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Hello everybody. I hope that you are well. My name is Christian and welcome to my channel, Backpacking Bananas. I am currently living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Sydney, Australia. My boyfriend Ben and I have just moved here about a month ago after driving across Australia all the way from Perth. And our plan is to now settle here in Sydney for the long term. But we're not settled yet because honestly, we don't know where we want to live yet. We want to explore different suburbs to see where we like and where we feel would be a good fit for us. And right now we are living completely for free. We have just started getting into the world of housesitting. So in this
video I wanted to share with you a breakdown of how housesitting works, how we get sits, what are the pros and cons, and whether it can be something that can be viable for you. So what is housesitting? At least in the capacity that we are doing it. It is when you get free accommodation in someone's home when they are not there in exchange for you looking after the home and or pets garden and any responsibilities that they may give. These responsibilities could be walking dogs, feeding pets, just keeping pets company, watering plants. And in exchange for doing these responsibilities, the homeowner usually gives access for you to use pretty much everything in their house. Their kitchen, their appliances, their
laundry. Sometimes they even let you use their bikes or even their car and it's like a fair exchange. It's not just a free holiday because we're literally hopping from suburb to suburb every few days to every few weeks. We are completely relying on good mobile data to find sits, message the owners, check the neighborhoods, get our directions, everything. And this video is kindly sponsored by Sy, who are the eim provider that I use when I travel abroad anywhere. It's actually become one of my number one safety tips for when traveling abroad that it's so important that you have local data. You're always connected to the internet so that you can find where you're going. You can call an Uber. You can book
accommodation. You can see restaurant reviews. You can clarify important pieces of information. Whatever you use the internet for. And for years previously, I would buy local physical SIMs when I arrived in different countries. But with an eim, not only do you not have to fuff around with trying to find that physical SIM on arrival when you get to a new country, you've got data straight from the get- go as soon as you land, you are also able to keep your home physical SIM in your phone as well as the eim. So, you can still receive verification texts on your phone when you're trying to log into things. I remember a time when I was always trying to switch those SIMs out, but you don't need to do it anymore. And
the amazing thing about SY in comparison with other eSIM providers is that you only ever have to download and activate an ESIM once. After that, it's literally just a case of topping up data from whatever country that you are going to and it puts it all onto the same EI. So, it literally takes less than 20 seconds whenever you want to purchase data for a new country that you are going to. If you want to try SY on your next trip, just click the link in the description. I've also got a discount code that you can use which gets you 15% off all SY data plans. You just need to use the code backpacking or you can head straight to sail.com/backpacking.
Okay, so back to how we are actually living for free in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Now, I first heard about this housesitting thing not that long ago. It was at the beginning of 2025 when I found out that one of my very good friends, Sabina, has been doing full-time housesitting for different homeowners for the past 2 years. and she actually created a whole PDF guide on how to become a housesitter. So, she was telling me about it and I read her guide and I'll link her guide in the description because it was so useful. But I think just knowing someone who's done it and who's done it so successfully made the whole thing sound very doable and less intimidating because I think my initial
thoughts towards it are like this sounds too good to be true or there must be some catch or it must be difficult in some way. And at the time she told me about it, I was like, "Okay, this is really cool, but I don't know when would be a good time for me to do something like this." A couple of months ago now, when we realized that we were going to be moving to Sydney, we revisited this housesitting idea and we were like, "Huh, actually, if we are going to do this, this is the perfect time." One, because it's a real priority for my boyfriend and I to be saving money at the moment. We both have a lot to save for. Two, we do not know exactly where in Sydney that we would like to settle.
We know we want to settle in Sydney, but there are so many different suburbs that have so many different things to offer. And what a great way to test out living in these places than literally living in people's homes for extended periods of time so that you can live that lifestyle. We can test beach proximity. We can see the public transport options or just the transport options in general, parking situations, what are the local cafes like, what are the local running routes like? That's been an important one for me and actually quite hard to find in the Sydney area. Good run routes because it's such a hilly city. So, housesitting kind of seemed perfect for this unsettled but exciting transition chapter. And when we were
thinking about this deeper, we were like, we are actually in the perfect position to be houses sitters as well because one, we're planning on doing this in one city and we've got friends in the city who have said to us, you know, if you have gaps in between your housesits, you can come and stay with us, which is we're so lucky to have that community and support system and we don't have that in loads of places around the world. We both currently work online, which means that we are home most of the day. So, we're able to let owners know that we can keep their pets company throughout the day. There's two of us, which is great because not only can we divide the responsibilities that
we may have around the house, but also if there's any overlapping dates between sits, one of us can start somewhere else while the other one is finishing up at the initial sit, and that works out quite well. And this is a new position for me to be in. I notoriously have traveled solo all throughout my 20ies. So, it's quite nice to finally be in a couple and reap the benefits of that. We are in our early 30s, so perhaps seen to be more of like a reliable age group. We don't have any children or pets of our own, which we're bringing into the house. And we have a car, which makes us so much more flexible and we're able to do sits further out. We don't necessarily have to be close to public
transport, although that is nice. And we can also, of course, just transport all of our things around really easily. Now, there are quite a lot of platforms, agencies that people use for housesitting services, but the main one, the biggest one in the world is Trusted Housesitters. That's the one that we've used to secure all of our sits so far. We have also signed up for Aussie housesitters, though we haven't got anything from there yet, but we are looking. Other than the fact that it's the one that we've had success on so far, a big reason why Trusted Houses sitters is our favorite is one because you can save your searches of when you're looking for a housesit and you
get instant notifications if a listing appears that matches your criteria of what you're looking for. Not only that, but they cap the number of applications that can go to a homeowner to just five. which means that if you've able to make your application, you are just one of five houses sitters that they have to choose from, which is much less overwhelming for the homeowners and it's also less competition for you as a house sitter. So, you feel like if you've got your application is there is actually a somewhat high chance of you securing that set. The only downsides to that is the good listings will literally vanish in under a minute, in under 30 seconds sometimes. And so you kind of need to be
on your phone constantly for when a notification pops up. You need to read it super fast and have your application spiel ready to go to make that application. It's important to note you do have to pay a membership fee for these agencies. And at first it does seem like a lot. We paid £126 for the trusted housesitters standard sitter membership. They do have a premium sitter one which we are thinking of upgrading to because of the sick cancellation plan. And honestly, it is so worth it because if you think that we'd be spending at least £350 per week between us on rent, a houseet of just 2 days means you've already got your money's worth for the whole year. And while we're talking about the cost of this, I actually have a trusted houses
referral link which gets you 30% off that membership fee. So, I'll leave that in the description for you. And Aussie Housitters was even cheaper at $89 for an annual membership. So even though we haven't secured anything with them yet, if we manage to secure just one day of housesitting with them over the next year, we will have got our money's worth. So what do we look for in a good listing? For us, location, of course. Like I mentioned, we want to explore different suburb, but we definitely have ones which we more so lean towards. For example, if it is close to the beach, oh my god, if it's walking distance from the beach, but sometimes you may not
know that much because their address won't be specific in the listing, but you may well be able to see what suburb they live in. not having to look after too many pets or pets that require more than the average care and attention. I saw one listing where you literally had to look after like three horses, four chickens, five dogs, three cats, and it's like why are you on trusted house? You should be paying someone to do that amount of work for your animals. So, if we see ones like that, there's no way that we are applying. If there's like one or two dogs or maybe a dog and a cat or two cats, like that's fine. We look at the length of the sit
because this is something that we are wanting to do as a means to live and like actually get to know each suburb. The longer the better. If we can find one that's at least over 2 weeks, that is the most ideal for us. However, when we were first getting started, we were definitely accepting two day and three day sits just to get our names on the roster, get some good reviews on our profile, and just get experience doing this. To be honest, we try and gauge from the photos what the house is actually like. Does it look clean and tidy? Does it look super cluttered? Is there enough space where we're going to be able to set up our laptops and computer and get some work done because
obviously that's very important to us. We are working from home. We'll also look a little bit at their house rules as well. Some of them say no guests, no parties. To be fair, that doesn't really affect us because we never plan on inviting anyone around anyway. We just assume that we're not allowed to invite guests or have parties. It's obviously a bonus if they say we can use their car or their bike. So, I'll tell you about a few of the houseets we've done so far. We're now on our third. They've all been super successful. The first houseet, we were looking after a 12-year-old Labrador. She was so sweet, really calm, very easy to look after because, to be honest, she just wanted to lie down and
sleep most of the day. But we would still take her on two short walks. And she was like a local celebrity everywhere that we would take her. Like the coffee shop owners, people in the park just knew who she was. Then the next houseet we were looking after two dogs, a toy poodle and a sausage dog, and they were just the funniest duo to have around because they would be on a split lead. And the toy poodle had a lot more energy and agility than the sausage dog did. So, she would just be dragging her along, but the sausage dog would just go along well with it and just waddle along and keep up. I've never looked after a sausage dog before, but I think I'm obsessed. They are amazing. And where we are right now, we are looking after a one-year-old border
collie kelpie. So, he's a puppy and he has so much energy and when you're walking him, he just wants to start running and so he needs like double the exercise of all the other dogs that we've looked after. But that's really nice. So, our walks here have been much longer and also it's getting hotter now in New South Wales. So, we're just leaving super early in the morning. But one thing that has been a consistent across all of these houses is the amazing hospitality of the owners. I don't know if we've just been lucky so far or if this is just the standard of using trusted housesitters. Every single one of the owners has been super friendly, super generous with just
letting us use anything in the house. All of the houses have been really clean and tidy, and they've just wanted to make sure that we are comfortable. So, that's been really, really lovely. So, what does the daily routine look like now that we are housesitting? Honestly, pretty much exactly the same as before. Ben and I would always start our day with a walk to go and get some coffee, especially now we're living in Australia where you've got the best coffee in the world. But now we just have a fairy sidekick along with us or several sidekicks. We are getting up slightly earlier than what we would do previously, though. Mostly because it's just becoming more and more hot in New South Wales this time of year, and we
don't really want to be taking the dogs out in the middle of the day. So, we've been getting up at the very least 7:00 a.m. trying to get out on that walk by 7:30 so that we can be back at the house to start work by 8:30. But to be honest, I think as the next few weeks go on, that's probably going to be brought forward to like 600 6:30 that we're going to be leaving. This morning, it was already 23° by 700 a.m. So, it is getting hot. In the daytime, we are both working from home. We try to create proper workstations for us both in separate rooms if possible, just to find like a healthy work from home situation. And on the days in between sits, if there's a period of time which we need
to kill, we've just been going to whatever the local library is and getting work done there, and that works really well as well. And then in the evening, we'll take the dogs out again for a sunset walk before dinner time. This is so nice and it's actually really helped to keep us moving throughout a day. We might just entirely be on the laptop and it really gets our steps up. We've both been doing over 10,000 steps a day since we started this, so that's good. Let's talk more about the application process. It's pretty simple. So, as I mentioned on trusted housesitters, only a maximum of five houses sitters can place an application
for a houseet. So, ideally, you want to do this as soon as possible. And in that application, you just do a quick friendly introduction to who you are and why you are a good fit for their particular houseet that they've advertised. And it's really important that even if you are on short time that you do actually read the listing, you name the owners by their first name, you name the pets by their first name, you actually see what the responsibilities are. And I know that's hard when you are pressured on time, but it is absolutely essential if you do want to be considered for that house sit. Anyway, at the end of the message, I will always say, "We'd love to hop on the phone and have a video chat with you to discuss
more of the details." And sometimes the owners will respond super quickly, like within an hour, like they'll just be very fast at reading through their applications. Um, or sometimes it can take a few days. We never put any pressure on how long that takes, but we find that most of them do respond and say, "Yes, we'd love to chat on the phone." And we find that normally they are having video calls with several of the applicants. So just when they say, "Oh yeah, I want to have a phone call with you." It doesn't mean that you've got the house set yet. So then you exchange WhatsApp numbers and arrange a good time for the call and for the call if we can. Ben and I try to make sure
that we are together and present for it so that they can speak to us both. And if the homeowner wants to lead the conversation, I definitely allow them to do that. Sometimes they want to kind of do it as a bit of an interview. But if they are not really taking the lead with the conversation, I just go ahead and reintroduce who we are, what we do, and express our enthusiasm for wanting to do that particular houseit and meeting their pets. And it's quite funny the difference between me and Ben because I find that he goes into interviewee mode and he's very professional and formal and I'm quite casual and chatty. But maybe it's good that we've got both of those sides to our behaviors. And like
an interview, we do also make sure that we've asked our questions on the phone. So we will ask again about the pet responsibility, how long we are able to leave the pet unattended for at home because if they say, "Oh, we actually don't really want the pet unattended even though we are home most of the time." We know that we are going to want to go out sometimes. How long the pet needs to be walked for each day? If they need any medications, how they interact with other animals and other people, can we let them off the leash? And also on a practicality level for us, is there somewhere where we can park our car? cuz for the most part having a car is a big bonus. But if the homeowners live in a
flat where there is no parking and you can't park on the road either, we would be in a bit of a sticky situation, you know. So yeah, sometimes you find that you are the only applicant that they're speaking to on the phone. Sometimes they tell you that they're speaking to a few others. So the best you can do is just to be yourself and wait. And if after the phone call they decide that they want to pick you as their sitter, they will send an official invitation to do that where you can accept the offer or decline. Obviously, for the most part, you're probably going to be accepting the offer, but we have had to decline a couple of times just because in the early stages, we were applying for as
many sits as we could, and we found ourselves getting several sits that were overlapping, and so we weren't able to accept all of them. Like I said, I think that we are really good candidates for doing the housesitting. So, we have had very good success with this so far. And long may it last because, believe it or not, we take the housesitting very, very seriously. One, because you get reviewed on how you are as a house sitter. And these reviews are super important because that is what all future homeowners are going to be reading about you before they offer you to housesit for them. So, it's really important to us that we get given five stars for the longevity of this housesitting career.
But also, I take pride in the fact that these owners are trusting us with their home, with their pets, so that they can go on holiday stress-free because that's what you want. That's the whole point of this. I also think that it's important to build a good relationship with the homeowners because if you do a good job for them, chances are when they go away again, maybe for an even longer period of time, they'll be like, "Ah, Ben and Christian were good. I'm just going to ask them directly this time if they are available for the housesit," which is really good for us as well. So, you know, we're always doing all of our responsibilities. We're following the pet routines, making sure that they get
taken out for some really good walks. I'll send the owners daily photos of their dogs while they're away. Also, we try to leave the house cleaner and tidier than how it was left for us. That's not necessarily expected by the owner, but I just think it gives a really good lasting impression. And the homeowner coming back to a nice clean house is how it should be. So, who should not house it? I don't believe that this is for everyone. And actually, I don't think that there's been many times in my life where I would be available to do this kind of thing. If you are just looking for a free holiday, this is not for you because you do have responsibilities. If you work and you are going to be out all day or all
night, that could work for some owners, but often that doesn't work in your favor because they want you to actually be home to look after the pets. If you like to just take spontaneous trips all the time, then this may not be for you, unless you want to do them in between your sits. And this has actually been the biggest compromisation and realization for Ben and I because we are so used to just taking spontaneous trips, spending a night here, spending a night here, and we're like, wait, we can't do that when we're housesitting. If we're committing to a sit for a period of time, we need to make sure that we are there for that period of time because at the end of the day, you are there so that the owner can take their trip. So, you need to respect
that. I would also say that housesitting is not for you if you are a solo traveler wanting to meet people. So like me coming to Australia on my first year working holiday visa 10 years ago, this would not have been a good situation for me because you're not hanging out with other backpackers, other people doing the same thing as you. And if you're by yourself, that can feel quite isolating. And so although saving money on accommodation sounds like a backpacker hack, this is not really a backpacker experience. Does that make sense? But if you are in that situation, I would highly recommend checking out doing work for accommodation gigs with agencies like World Packers where in exchange for
free accommodation, you can do things like working in a hostel or you might have gardening and farming duties. There's so much stuff on there and normally you are paired with other travelers and backpackers who are doing the same thing. So that is another idea to consider to save money on accommodation. But even though I feel like we are in the perfect situation to do this housesitting thing right now, is there any downsides? Yes, I would say there is. The main thing just being that whilst we're doing this, I don't think I will feel fully settled because even if we do have a fairly long sit, it's still never going to be permanent. I still know that in a few weeks time we're going to be packing up our bags again
and moving and we're technically still living out of our car. We're technically homeless. And that can sometimes feel a bit stressful. And at this point in time, we are moving around a lot and it is quite tiring. But I am not complaining. We've obviously chosen this situation and I'm very happy to be doing this. And I also think it's very necessary cuz it is allowing us to explore all of these different suburbs so that we know where we're going to want to settle. Also, do you know how much money we are saving? What we are expecting to pay when we get our own flat will be around $800 a week plus bills. that will be $900 a week. So, £450 each, which works out to be about
$900 each a month. And that's a lot of money, but I am not seeing that as my disposable income because like I mentioned previously, our priority is to save at the minute. So, we're really going to use this housesitting and free accommodation as a tool to try and jump ahead for where we want to be in a few months to a year's time. So, I am saving up for a car or a moped. I really need to build my emergency fund back up again. We are going to save up together for a rental bond because when you move into a new flat, you normally need to pay at least a whole month's rent for your bond. And also, we just want to lower the financial stress. We've both just moved to Australia together for the
first time, and the last thing that we want is to be worrying about money. And so, we feel like we're being sensible during this time, and that feels very, very good. So, the bigger plan, our future, we are going to be housesitting for the foreseeable. Our ultimate goal is to find our suburb and to save up enough money to feel super comfortable with our finances. I am praying for more beachside housesits because I really want to live by the beach. As you can imagine, those are the ones that snap up fast. We don't yet have one in the northern beaches and I'm really, really keen to explore that area. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I hope it's given you a
clearer picture of how we are living for free in Sydney, one of the most expensive cities in the world. Do you know what I want to do as we're exploring all of these different suburbs? I want to make a video of what it's like to live in each region, like what the pros and cons are, pros and cons of living in the eastern suburbs, pros and cons of living in the northern beaches, pros and cons of living in the inner west. I think that would be fun and really insightful. Anyway, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye-bye.
