Savings: Woman saves £10,000 while travelling Australia for free by looking after pets | Personal Finance | Finance

One woman is sharing how she was able to put away £10,000 in savings while travelling to Australia for free.

Hailey Learmouth, 25, from Squamish, Canada was able to accomplish this by staying in other peoples’ homes for free.

In exchange for this, the photographer would be looking after her host’s pets and homes for anywhere between six days and three months.

While travelling Down Under, Ms Learmouth was able to live rent-free in Brisbane and the Golden Coast and saved thousands of pounds in the process.

In total, she was able to save $20,000 AUD or the equivalent of around £10,400 which helped her travel the country.

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Before leaving Canada, she Googled “how to travel for free” and came across a housesitting website.

On this site, the 25-year-old matches with homeowners and agrees to look after their places for an extended period of time.

This unique way of living has given her the opportunity to explore “underrated” places in Australia.

As well as this, Mr Learmouth has successfully saved a lot of money on rent, nights out and drinking.

Originally, the young woman first visited Australia during a university exchange programme in 2018 for four months.

She explained: “It’s been a crazy experience. When I first came here, I thought it’d be good to house-sit for a while and find my feet.

“But it’s turned into me living in other people’s houses for the last nine months. I love Australia – and it’s been a fun little journey to get here. I can confidently say through working full-time and living rent-free, I’ve saved around £10,400.”

“I met an amazing group of friends who I travelled with I knew I’d be coming back.”

During the pandemic, Mr Learmouth looked into ways she could travel without having to spend a lot of money.

This led her to create a profile on Trusted House Sitters to find a cheap way of living in Australia and only had to pay a yearly fee of £84.

Ms Learmouth added: “I was a bit older, and my standards had changed a little, but I was still very much a broke backpacker trying to cheat my way through absolutely everything!”

“I added loads of pictures of myself with dogs, talked about my experience with pet-sitting in the past, showed my personality – [I] was transparent about the fact that your dogs will get lots of walking done with me because I’m a very active person.”

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