When I tell people that we spend most of our time traveling around the world they immediately want to know how we can do this. There are many things that make this possible (check out our blog post How to Make Travel a Lifestyle if you want to know more about this), but a huge one is that we use our house to fund our adventures.
What if I told you that your home (the one you are currently living in) can help fund your travel adventures and more; and this is not out of reach for you no matter what kind of travel you are doing. This can work for the weekend getaway to the year-long adventures.
There are two questions I want you to consider first:
#1 How long do you want to travel?
This is a super important question to ask yourself. I think there are really 3 choices around this. 1. You want to travel for short lengths; 2. You want to go out for the long term (a year, longer, forever); 3. You want to travel out and then come home for a while. One of these options may resonate with you or you might find you can fit somewhere in between.
1) If you love to travel, but you love coming home just as much, traveling for shorter lengths might be the best fit for you. My Mom loves to travel. She travels frequently all over the U.S. and has gone overseas several times, but she loves coming home just as much. My Mom says, “I have learned that two weeks is really my max. I am ready to come home and get antsy to come home if I go any longer.” Fair enough. She doesn’t want to go out for a long haul. She loves the feeling of coming home.
2) You might be on the total opposite spectrum where you are considering living overseas or in a different state/area for a while. You might have the opportunity through your job to go live somewhere for a while. Or you might just want to live as a vagabond. You plan to travel everywhere and don’t really feel the need for a home base.
There are many reasons you may want to experience travel this way and I will encourage my own kids to live overseas for a year when they are older. I lived in the Dominican Republic for a year when I was 20. It was a wonderful coming of age experience for me and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
3) The third option is you might want to do both…you love the idea of long-term travel and coming home. This option I think is wise before you jump into anything drastic. You cn opt to do shorter, more frequent trips or maybe go out for a month or so and then come home. This gives you the option to size up what is working or not working for you. You might find you love this style of travel or you just want to go full time, but this allows you to adjust to what you want.
It is important to consider how long you want to travel because it really dictates what you can do with your home and stuff. This leads me to the next question you need to ask yourself…
#2 What do you want to do with your home?
There are again probably three options here; 1. Nothing; 2. Sell it; 3. Rent it.
Option 1: Nothing
This might make a lot of sense if you just travel for a week or two a year and that is perfect for you. But there are some pros and cons to consider if this is the option you think you want to take.
Pros: Your house doesn’t get used or potentially damaged by others. You also don’t need to prep your house in any way before you leave.
Cons: You are traveling, your home stays empty and becomes an empty bucket that you are just spending money on but not enjoying. You are not taking advantage of making money off your home when you are gone.
I have plenty of people in my life who think we are crazy to let people live in our home while we travel. Nothing makes them more anxious than this thought. I get it. I am actually a little bit high-strung when it comes to how I take care of my home and things. It is important to me that things get taken care of. Nothing is worse to me than letting someone borrow something and giving it back broken or ruined. But…this didn’t stop me from using my home to fund my travels, the pros way outnumber the cons.
Option 2: Selling
Selling your home might make a lot of sense for you. You need the money from your home to fund your initial costs of doing this (for example buying an RV set up, plane tickets, travel money). You might be looking to not come back. Or you just want to do something drastic to shake up your world.
Pros: You get instant money to spend on your travels. You get to make a new start at something. You don’t have to worry about renters.
Cons: You don’t have long-term passive income. You can’t come back to it. You have lost a long-term investment and you may not be able to buy back into the neighborhood you are leaving if you ever want to come back due to rising real-estate markets.
Weigh all your reasons to sell and put super careful thought into this before you sell your home. Know that you DON’T have to do this in order to travel. I have watched so many travel families on YouTube sell everything they have and hate every minute of what they did. The major downfall of just selling your home that you need to consider is that you might not like traveling like you thought you would. Sometimes we can over-romanticize the idea of it and the reality is not as beautiful as the picture in our head. You don’t want to end up in a position where you sold your home and everything in it because you got caught up in a YouTube moment. For real, add music to anything and it makes it magic, not real, just magical.
Option 3 Renting:
Renting your home might make a lot of sense if you are traveling short-term, long-term, or even if you don’t plan on ever coming back. It can work no matter what kind of travel you do.
Pros: You have your home to come back to. You are able to keep your home as an important investment that plays into your long-term goals. You don’t have to make drastic choices to travel. You make passive income from your home to fund your travels.
Cons: You have to deal with renters. You might be limited on what type of rental you can offer depending on your area. You need to consider the wear and tear on your home. You need to make sure you are protected legally.
If you are considering renting your home there are many things to take into consideration. There is no one way this looks, so you have options to consider. I am going to walk you through them so that you can think about what is right for you.
Long-Term vs Short-Term Rental
There are basically two types of rental properties; long-term and short-term. The definition of a long-term or short-term rental can vary from county to county. Typically, a long-term rental is considered 30 days or more and it is a property that has a lease that is for tenets to live there for a long-term lease. A short-term rental is a property that is rented for short segments (i.e. less than 30 days) and can be used by multiple tenets in a year. What type of rental property you want to have is really dependent on several things so let's break down these two different types.
Long-Term Rentals
Like I said before, the way a county determines what is a long-term rental can vary. For example the county that we live in, a long-term rental is anything that is being rented for 30 days or longer. This can be shorter or longer in other counties. So the first thing you need to figure out is what is your county's definition of a long-term rental.
If you are deciding to rent your home out long-term, put a lot of thought into how long you want that to be. For example, you might want to try traveling for longer than your usual week or two-week vacation. You can absolutely dip your toes in and try it. Depending on your county you could just go for 30 days and then come home and assess. You have the ability to assess what worked or alter what didn’t work for you.
Most of our rental properties are long-term rentals with year-long leases, but we have one property that is the home that we live in currently that we rent out for 3+ months at a time. It is still considered a long-term rental because we post it for 30 days or longer.
If you want to understand how Long-Term Rentals work and details on lease agreements, insurance, and overall ideas we are working on a blog called Long-Term vs Short-Term Rentals that is coming soon.
Short-Term Rentals
Whether or not you can rent your home out for short-term rentals really depends on what your specific county allows. Our county allows for short-term rentals, but you have to get a special license through them and you have to live in the home 22 days out of the month. Look at what your county allows when making this decision.
Using your home as a short-term rental is perfect when your travel style is more of the week vacation situation. Imagine you get to go to Costa Rica and someone else is helping paying for it! We currently have one home that is a short-term rental property in the mountains. We use Airbnb to rent this property out. The great thing about doing a short-term rental is that you get to set any amount of days you want to offer it. For example, we have a 2 night minimum at the mountain property, but we have had people stay as long as 3 months. The upside of short-term rentals is that you can make money even on a weekend getaway. The downside is that if you can’t clean it between guests you will have to pay someone do this for you. At our mountain home, we have friends we pay to prep it between renters; this means laundry, cleaning, changing out sheets and towels. This is an extra cost you will need to account for as well.
If you want to understand how Short-Term Rentals work and details on Airbnb, insurance, and overall ideas we are working on a blog called Long-Term vs Short-Term Rentals that is coming soon. You can also check out our blog on Setting Up Your Home to Airbnb
Unfurnished vs Furnished
Once you have determined how long you want to rent it out, you get to decide if you will offer an unfurnished rental or a furnished rental. The type you choose I think depends on how long the lease is for.
Unfurnished
An unfurnished rental means that you are moving everything out. This might make a lot of sense if you are planning at least a year-long lease. You either sell your stuff or you get a storage option. If you are planning for a short amount of time you might want to consider doing furnished.
Furnished
A furnished rental means will you be offering all the furniture, sheets, towels, kitchen supplies, etc. The plus side to this is that you don’t have to move out. The downside to this is that not all people will treat your things as well as you do. I personally struggle with this a lot, but here is what I have learned. Most everyone has been super respectful of our home and all the things inside. We have two furnished rentals and we have never had damage done to either of these houses or our things in all the years we have rented them out. I have heard the horror stories too and I believe 99% of people are very respectful to your space.
Offering a furnished rental is a must if you have a short-term rental situation, but I think it is equally helpful even if you rent it out for a full year or 6 months even. Not having to move out of your house is a huge perk. I hate moving! If you just keep your stuff in the house it makes everything so much easier. If you want to know more about how to get your house ready for Airbnb check out Setting Up Your Home for Airbnb. You will find lots of helpful tips on what you need to have, how to store your personal items, and how to make it impersonal when you are gone and your home again when you are back.
What we do
When we were making the life-altering decision to travel as a lifestyle choice we saw people really only making one choice, which was selling everything they owned to be able to do this. This did not feel like it fit what we wanted. Why not you ask? My home is an investment that plays an important role in the security of whatever the future brings. We also didn’t want to travel for just week vacations either, we wanted to shake up our world and make travel our lifestyle.
What we didn’t really find much information on was how to have the best of both worlds. What we wanted was to have our cake and eat it too (“can’t have your cake and eat it too” is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Who the hell makes a cake and doesn’t eat it).
So our goals were simple; 1. Keep our home and the things we own, 2. Have the ability to return home when we needed to be home; 3. Use our home to fund our adventures. Guess what? We found a way to keep all three of those goals.
Here is the gist, we rent our home out fully furnished as a long-term rental and this actually pays our mortgage and funds our trip. Yes, you heard that right. We can rent our home and make a profit doing this. We make more money not living in our house!! Today we can travel as long or short as we want and our home helps us make that dream a reality.
There are lots of parts to consider and you need to understand what your own goals are. Figure out what fits best for you, what we do might not be what you want to do, and… you need to do you.
Comment below with ideas you may have that would be helpful for others. Also, subscribe and let me know what else you want to know about. You can also check out our soon to come Youtube channel called Out of Order Living where we walk you through our process of getting our home ready for our upcoming travel journey.
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