How we live rent free in one of the world’s most expensive cities
Our frustrations with Sydney’s rental prices and desire to live more with less led my fiancé and I into the minimalist world of house and pet sitting.
Like most millennials in their twenty-somethings, my fiancé and I want to experience life, not just live it.
We don’t want to be given the usual wedding gifts of blenders, vacuum cleaners and ironing boards, we’ve just sold all our household belongings and have chosen to live perpetually out of a suitcase.
We want the freedom to travel without the commitments of paying rent and mortgage bills.
Sydney’s housing market has recently been declared as the second most expensive in the world, more expensive even than London or New York.
Millennials have become known for placing more value in the experiential than the material. When we buy stuff we want a memorable, personalised, monogrammed experience.
It’s not just physical objects that we adopt to define ourselves, it’s everything about us. Our Facebook profiles, our Instagram feeds, our birthdays, weddings, even our funerals — all of it has got to say something meaningful about the authentic people we are.
Millennials are said to have lizard brains. Years of smartphone usage which triggers a dopamine response have apparently re-wired our brains to seek short term gratification over than long term gain.
There’s no place like home
Whether or not this is true, it is of course a generalisation, however, the most apparent failing from this new development of human behaviour for our parents’ generation is that millennials are not homeowners, nor are we actively trying to become them.
Australian culture places a large emphasis on owning your own home but perhaps the zeitgeist is starting to shift. In countries like Germany renting is more prevalent than home ownership. In 2004, only 41% of Germans owned their own homes, compared to 69.5% of Australians.
Like many people of our generation, buying a home is pretty low on our priority list. In fact, the thought of being pinned down in one place scares us a little, even though we are frequently reminded that these were milestones our parents and grandparents had well and truly surpassed by our age.
Millennials were recently accused by the Babyboomer Tim Gurner of complaining about the housing market for no reason. Buying a house was feasible if only we curbed the trivialities of modern life.
The expensive living habits of millennials — like spending half our salary on rent in the trendy, newly gentrified inner-city, eating mountains upon mountains of quinoa, brunching ourselves to poverty with avocado on toast — would ultimately mean we would never be the kings and queens of our own castles, blissfully sending knick knacks straight to The Pool Room.
While ever-tempted by the seaming ease, and vibrant charm of inner-city living, my partner and I gritted our teeth, bore the gruelling western Sydney squinters’ commute into the city’s CBD and rented for two years in the more affordable Parramatta.
Then, fed up with the slow progress of our savings and nursing vague plans to take unpaid leave to travel, we ended our lease last December, sold our furniture and culled our possessions down to the bare essentials.
Sharing is caring
Using house sitting websites, for which we pay small membership fees, we have discovered that house sitting is a viable alternative to renting. We are animal lovers which is important since most of the owners will want you to stay in their homes to take care of their pets.
Since January this year alone, we’ve looked after ten different homes and thirty-four pets, with everything from dogs and cats, to reptiles and poultry. We are now booked up with house sit jobs back-to-back until October, so living out of a suitcase while balancing our 9–5s seems a small price to pay.
We’ve lived rent-free in a variety of properties we couldn’t dream of renting; a mansion in the Shire, a Balmain townhouse, a cosy flat in leafy Wollstonecraft, a carefully preserved federation home in Strathfield and a quirky cottage in the Blue Mountains.
It’s not all easy. Winning house sitting jobs is fiercely competitive with as many as 50–100 people applying for each job.
There is definitely an un-glamorous side to it. We once spent four days in the dark because there had been a power-outage and had forgotten to ask the owners, who were on a cruise and out of signal range, for a key to the fusebox.
We’ve had a drunken neighbour turning up late night at the doorstep accosting us with thinly-veiled threats. We’ve had an overly-playful puppy maim a chicken whose free-ranging in the back yard days are now over. Not to mention clearing up the constant stream of diarrhoea from an old dog with a sensitive stomach; she would squirt it out in neat little piles all over the concrete backyard like she was decorating biscuits.
It’s been a steep learning curve.
Our one key tip to any prospective house sitters is to do you due-diligence. It’s a two way street. As much as you want them to trust you, you’ve got to feel safe with them and prepared for the job. Meet the owners beforehand in their homes if you can, get their emergency contacts and make sure you have an pre-arranged plan of action in case something happens to their home or pets. It’s a cliché but it’s true — trust your gut.
How we save $30k a year
We’ve calculated that at the average rental costs for a couple at our stage in our careers, we are saving up to $30,000 a year which comes pretty close to that house deposit, even if we did choose to live on the wild side and eat avocado on toast for breakfast every day.
Then again, perhaps even after we get married we’ll venture further on this nomadic, minimalist lifestyle and choose instead to invest our lizard-brain savings on travelling the world.
