From Three Bedrooms To Two Backpacks: The Life of a Global House Sitter
From Colorado homeowner to full-time house sitter, Alicia shows how one rental, remote work, and a stack of five-star reviews can add up to a sustainable life on the move.
Alicia and her husband traded a three-bedroom life in Colorado for two backpacks and a world map, building a slow-travel life funded by remote work, a rental house back home, and an almost comically minimalist approach to bills. Over the last two and a half years, they have stitched together a life that moves from Costa Rica to Cambodia, from house sits in South Korea to rainy weeks in Wales, with spreadsheets, pet cuddles, and the occasional blown fuse holding it all together.
From Suburbs To Suitcases
Their story starts with a decision most people only daydream about: sell nearly everything, keep one house as a rental, and leave. Once Alicia’s child became an adult and moved out, she and her husband spent about six months dismantling “normal life” so they could travel full-time with no car, no insurance payments, and almost no overhead beyond flights and food. The spark was part wanderlust, part wake-up call: after her husband lost his father soon after his retirement, the idea of saving “the good years” for later no longer felt like a safe bet.
House Sitting As A Travel Hack
House sitting became their secret weapon, especially in places where lodging could have blown up their budget.
They use a platform called Trusted Housesitters, paying about $200 a year for a premium membership that adds perks like cancellation coverage when an owner’s plans change at the last minute, as happened with a Scotland sit after a death in the family. To make themselves attractive to homeowners, Alicia started locally: Thanksgiving and Christmas sits around Denver helped her stack reviews quickly, trading time away from her own family for the social proof that now makes it much easier to land sits all over the world.
What House Sitting Really Looks Like
From the outside, it looks like a highlight reel: Costa Rica sunsets, Australian detours, a cat in Cambodia, and a pup currently snoozing beside her in a suburb of South Wales. In reality, it is also breaker panels that trip in a Welsh storm, outdoor outlets that short out in the rain, and plumbing mishaps in Mexico that require the kind of calm only long-time homeowners and handy spouses can bring. House sits give them pause points between tourist sprints: they get to cook again, shop at the local grocery store, and taste what “normal life” feels like in places they would never otherwise visit, like a random neighborhood outside Newport, Wales.
Money, Pets, And Trust
The house-sitting economy runs on trust, reviews, and pets, mostly dogs and cats, with the occasional chickens or fish tossed in. Owners avoid expensive kennels and keep their animals in familiar surroundings, while sitters trade pet care and basic house stewardship for free lodging—a powerful swap when hotels are the biggest line item after airfare. Alicia is a self-described lifelong dog person who has become a reluctant cat convert, while her husband, who used to work 14-hour days, now jokes that she is his sugar mama as he handles repairs and logistics on the road.
A Life Lived Through Time Zones
Alicia’s travel years don’t look like “a trip”—they look like chains. In 2024 alone, she strung together Fiji, New Zealand, three months in Australia, then hopped through Bali, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, South Korea, and Japan, with house sits woven in where costs were highest and options existed. Another year saw her start in Japan in winter to finally see the snow monkeys, swing back through months of U.S. house sits, then on to Montreal, a two-week tour across Morocco with Australian homeowners-turned-friends, a brief pause in Portugal, and finally a series of sits across Scotland, England, and Wales.
Community On The Road
The lifestyle can look solitary, but there is a whole parallel universe of people doing some version of the same thing. Alicia is part of a Facebook community of full-time or most-of-the-time travelers who meet up wherever their paths cross for shared meals and travel talk, and she has even joined homeowners she once sat for on later trips, like the Morocco tour.
Alicia’s Substack and Instagram @adg_photo have become the narrative spine for this life: she shares polished stories on a delay in her newsletter and posts real-time glimpses of trains, markets, and mountain views on social media, even if she insists she is still not fully comfortable on camera.
Why It Works For Them
Underneath the romantic surface is a simple, ruthless clarity about priorities. Alicia wanted travel more than she wanted square footage, routine, or a conventional career ladder, and she built a model—no bills, one rental, remote work, and house sittings—that made that choice financially viable. Her husband initially doubted the feasibility of the plan but eventually agreed, in part because he recognized she had spent years compromising for his preferred stability, and in part because grief made both of them more honest about how little time anyone is guaranteed.
The Quiet Tradeoffs
Even a life that looks like a permanent vacation still has spreadsheets, stress, and homesickness woven in. Alicia still has work deadlines, long days, and the constant hum of planning the next move, while friends back home navigate milestones she only sees from afar. Yet, each time they arrive in a new suburb, are picked up at a station by generous homeowners who feed them Indian food or French home cooking, or kayak in a Norwegian fjord in December “just because,” it becomes harder to imagine trading this for a single fixed address again.
In the end, their story is not a template so much as a permission slip: if travel and freedom sit at the top of your list, life can be re-engineered around them—but only if you are willing to trade comfort and certainty for backpacks, pets, and a very well-used passport.
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If this glimpse into global house sitting sparked some ideas, you might also enjoy these other Travel Tales from Oceania.
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