Yesterday marked 1 month since we left Australia on our full time roving retiree lifestyle. The months preceding our departure were very hectic as we packed up and sold off our existing life but now one month later we have relaxed somewhat and started to enjoy our new life.
First day in KL 
Lunch at the Royal Selangor Club 
Batu Caves – so many stairs 
Batu Caves, KL 
London by the Thames River with Lexi 
Plaza de Constitucion – Malaga 
Beach BBQ – Spanish style 
Walk on the promenade at Torre Del Mar 
Moclin castle 
Local festival to St Vincent 
Local festival to St Vincent 
Fiesta time 
A walk through the river valley 
Alcala La Real
The past month has seen us
- spend a few nights in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as ‘tourists’,
- house sit over the Easter break near London
- fly to Spain for a repeat house sit on the Costa Del Sol for 2 weeks, and
- we are now one week into a 3 week sit in Spain but further inland between Cordoba and Granada.
So it’s been a pretty busy time but with some great relaxing down time as well.
One of the advantages of our new lifestyle was that we believed it would be much more cost effective than our ‘normal’ life back in Australia. Our year off from November 2015 to October 2016 ‘test driving’ this new lifestyle showed us that it was possible to travel and live full time overseas without it costing a fortune.
I was interested to see what our expenditure had been over the first month and here’s what I found.
- General expenditure – $946 (food/tourist attractions/public transport, etc)
- Transport (car hire/fuel) – $329
- Accommodation – $183
- Airfares (London-Spain) – $220
Our total costs for the month add up to $1678 (or $55.93 per day)
Of course this does not include the cost of our airfares to get from Melbourne to London. These will be included in our costs for the whole year and averaged out over that period.
We’re pretty happy with the first month and it will be interesting to see how that figure increases (or decreases) over the coming year. We’ll post the figures over the coming months and see what the reality is.
What do you think? Is this an affordable way to travel? Let us know and leave a comment.
Lambies Travels 
Glenn, l’m enjoying your blog! Very inspirational and l’d like to try this too! A couple of questions if l may. So you are renting your home in Australia and doing house sitting in Europe, correct? What is the house sitting website do you find the best? Any tips on house sitting? I used to live in Barcelona and would love to return via house sitting especially in small Medieval villages in Catalonia. Thanks in advance advance! Happy trails. Cheers, Greg
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Hi Greg, we’re glad you’re enjoying the blog. We are trying to inspire others to perhaps look at alternative ways of living/travelling.
You are correct – we are renting our home out in Australia and house sitting in Europe. We do this for about 6 months per year (in the European Spring/Summer) and then plan to live in Thailand for the other 6 months. One thing to be aware of is the Schengen Visa requirements – in summary if you have an Australian passport you can only stay in mainland Europe for 90 days out of 180 days – this excludes the UK, Ireland and some Baltic countries. So we split our 6 months with 3 months in Europe and 3 in the UK. Take a look at the calendar on our house sitting website (www.theaussielambs.com/house-sit-schedule) to see what I mean.
We are members of two of the main house sitting sites – Trusted Housesitters and Housecarers. Space precludes us from trying to give you some tips here as it’s a big subject but drop us an email at glnnlmb@gmail.com and we’ll be happy to help you out (we also have discount codes for the house sitting websites).
Lucky you living in Barcelona, it’s a wonderful city. We love Catalonia too and are returning to a sit there in September – interestingly a sit popped up the other day for Pals which is a lovely medieval village in that region. Take a look through our previous blogs for the post we did about it last September/October.
Hope some of this helps Greg – thanks for following us.
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