d have to say one of things I find hardest about housesitting is leaving the pets behind – even though I know they’ll be overjoyed to be reunited with their owner, it’s a little bit of heartbreak each time I leave a sit.

Another thing you need to think about before you go full time with housesitting is that you’ll need to lug your stuff around between sits. This is another reason we love a longer housesit, it’s less packing and unpacking. If you do lots of shorter sits you may find that living out of a bag becomes a bit tedious. You could consider going minimalist and getting rid of anything that isn’t essential.

The main downside of housesitting is that things can and do go wrong, so you always need to have a backup plan. For example, we were doing a 2 month sit in Vienna recently and the homeowner decided to come home 9 days earlier than agreed – not for any emergency or issue, she simply decided that’s what she was doing. We were, in effect, evicted. We had already booked our overland travel back to the UK which couldn’t be amended and was very expensive so we ended up having to pay for our own apartment for the 9 days, which cost around £400.

We always make sure we have some savings available for emergencies like this where we may need to cover our own accommodation costs for a while. As the process is a trust exchange there are no formal contracts in place and so having a backup plan – such as savings, or a family member or friend whom you can stay with at short notice – is always a good idea. We also have our motorhome which we can stay in when needed between sits.

Other issues we’ve encountered whilst housesitting include difficulties getting doctor’s appointments – both in the UK and overseas. We’ve also had dental emergencies and struggled to get dental appointments overseas. One time, we made complete arses of ourselves and only realised mid-sit that we didn’t have travel insurance, so had to pay a huge amount to take it out whilst already travelling.

Obviously you need to research things much more thoroughly if you’re going to start doing international housesits such as visas, vaccinations and customs. We’ve mainly only had issues on sits when we’ve been abroad.

A big thing to consider, and the last thing I’ll discuss with you today, is that some sits are quite hard work. If you’re working full time, maybe don’t apply to a sit with 5 dogs, 2 cats, chickens and horses. You’ll be working every second of the day doing all the “chores” that come with that many pets. Sometimes pets are more difficult to look after than the homeowner made out – this has happened on a few occasions to us, both in the UK and abroad.

For example, a homeowner may say that their dog is “energetic” or “people-loving” but what these terms really mean is something much different. Energetic probably means a pet that cannot be tired out and will not chill in the evenings. People-loving almost always means that that pet doesn’t like other animals! Be wary of these terms when you read a profile of a sit.

I hope this blog post has helped you see a bit more into the world of housesitting and given you some insight to the pro’s and con’s of living this way ‘full time’.