How We Saved Over $20,000 In Housing Costs As A Digital Nomad (And Got To Play With Awesome Pets!)

May 8

***While this article heafline is about saving money, these are people's pets! You should only use this service if you are willing to take the responsibility seriously***

Long story short, I am the founder and editor of “After Dinner Conversation” publishing. That means I’m in charge of the print books, monthly magazine, and two podcasts. It keeps me super busy, but I love doing it.

And, the best part is, for the last 2 1/2 years, I’ve done it while traveling the world as a digital nomad. Because, really, you can run a digital magazine from basically anywhere in the world with good internet!

Months ago, on a whim, I did a post with all the useful links to websites and tools I use in my life as a digital nomad. Quite a few people read, and it got a really strong response from people saying it was super useful.

One of the websites I listed in my last post was “Trusted House Sitters.” I thought I would do a follow up post about it and just how much money it has saved us; over $20,000! Trusted House Sitters is a website that matches people who have pets, with people who are willing to watch those pets. There is a whole verification and rating process, similar to Airbnb. You review people, they review you. Bad reviews mean you no longer get accepted for pet sits.

We (my wife and I) have been using Trusted House Sitters for over two years while working while working as digital nomads and love it. Not only do we love the money it saves us, but we also really love the pets and the people it has given us the chance to interact with.

So, I thought I would share where we have traveled, and how much money we have saved using it. I could type everything out, but an excel sheet seems the easier way to do it.

Methodology

To come up with these numbers I took the # of days we stayed at a house sit, times the average nightly rate for that area from Numbeo.com It’s not a perfect system, of course. I included the one bedroom option to show the low end, but we never stayed in small places, typically, they were very large homes. Also, these are the prices based on a 12 month lease. Of course, a hotel room or short term Airbnb would be much more expensive.

Long story short, do a quick search for a hotel room or Airbnb in Paris, you would be hard pressed to find anything cheaper than the three bedroom rate ($97/night) I have listed, so that’s probably the better number to use for estimates anyway.

And, of course, we had to get ourselves from location to location, and that would involved costs for flights, busses, or trains, not listed.

Hope this information was helpful, and of course, I’d love it if you would check the monthly magazine!

PS. I should also mention, we have also lived in Thailand, Turkey, Croatia, Cyprus, and loads of other places, but we didn’t use Trusted House Sitters for those stays as the places were cheap enough, it wasn’t really needed.