EPISODE 7
June 23, 2021
Originally from Australia, Jodie and her wife Natalie have been traveling as full-time international house-and-pet sitters since early 2013. They’ve enjoyed 95% free accommodation all over the world thanks to their back-to-back housesits. With no home base and no residency anywhere, they travel with all they possess, which is less than 50 pounds each, enabling a sense of freedom with the minimalist lifestyle they now relish.
Jodie and Nat’s website internationalhousesitting.com
TRANSCRIPT:
Louise: Hello, welcome to Women Who Walk. I’m Louise Ross writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women, who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom. You can find show notes to each episode and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:46] Hello listeners. Welcome to Episode 7 of Women Who Walk. My guest today is Jodie Burnham. Originally from Australia, Jodie and her wife, Natalie have been traveling as full-time international house-and-pet sitters since early 2013. They’ve enjoyed 95% free accommodation all over the world thanks to their back-to-back housesits. With no home base and no residency anywhere, they travel with all they possess, which is less than 50 pounds each, enabling a sense of freedom with the minimalist lifestyle they now relish.
[00:01:29] As a result of housesitting changing their lives and enabling their love of travel, Nat and Jodie channel their new-found passion into creating many world firsts in the housesitting space. Including starting the first housesitter community on Facebook in late 2013, a podcast on housesitting, a virtual summit on housesitting and a live housesitting academy set in Greece.
[00:01:58] Actually, Greece is where we first met, when I stayed with the girls on an amazing property they were housesitting on the island of Evia, just outside Athens. Much to my astonishment it was snowing when I arrived for that visit in early January. And with the mighty Agean at our backdoor and slushy snow on the road in, where the car was seriously bogged for several days, there was little to do, but huddle and talk around the fire since the snow had knocked out the electricity, and that was the week the girls began evolving their idea for their housesitting summit.
Jodie & Nat & snow-bogged car on the island of Evia, Greece. Photo by Louise Ross
[00:02:37] Jodie and Nat are best known for their signature program, the International Housesitting Academy, which features their 10-C Confidence and Competency Roadmap, helping anyone learn the inner circle strategies for becoming an in-demand sitter with tips and advice from many of the world’s most experienced and sought after housesitters. They’re also the authors of International Housesitting a Kindle book available since 2015 and which has recently become available as a free download on their website.
[00:03:15] It was really fun for me to interview Jodie for this episode, we had a few giggles over some of her stories, and this is the first time we’ve chatted since I last caught up with her and Nat in-person when we three were all in Sydney, in Australia in late 2015. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Jodie certainly has a lot to share on the topic of housesitting around the world.
[00:03:53] Hi Jody,
[00:03:54] Jodie: Hi Louise,
[00:03:55] Louise: So good to see you. It’s been a few years, but this is technology. We get to see each other online. I’m about six hours ahead of you in Lisbon. So why don’t you go ahead and set the scene for us. Tell us where you are, and tell us what you see out your window, the landscape beyond the house where you are.
[00:04:12] Jodie: Okay. So a little fun fact: I’m actually in Mexico in the Sierras, and being at 2,200 meters above sea level, means that the house that I’m housesitting is on top of the equivalent of Mount Kosciuszko. We’re actually looking down over the beautiful city of Guanajuato, which was described to us when we first came here in 2017, as like a little piece of Europe in the Mexican Sierras cause there’s old cobblestones and colored buildings and tunnels under the city. It’s very, very unique. It’s an awesome place.
Storm over Guanajuato, Mexico. Photo by Natalie Smith
[00:04:43] Louise: It sounds gorgeous. I think I have seen some pictures you posted on Facebook of the cobbled streets. And it really does remind me a bit of Lisbon, these little tight streets with beautiful buildings, and colonial buildings aren’t they?
[00:04:56] Jodie: Yes. Yeah.
[00:04:57] Louise: Now, you mentioned Mount Kosciuszko, listeners might notice that we both have a similar accent from Australia. So tell us a little about your journey. You left Australia, I think back in 2013. Is that right?
[00:05:11] Jodie: No, actually I left Australia in 2011, and initially went to Dubai, because my wife Nat, my now wife, not that we were at the time, was offered a job in Dubai. It was our first time in a same-sex relationship. We were sort of running away from Australia to try to navigate this world on our own, without influence of family and friends. And of course, a lot of our family and friends were like, you want to do this in Dubai? You’re going to the Middle East!
[00:05:35] But yeah, so she got offered at a job and we went there. And then I started getting some issues with not being able to be recognized as a spouse to get a spousal visa. To work for yourself, and this was a long time ago, it was expensive to set up something. You’re not even officially allowed to work from home. You’re supposed to rent an office. I now know there’s things like hot desks, etcetera. But back then her alpha-male boss said, ‘We can fix you a visa problem, Jodie, let’s start a company. I need to get some visas for some of my friends from Iran, and this will be a great deal and you can be the managing director and away we go, we’ll start this business.’
[00:06:10] Anyway, I got swept up in his enthusiasm and the relief of being able to not run out of the country every 30 days. So we put a lot of money in, and started a business there, and it absolutely failed. The reason for going to Dubai was so that we could make enough money to travel the world and do what we really love to do. But in essence, we actually lost everything. And in our early 40s, were not only losing finances, lost our pride as well. We were really having to lick our wounds.
[00:06:39] Louise: That’s quite a story. And of course I absolutely have to ask. What next? Where did you go? What did you do?
[00:06:45] Jodie: That’s where housesitting literally saved us. Leaving Dubai, we had no credit cards, they were all fully maxed out. We had no savings left. All we had was a bit more of a collection of gold jewelry than what we do now and $300 and a one-way ticket to London. So we thought if we just do some housesitting, we can not have to worry about bills and rent and all of that. And we’ll work out a way to get back on our feet.
[00:07:10] We just never considered going back to Australia and getting a job and living with parents. It was like, can’t do that. Can’t do that. And yet within six months of doing the housesitting, we were sitting in a beautiful French property with 35 acres, a 20-meter infinity pool. It was a multi-million dollar renovated farmhouse and we’re sitting there cutting each other’s hair with kitchen scissors because we couldn’t afford to go to the hairdresser and we’re looking around at all this abundance going, what if we just kept doing this. This is pretty amazing.
[00:07:42] We get to have some puppy love, some kitty love, that was soothing and nurturing us in our healing of the pride. And we were surrounded by abundance. I mean, our kitchen had four different types of ovens and it was just crazy. We had so much and thought, what if we just kept doing it? And we did, and we haven’t stopped. And that’s eight and a half years ago at the time of this recording.
[00:08:07] Louise: How did you do that, Jodie? You said that was the beginning of your housesitting internationally. But it, it sounds like a fairy tale. How did you get to the next housesit and then the next housesit and so on?
[00:08:20] Jodie: Well, I guess to go back, the only thing that I regret not having more awareness around is that, when my marriage first ended, I took on a contract job down in Sydney. And as you know, Sydney is pretty expensive and I was like, what’s the point of taking on this contract job if I have to pay lots of money to get accommodation. Staying with friends is fine but it was going to be a good five or six weeks. I don’t even know how I knew. I just knew to look up a housesitting site. And I got a housesit for five weeks with this cute little Jack Russell. Had an absolute ball. And then everything eventuated with Nat, and then Dubai. And we really kicked ourselves. Why did we not think that this was an international thing? Why did I just think it was this one-off thing that I needed in Sydney?
[00:09:02] So when the back was against the wall, asking, what is the way out of this horrific situation we’re in in Dubai where all of our money is just disappearing, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And it just hit me: Let me check this housesitting thing. And it opened up this whole world of, wow, there’s people all around the world that actually need people to come and look after their homes and pets just like I did in Sydney.
[00:09:23] Having a little bit of a marketing understanding, or at least the psychology of marketing, writing up the profile, knowing that it was for the reader, and we had no problem with jumping on a video -this is back in end of 2012 start of 2013- and having that on our profile, showing who we were. Then it was really funny, cause whenever we would interview, it’s a bit like applying for a job, whenever we would interview for the housesit, and then arrive, the people would say, you’re just like you are in your video. It just intuitively flowed. They just kept lining up and I’m talking like across the Atlantic, across the Pacific, they just kept lining up and we just kept saying yes to the ones that felt right.
[00:10:06] Louise: It really was meant to be wasn’t it?
[00:10:08] Jodie: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:10:10] Louise: You’ve been able to move about the world, doing your housesits with approximately 50 pounds of luggage. I mean, that’s incredible. Tell us, what’s it like to free yourself to that extent where you’re unencumbered by stuff.
[00:10:28] Jodie: This has been a work in progress. It’s not that easy for most people to go from, oh, here’s a house full of stuff to, bang, I’m walking out the door and this is all I own now. It is a kind of over long period culling type of process. I think the thing that stuck in my mind the most, I don’t have children, Nat does, but for me, it was like, when you’re gone, what do you get to take with you? Having been through experiences and seeing friends going through experiences of where parents or loved ones, leave this realm, and they’re left with all their stuff. And what do you do with it?
[00:11:05] I wouldn’t say we’re a hundred percent environmentalist or a hundred percent into sustainability, but we have a really good awareness and we like to do what we can. And this is our little version of not adding to consumerism. It’s that lower footprint type of element, which some people will say, well, you still fly places. Well, only when we have to. We do try and do overland as much as we can as well.
[00:11:29] We’ve become great thrift shoppers. We even thrift shop here in Mexico and we get stuff with labels still on it. We get rid of what we don’t need to get what we do need as we go. And when we get into somebody’s home, we’re the stewards of their possessions. So we still get to feel as if we’re getting the enjoyment out of these things, but we don’t necessarily need to own them. So, yes, you drag a bag along physically and metaphysically and as you start releasing stuff, you really start releasing physically and metaphysically. It’s very, very freeing. It’s like standing up taller.
[00:12:04] Louise: You’ve mentioned Nat, your wife, and I wonder along the way, if there’s been any discrimination, because you’re two women, married, perhaps encountering particular belief systems that don’t support the fact that you are married. Can you talk a bit about that?
Jodie and Nat, New York
[00:12:21] Jodie: We’re both believers in creating your own reality. It’s your lens. Your lens on the world is something that we believe is how the world shows up for us. How we view outside of us tends to be the experience that we create for ourselves. To be honest, we’ve had amazing experiences. I think out of all the housesits that we’ve done, there’s literally only been one couple who were a little bit coy and they said, ‘ we didn’t know if you needed two bedrooms when you came to stay or if you were wanting one bedroom.’
[00:12:54] Other than that, everybody’s been totally, totally fine. We quite often get called The Girls, which we love. The only kind of semi weird experience was actually in Dubai. Remember Tony Greg, the cricket commentator, he was at a bar with another cricket commentator that we didn’t recognize, who was from Sri Lanka. We ended up just talking to him and Tony Greg was amazing, rest his soul now, but to hear all of his stories about what happened with cricket in Australia and Kerry Packer and all this stuff. And this other guy was, I guess he was drinking as well, he used to be a professional player for Sri Lanka. And he’s now a commentator with the international cricket board, and he was just a bit weird, cause when we went to leave, he hopped into the lift and was like, ‘So you girls, you want a man? And it was like, Dude, come on!
[00:13:47] Louise: Oh boy, not nice. So tell us, Jodie, could you tell us how many housesits have you done? And then what was one of the best or the craziest or the most interesting situation that you’ve had?
[00:14:07] Jodie: Okay. I’m opening up my notes on my phone because I do actually have notes of how many sits we’ve done. And of course this last year has been a little bit different. We had to rent, but it didn’t last long. We agreed to a term rent of up to six months, but we ended up getting out of there in less than three months. Just having a look here. Now we have done, I think it’s 70, 78 housesits around the world and have looked after over 150 different animals.
[00:14:40] Louise: How many countries is that?
[00:14:43] Jodie: For physical housesitting? I think it’s about 24. We’ve probably visited a few more, but not had housesits in those countries .
[00:14:52] Louise: Well, 24 countries is still substantial and then, can you tell us the best or most interesting or craziest situations?
[00:15:01] Jodie: The question of best is always really tough, because the animals have their own personalities. The home has great things and weird quirks, and then, the areas, or the cost of living, like there’s always just too many things to weigh up to call what is a quote- unquote best, but some really unusual situations. The funniest one was in our first year. We did an interview over Skype and the lady that was taking us on for her place in Costa Rica, didn’t have a video camera, so she couldn’t show us the house. She’d posted a couple of photos, but we still just didn’t see it. We didn’t even know what she looked like.
[00:15:36] When it came to the arrangements of arriving, because where they were was about a four-hour drive from the international airport, she said, ‘look, it makes the most sense that if you guys arrive on the same day that I’m flying out, so that my friend can drive me up, and then pick you up to bring you back,’ which meant that we didn’t see her because she was already checked in. And when we arrived, we, find her friend and off we go. So it takes this big, long trip down and her friend drops us off on the main road and then her neighbor picks us up to take us up this little track to get up to her house. We arrived just on dusk and we knew where the key was. We got the key and open the door, trying to find light switches. We’ve got a couple of dogs barking at us. And another one looking at us very sheepishly and we walk in here’s this big piece of paper saying, the white one’s named Coco, the black one’s named Bitsy, the brown one’s named Flaca, and the cat’s name is Felix.
[00:16:33] And then the next day, another neighbor pops over on her quad bike, cause everyone rides quad bikes around in the Costa Rican jungle. And she’s like, ‘Hey, I’m Linda, blah, blah, blah.’ We ended up becoming really good friends with her and she had it fascinating story. I mean, you talk about Women Who Walk. She actually used to be in the ’70s Hugh Hefner’s right-hand woman. She ran the show for Hugh Hefner and she was as gay, as gay as well. And that was even funnier, but we had this fascinating experience. And then when we left we had the same thing. So we never met Leanne. We never met the lady of this house. We looked after her animals for a month, got to know all the neighbors, all the neighbors were telling Leanne about us. Thankfully we got an opportunity to go back six months later and finally had a couple of days with her, but the crazy amount of trust involved is what has always been so heartwarming for us. It’s always just gives us faith in humanity and people.
[00:17:29] A lot of people we housesit for are primarily expats, so I think they have that different mindset anyway, about opening their doors to strangers. When you’ve got a lot of expats, you tend to have a lot of rescue animals. So there’s just this sense or energy in the animals of like, I feel so lucky that I’ve found love and I’ve found a home, so we don’t have a lot of issues. We’ve had some amazing experiences and crazy experiences. I got to drive a six-month-old Porsche Macan in Breckenridge, Colorado, which was pretty exciting. I think we drove down and meet you.
[00:18:04] Louise: That’s right. I remember. Yep.
[00:18:07] Jodie: So there’s been some amazing experiences. One of the funniest ones is actually at the start of 2020, looking after five sheep and a cow in Vermont. We were knee deep in snow and these cows, these sheep were just hilarious; their little tails would wag and they want to get patted all the time. it was just like so cool. I love it.
[00:18:25] Louise: You mentioned trust Jodie, that the people that you’re housesitting have an enormous amount of trust in you or that they trust the whole situation. It feels like that’s equal for you and Nat and for the people that you’re housesitting for, perhaps because of that trust that continues to open up all these opportunities.
[00:18:44] Jodie: We do call it the trust economy, funnily enough. You’re right. It’s as much trust required on our side, as there is required on the homeowner’s side. But we’ve made friends all around the world now because of doing this and we’ve gone back to a number of places. If I come and housesit for you now, you have that level of comfort, and then next year, like I’m going away again, Jodie and Nat can you come back? It’s just easier if we can, rather than you having to interview somebody else, get to know somebody else.
[00:19:14] What we have done over the years is a personal referral network. So it was like, we can’t make it, let’s check in with our network, see who might be available. So we’ve had this inner circle referral network running for many years now. And thankfully we’ve had some opportunities to meet up with those fellow sitters.
[00:19:31] Louise: This might be a good time to transition to you telling a little bit more about the business that you’ve set up around your housesitting. You have this network of housesitters, but this has come as a result of you creating an online academy, have I got that right?
[00:19:46] Jodie: Actually, that first year, at that French property, when we made the decision to continue with this, we did a little bit of commission-based selling online. We did a little bit of services, uh, Nat, who is ex Australian, federal police, who literally still only types with two fingers, no matter how many times she had to go back to typing remedial classes. I had to teach her how to use the computer. And it turns out after all these years, she’s an amazing web designer.
[00:20:14] So we’ve picked up sort of little jobs along the way doing that. And understanding marketing or learning more about marketing, always had kind of a fascination with it, was like, well, what do you get asked the most? And what could you talk about till the cows come home? We’re in the UK and this girl knocked at the door and she was doing a fundraiser and we said, oh, we’re not actually from here, happy to give you money. She says, ‘oh look, I can’t receipt you, and what do you mean you’re not from here and what are you doing here?’ And it’s like, we’re housesitting and the next place we’re going to is Costa Rica. And she was like, ‘You have literally changed my world. I had no idea this existed. I want to do this.’
[00:20:53] We both walked inside after she left and went, okay, I think this is a sign. We were literally just asking about, well, what is it that people ask us or what have you and we realized that we’d been asked about it 40 times. So the first thing we did was register the domain international house sitting. So that was at the end of 2013. And we started blogging with it.
[00:21:12] Through our Dubai debacle, we’d ended up accumulating this app creation software for magazines. We were like, what if we created a digital magazine around housesitting? We could interview people and get their stories and put in the magazine. All of that was going great. We had this fantastic idea. And then, oh, hang on, we don’t have any money to advertise. How do we actually get this magazine out to people? So we started a Facebook group simply because we needed an audience to talk to.
[00:21:39] We also realized the websites that list housesitting opportunities, you’ve got the homeowner and you’ve got the housesitter but, homeowners can’t talk to other homeowners and housesitters can’t talk to other housesitters. It’s only that one-way communication. And we thought this is crazy. So we started this Facebook group and it was the first one to just go, bang viral big.
[00:22:01] About six months into 2014, after working what felt like 24/7 answering the same questions over and over and over, a friend piped up and said, ‘I love what you guys are doing. I’ve seen how fast your group has grown. Can I interview you? But if we do an interview, have you got an offer to, to give people?’ We’re like, oh no. And he says, ‘well, you got two days to come up with something.’
[00:22:26] We sat down and thought, well, we’ve answered these questions for the last six months. What were the main questions? What is repeating itself? And I swear it was like 15 minutes, we’d come up with the 10 steps of going from having no idea that housesitting exists through to getting referrals sits around the world. We called it our 10-C Confidence and Competence Roadmap. We got onto our friend’s interview, and we said we’re calling it the Housesitting Academy and here’s the 10 steps of how to go from zero to hero.
[00:23:01] Before we’d even created a single ounce of content, we sold 12 places. It was proof of concept and we went right, okay. And funnily enough, our housesitting took us to Barbados and that is where we first recorded all of our videos for the Housesitting Academy at a housesit on Barbados, which was pretty damn cool.
[00:23:22] That became our digital course and program. Another year later, a travel podcaster reached out to say, ‘Hey, I see you’ve got your course. I’ve got this idea of creating a book series, could we look at your course and extract some of it to write it into a book?’ He ended up publishing a Kindle book, which this year, so that’s six years later, he’s just given us the rights back, so we can now give it away for free! Our original 10-C Roadmap, the extracts of the course, you can download it at www.internationalHousesitting.com, which is really exciting.
[00:23:56] You can get the book for free and then if you want to get more in-depth knowledge and more experience from other people, cause we’ve been doing interviews and all sorts of crazy stuff over the years, like we’ve run a virtual summit. We did a short-series podcast called Housesitting Legends. We’ve got some crazy stories from fellow housesitters. Basically everything we’ve learned about travel hacking as well, we’ve put it together into this new bundle of digital assets. So if anyone wants to go further than the book, like the book will literally give you everything you need, but if you’re more interested in different people’s stories and that inspires you, then the course is available for sale after that as well.
[00:24:34] Louise: You’ve got an enormous amount of content and offering for people who are interested in this kind of lifestyle. And then over the years, have you seen that there has been an increase in people wanting to do what you’re doing?
[00:24:47] Jodie: There has. And then 2020 hit. When you’ve got an abundance mindset is probably the best way to describe it, there are people that will have come into the space over the years and have gone, oh, it’s so competitive now. There’s so many people doing it. There’s so many more websites. How do I stand out if I’m starting? And it’s like, that’s what we teach you through the book and the course is that how to stand out part, because not everybody has a marketing background. How to put your best foot forward? So it really doesn’t matter if you’re the brand newbie or you’ve been around the block, like we have. I mean, we’ve actually been rejected on a housesit in Ireland, because the lady said that we were too experienced and that she was worried that we’d think her house wasn’t good enough and it’s like, oh my God, we’ve lived in the jungle, Love, it’s okay.
[00:25:31] Not everything makes sense, but then everything is perfect. So then a newer housesitter got the opportunity to do that housesit, not us. Where things were getting to … it’s a little bit like watching the markets, everything was rising up and everyone was feeling like there’s lots of competition and there’s too much out there, and I paid for a website for a year and I got nothing out of it. And then 2020 hits. And all of the people that had bookings for that year, all of the people that couldn’t get out of their countries, all of the people that, literally had to pivot, a lot of them have decided to just take a break for a while.
[00:26:06] That means there’s a door opening again for people to come back in. It’s almost like a market correction is how I’m seeing it. You can still pretty much go out into any suburb of any city and talk about that you’re going to have a total stranger come into your home and people will look at you like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why would you do that? So it’s still relatively unknown.
[00:26:27] We like to call it a travel hack because it has been. It’s been a travel hack for us. A way to enable us to do what we first went to Dubai to save up our money and is to be able to travel the world. But this has been so much more rewarding and fulfilling.
[00:26:43] Louise: Do you and Nat imagine doing this till you retire? I mean, how many years do you still have in you?
[00:26:50] Jodie: What is retirement? One of our friends says, is it retire or is it just rewire? And it’s like, well, I think we’ve already rewired and yet, no, we have no plan on stopping. We’ll just do this for as long as we physically can, cause it’s amazing.
[00:27:07] Louise: Good for you. So we’ve rendezvoused now in two different countries, in Greece where we first met, and then in Colorado, where you were housesitting near where I lived.
Evia Greece, without snow, & some of the pets on the housesitting property
[00:27:16] Jodie: And Australia.
[00:27:17] Louise: And Australia! That’s right, we rendezvoused in Sydney. So you both have to come here. You have to find a housesit in Portugal.
[00:27:24] Jodie: We still haven’t been to Portugal. I can’t believe it.
[00:27:26] Louise: Well, how will listeners find you Jodie? You’ve mentioned your website, but tell us again and any other social media sites that you’d like to bring to the listener’s attention.
[00:27:35] Jodie: Definitely check out our book at internationalhousesitting.com. So it was like the three words, how they sound <international housesitting dot com> Our personal branding, like our social stuff, we actually did Nat n Jodie. And that sounds really weird when you’re speaking, because it’s like Nat, N A T and then N, as in the shortened version of ‘and,’ Jodie, J O D I E. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and YouTube. I also spend a fair bit of time on clubhouse if anybody is in clubhouse. I have secured a club about international housesitting. I haven’t done a lot of rooms as yet, but that will be changing. I’ve just had so many people interested in it, so I’m happy to show up there and talk on a regular basis about that.
[00:28:19] Louise: Well, thank you so much for your time, because it sounds to me as though you do an enormous amount of interviews and that you really make yourself available to the housesitting community as a source of wisdom. Thank you, Jodie.
[00:28:32] Jodie: You’re very welcome. Catch up with us, but you can also look at all the other amazing resources out there as well. There’s some great Facebook groups, and the magazine that I mentioned, I didn’t quite finish the story, we ended up selling it. The couple who bought it are really good friends and they have, I don’t know how many issues now, but they’ve been running for the last few years and it’s a massive, massive resource. So definitely go to Housesitting Magazine, as well, so that you can get a hold of all those back issues.
[00:28:58] Louise: Well, Listeners, if you’re interested in housesitting there’s some fantastic resources that Jodie’s just given you. Thanks again, Jodie.
[00:29:06] Jodie: You’re welcome. Bye bye.
[00:29:08] Louise: Thank you for listening today. And if you would like to read a transcript of this episode, you can find it in the show notes on my website, LouiseRoss.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.