Review of our 6 years of travelling

Housesitting Sooty cat (2016)

We've moved on to Stroud for our last housesitting assignment, this one for two weeks, before heading off travelling again. Whilst here we had a Facebook memory notification that Jackie got voluntary redundancy and left the BBC 6 years ago this month (here's her first post about that), four and a half months after I sold the shares in my business and took early retirement at the end of April 2012 (here's my first post and the start of this blog). As we've now been unemployed and travelling the world for six years and it made us stop and look back on all our travels. This post is therefore about our last six years and what it costs to do what we've done, rather than this housesitting assignment, we'll talk more about that in the next post.

Memories of the bridge on the river Kwai, Thailand (2012) 

We've now done three major trips and three full ski seasons in the French Alps in those six years, spending a total of 1,363 days travelling abroad (63% of the time) and 827 days travelling in the UK (37% of the time). None of that time has been at either of our homes as we have tenants in both on long term rental agreements and, to some extent, they are funding our early retirement, so most of our time in the UK has been spent housesitting, looking after other peoples pets while they are on holiday. To do that we have our own car and pay for our own travel and our own food but, other than that, housesitting is cost free and allows us to visit places we may not otherwise go to and, when housesitting near home, to visit friends and family. In doing this the UK has thus become one of the cheapest places in the world for us to stay and travel! Of our time in the UK we have housesat for 497 days out of 827 days over 6 years (60% of our UK time), the remaining being holidays or staying with friends/family. This has resulted in average costs of £16,115.00 per year, which includes all costs of running our own car, with the exception of the initial car purchase price. See graph below to see how this compares with other country costs. If you are inspired by this way of living, have a look at our housesitting page (link here - or click the button at the top), which gives details of all the sits we have done round the world, with links to our references. More importantly, if you use the link near the top of the page you can get a 20% joining discount to the 'trustedhousesitters.com' website (copy of the link here), which is the one we have mainly used and find most useful. As well as your 20% discount they give us 2 months free membership, so it helps us all.

Skiing in the French Alps (2018)

Our world travelling and particularly our three seasons of skiing in the French Alps have been at a cost that's lower than most people would think. To cut to the 'bottom line', whilst travelling abroad we have spent an average of £23,840.00 per year, but travelling in the UK has been much lower due to our housesitting lifestyle at £16,115.00 per year, so our average annual spend has been £21,076.00 per year overall to do what we've done and what a fantastic six year adventure it has been. By the way, those prices are for two of us and includes everything we spent. Is that lower than you thought? We hope so - and we hope it inspires you to give up work and join us, we can absolutely recommend it.

Feeding wallabies in Queensland (2013)

It just requires a careful bit of forward planning to get your finances in order and you could do the same! Read on to see what it's cost us and where we've been. For the full details visit our pages 'Our Travels - where we've been' (link here), have a look at our 'Maps of our travels' (link here), where you'll find Google maps of where we've been on each trip, with photos and links to blog posts. For more in depth costings of what each trip has cost, have a look at our page 'Our trip costs' (link here), which has a lot more detail.

Zion National Park, Utah (2014)

Our first trip back in October 2012 was for a full year and took us as far as we could go, to New Zealand for six months, Australia for three months and three months in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore (link here). Trip two, in December 2013 to May 2014 was our first full ski season in the French Alps, something we've always wanted to do and had us out skiing most days when we could. We also did a side trip to Spain to visit Jackies dad (link here). Trip three from August 2014 to April 2015 was a 'round the world' trip: three months through the USA and five months travelling through Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra (link here). Trip four, from November 2015 to May 2016 was another ski season in the French Alps with another side trip to rural France and Spain to see Jackies dad (link here).

Machu Picchu, Peru (2016)

Trip five, from September 2016 to May 2017 saw us head out to South and Central America taking in the countries of Peru (we saw Machu Picchu and the Nazca lines), Patagonian Chile and Argentina (Torres del Paine, Fitzroy), Mexico (Mayan temples and Cenotes), Belize, Guatemala (more temples and volcanos), Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, returning home on a cruise ship that was relocating from the Caribbean to Europe (link here). Trip six was our third ski season in the French Alps with another trip to Spain to see Jackies dad and some of southern Spain and Gibraltar and we arrived back in the UK in May of this year (link here). So here we are now, about to depart again for anything up to 11 months, this time to Europe in the motorhome we've bought (link here). We think it should cost us even less per year to travel that way (excluding the cost of buying the motorhome and all it's equipment of course), but we'll report back about that next year!

Fitz Roy, Patagonian Argentina (2016)

We've already mentioned what we've spent on average to travel, but it's varied quite a lot country to country as you might imagine. One thing we've noticed is the similarity in the costs of flights for the three big trips we've done. Our trip through New Zealand, Australia and SE Asia cost us £2,506.00 in flights, our 'round the world' trip through USA, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesian Sumatra cost £2,962.00 and our trip through South and Central America £2,739.00 so, as a rough guide to flights on a round the world trip £3,000.00 to £3,500.00 seems a sensible price to budget, as long as you don't mind economy class!

Smoking volcano in Guatemala (2017)

Travel insurance is a must and it can vary quite a bit depending on what activities you want to do and where you go. We insure for things like rock climbing, high altitude mountain hiking, downhill skiing and ski touring or mountaineering and, on occasions scuba diving when the mood takes us. Including the USA ups the price as our £1500 for an annual policy for our trip three shows, whereas our trip to NZ, Australia and SE Asia in 2012-13 was only £500 (which still included rock climbing, scuba diving and skiing).

Playful Kea in S Island New Zealand (2013)

We've looked at what we spent in each country we've visited, divided the total by the number of days we spent there and then multiplied by 365 to give an equivalent annual spend. We did that in order to compare our costs in each country, we didn't stay in any one country for a year, it's just to provide a means of comparison. This graph below shows how the cost of countries can vary, from Singapore, the most expensive country we visited at £36,500.00 had we stayed there a year, down to Mexico where, had we stayed there a year we would have spent just £8,168.00. Mexico however is a special case for us as we spent over half our time there housesitting, where our accommodation costs were zero. It was still a low cost country, but probably nearer £15,000.00 to £20,000.00.

Rafflesia, the biggest flower in the world, Sumatra (2015)

As we said above, there's a lot more detail on the other pages on our site, accessed from the buttons at the top, but if you want any more details get in contact with us by email or the other ways we show on our page 'About Us' (link here), or via the button above.

Finally, we're very near to heading off again, this time through Europe, France and Spain at first as an easy entry to motorhoming life so, if you'd like to follow us, we'll put a link onto Facebook each time we post, but if you're not into that, you could always enter your email address into the box at the top right and receive an email of our new entry immediately we post. Don't worry, there's nothing dangerous about entering your email, it goes nowhere except to automatically receive our updates and you can unsubscribe whenever you want.

Inspired? We hope so!