House Sitting and the Trust Economy
Zagan the motorhome’s had a 40km run over to nearby Antequera for supplies, but has otherwise not lifted a tyre. He’s in stasis sat behind locked gates in the villa we’re house sitting for 6 weeks in Valle de Abdalajís, an hour north of Málaga. The weather’s dipped a little, saving our Factor 50 sunscreen stash, granting an opportunity for less heated garden weeding, and seeing the log burner getting some evening action.
It’s been a tough week folks.
For the past couple of weeks we’ve been living in a luxury villa, with a 270º view of the wonderful Andalusian countryside, and it’s been messing with my head. How can this be? How can we be here, spending weeks on end in pure luxury, effectively for free. Sure, we’re paying for our own food and consumables like wood for the fire and gas bottles for the house’s boiler. We’re also spending a few hours watering and weeding the garden, feeding and walking the pooches. But still it seems to me quite incredible this is possible, this place should be £500 a week, and instead we’re living it up, and saving and investing more money each week we’re here. This is simply mind bending.
But as soon as I started scratching about in Google, I realised what we’ve got here through this trustedhousesitters.com gig is just the tip of the iceberg. The world is changing, and in an intriguing way, a way which could seriously benefit us (and you) in the future.
One of the first nuggets I came across was this TED talk on collaborative consumption (if you’ve not come across TED before, you’re in for a treat, there are thousands of high quality talks on all kinds of subjects by all kinds of people, for free). In it, Rachel talks about how the rise of trust is creating a new landscape of opportunities for people, and I’m currently sitting in one of them!
You’ve probably already heard of some of this sharing stuff, I had, but I’d not taken much notice of if before now as I’m an old git, and this is all new, fresh stuff, which seemed only relevant to the whipper snapper:
- You can earn money from your spare room – AirBnB
- You can rent out your car and ability to drive it – uber
- You can swap your motorhome with someone abroad – motorhomeholidayswap.com
- You can loan people money through various peer to peer lending platforms like zopa and ratesetter
- You can even sell your ability to assemble IKEA furniture, share a pet, share your push bike, share tools, you name it
The stuff which drives all of this is trust. We’re being trusted by the owners of this villa to take care of their dogs, not have a rave in here or set fire to the place. From our experience of travel and letting out houses, almost everyone is trustworthy, although human nature (including our own), tends to concentrate on the very small number of untrustworthy individuals. And in a weird backwards flip of logic, I find it difficult to believe anyone would trust me with their home, car, pet etc. It seems the world is becoming more trusting, helped by online reputation scores popping up everywhere (e.g. we’ll get a feedback rating on trustedhousesitters.com, which we hope will be a good one, to help us get more astounding gigs like this one).
The opportunity for us, as the early retired, dynamic, energetic couple that we are (ahem), is endless. We could opt to travel the world using airBnB to keep costs down and get more authentic experiences. We could share our motorhome, as our friends have done, travelling Canada and New Zealand at very low cost as a result. We could get use of a car while we’re back home without having to buy one. We could use ‘task trading’ websites, once they reach our corner of the world, to sell our time doing chores for people, and at the same time make a positive contribution to our wee town.
I’m quite excited about it all. Not just on a personal level, for the world around me as well. I often wondered back in the days when I had a garage full of stuff about the inefficiency of it all. I had a whole stack of tools, as did my neighbour, and his neighbour, and on and on. I used each them about 0.00001% of the time. After using tons of resources to get this stuff into my garage, I pretty much never used it, and it took up a load of expensive space, which we had to pay a mortgage for. The opportunity to share stuff about, based on trust and acceptance of a small amount of inconvenience, is simply enormous.
And in other Team Zagan news this week:
- We’ve had a BBQ, in one of the most amazing settings, and burned off the calories with a run the next day
- We’ve been over to Antequera, scared ourselves in the narrow streets, been surprised by just how lovely the place is, stocked up on dog food from the vets we visited 5 years ago, and left Lidl’s shelves empty
- The beard has gone, as it does from time to time, and Ju’s cut my hair, saving us a good fiver
- We’ve been on BBC Radio Nottingham with Mark Dennison talking about life
- The Michelle Thomas Learn Spanish CDs have been back out and we’re slowly grinding our way through ’em. I’m enjoying his way of teaching, where you’re saying full sentences from day 1, rather than learning how to fully conjugate tener and the like
- I’ve read How to Own the World, and Ju’s working through it now, a very good book about taking personal control through investing in worldwide assets, something we’ve started to do and build knowledge in with a range of low cost share funds we own. The book’s reinforced we’re doing the right thing, and given me a bunch of ideas for the future.
- And we’re rewriting our Motorhome Morocco book, updating it and pouring in all the practical experience we picked up from the three months we spent there this year. There’s a stack of work involved in writing books, so it’ll take us a while to get it completed. Watch this space.
Right, gotta go, too much stuff to be doing! I’ll leave you with a few photos from this week.
Looks like TomTom are gathering street view data in Antequera. Satnavs will be cool with real images of the scene around you!
The trolley wheels almost buckled in Lidl – aver €200 in one go, our biggest shop yet!
Parked up in Antequera while we nipped to the vets
Arghhh, best not to drive straight through Antequera (will we ever learn)! Ju had to get out at one point to edge us past a parked car, hazard warning lights a-flashing
Antequera and the Andalusian countryside. Pretty wonderful
A bit of cloud’s moved in over the sierra
Blue skies earlier in the week, so we BBQ’d some sausages from Morrisons!
Cheers, Jay
Glad you’re enjoying the house sitting. We’re dropping out of ‘wage slavery’ to retire early next month (wayhay!) and plan to do a few more house sits before we head off to Spain & Portugal in our campervan later this year. We also have our house up for sale and now have the option of de-linking sale and purchase by being able to sell our house, put our stuff in storage and house sit while we look for somewhere else to live. It removes a lot of the house sale/purchase stress and means we’ll be cash buyers, so able to put in that cheeky offer!
So house sitting has loads of other advantages and something we’ll continue to enjoy for quite some time.
Have fun!
Paul
>And we’re rewriting our Motorhome Morocco book<
Have you sought approval from Baz & Mag for this? :)
Hahaha hahaha. Waahahahhahaha. **rushes out to grab beer from fridge** :-)
Hi
I have really enjoyed reading all about your adventures. Many thanks to you both for being an inspiration and taking the timw to record what you have been up too. My partner and i, will head to Europe, for as long as possible, minimum a year, in September, cant wait! we have a sleath transit camper which is all kitted out and ready to go. We have a house to sell and buy another in chesterfield, where my son and his friend will rent and go to sheffield uni. We also have another property which we rent out so we hope to live off the income. We will hopefully house sit in the second or third year. We hope to build our confidence in year one and who knows we might even try to landcross to india!! anyway thank you xx
Cheers Shell, you’re in for a treat. Loving that overlanding idea, what an adventure, what an opportunity eh? Go, go, go. Cheers, Jay
Loving reading your updates. We gave up the rat race last April and full time in our motorhome. Family ties mean European travel for 7 months of the year for now but this will gradually get longer and longer. Really interesting to read and learn about the house sit options and I think certainly something we will consider going forward thanks to your insights. We are heading back into Europe on 2 May and can’t wait. Happy travels one and all.
Thanks Julie – 7 months at a stretch ain’t bad eh? The house sitting option is certainly worth thinking about. We’ve stayed in 798 places since we started his blog, and having somewhere to halt and rest for a few weeks is really useful for us, not just in helping our finances out but also giving us pause for thought. Cheers, Jay
On that basis, anyone fancy having my Gastroscopy tomorrow morning ?
…..yeah, thought so !
Very, very interesting. Reminds me of a couple of holidays up in the white villages next to the Alpajarras (Archez twice and Competa once). Not sure I would have driven our motorhome up those narrow, precipice ridden roads – eeek. We are just about to embark on our longest trip after buying Hilma 13 months ago. 3 weeks in Scotland – a baby tour compared to yours. MiFi fitted, solar panel fitted, bikes will be on the back – can’t wait. You two have been a real inspiration to us. Keep the stories flowing :-)
Cheers Ian, enjoy Bonnie Scotland, we need to spend more time up there. Jay
Strewth, don’t recommend that procedure to anyone ! At least I can cheer myself up and get my OT fix this morning.
Moral of the story is do not wait until you are an ol fossil. Get travelling as soon as. If you have found Julie and Jason then think yourself very fortunate. Due respect to others but no one writes like they do, brilliant database and a financial lesson on how to do it chucked in as well. Luvem !
(Must be the drugs !)
PS. Have you not gone crazy stirring that pool yet ???
Glad to hear you’ve survived, I looked it up, and didn’t much fancy it… We’re still sane here. The swimming pool, walk-in shower, bath, wood burner, cracking view, fridge full of beer and satellite TV are all helping us along. Planning for rolling onwards will commence shortly… Take it easy, hope all works out well for you. Jay
Hi, Thanks for all your interesting blogs. We are heading off to Europe in May for 4 months, can’t wait. I was interested in the language course you are doing. I will follow that up. It sounds interesting because of the use of sentences. I have been doing Duolingo, it is a free language app, I’m sure you have heard of it. A couple of other websites that I have recently discovered (I’m sure you probably know them already, but thought other readers of your blog may find them interesting) are http://www.gocambio.com and http://www.couchsurfing.com
Hi Jay & Jules.
A House? A House? You mean one of those things where you flush the Loo and the problem goes away? One of those things where you don’t need to bench-press the bed back into the ceiling every morning? One of those things that don’t require filling with water every few days (and you can have a shower in running water for more than 20 seconds at a time)?
Don’t blame you, sounds great. Apart from touring around for months at a time the reason we bought Humberto the Hymer was to search for a house in the sun just like that.
OK, brace yourself….. I bought a toy….a drone….it’s scary, amazing and exciting all in one small package. We just went on our first trip proper. 2 weeks in the Peak District, the Lake district and western Scotland. I couldn’t bear the prospect of not owning a drone for such a trip but, in reality, I bought it for the time we recreate your Norway route (on their crinkly western coastline (designed by Slartibartfast if I’m not mistaken)).
I’d be interested in where you think could be best captured by drone footage (surely Norway).
You can check out the Scotland trip at http://www.gohumberto.com
in the meantime here’s my first proper travel video using the Drone (I take care not to fly it in proximity to others, I realise they can be bloody annoying).
https://youtu.be/_N-lasExlOI
Whaddya think????
Lee at Go Humberto!
Haha, yes, a house. There’s SPACE in here! But also dust. Lots of dust. The reality of actually having to clean a full-sized house again’s enough to put me off the idea of ever living in one again, but never say never.
Your drone footage is wonderful. How much training/practise did you need to get that quality of footage? I’m really impressed.
Where could you film? There are SO MANY places it would be a very long and boring list. There are outstanding landscapes across so much of Europe and North Africa, you could make it a life’s work to capture it. Norway is an obvious one, as are the Swiss Alps, the Moroccan Anti-Atlas and the Moroccan ergs, Tuscany, the Gorge du Verdon, the towns and seascapes of Croatia, the Greek Peloponnese… The list is endless, you’re in for a lot of fun!
Cheers, Jay
Great quality photos. Did the camera come with the drone or is it a special fix? If the later, what make?
Hi Mike, I assume that’s for me.
The drone is a DJI Mavic Pro. It has a built-in camera capable of full 4K UHD footage. I record at 2.7K, to keep the file size smaller, then export to 1080p (let’s face it, not many people have true 4K…despite what it may say on their TV).
If you press the “Photo” button it will take a 12Mp image but I never remember to use that. All my still photos are taken with a big Canon 6D DSLR or a pocket-sized Canon S120.
When folded, the Drone is smaller than my Canon 6D. It’s an extraordinary piece of Tech.
Jay, as for the learning-curve, it’s very easy to fly, a no-brainer almost, but hard to remember all the settings and shots you planned in the comfort of the Motorhome. Once it’s air-borne panic does tend to set in. I’m coming to terms with it though.
Like I say, it’s an amazing thing….more amazing than its pilot at the moment.
Lee