Housing is almost certainly the biggest bite out of your budget. If you had no rent or mortgage payments, what could that mean for your bottom line?
An apartment-house manager can negotiate free rent and a small or large salary, depending on the size of the complex. I do this. Sometimes I wish I didn't -- when a tipsy tenant loses his keys at 2 a.m., for example, or when a washing machine leaks soapsuds all over the laundry-room floor.
Shelter can also be had in exchange for child or elder care, helping a disabled person live at home or even through an internship at an organic farm. But not everyone has the skills or the desire for long-term commitments that these gigs require.
Indeed, you might already have a job or might be a retiree who doesn't want one at all. For those folks, housesitting, caretaking and "workamping" offer shelter with minimal obligations -- and perhaps a chance at a little adventure.
Some of these jobs are fairly prosaic: Watch my condo in Phoenix while I spend a month visiting my grandkids. But you also may luck into, say, a 51-week-a-year gig at a millionaire's ski chalet or Hawaiian estate. And as an RV-owning workamper, you can see as much or as little of the country as you like.
Mind you, these usually aren't completely free flops. You will likely do some sort of work: tending landscapes and walking dogs, serving as day host in a campground, selling Christmas trees or running carnival games at an amusement park.
But get rid of shelter costs, and you've just slain your biggest budget dragon.
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That lived-in look
Freelance writer Tiffany Owens and her husband, an artist, haven't paid rent for almost three years. Their caretaking job on 150 acres in Maine even provides a salary and health insurance."Our spare time is devoted to creative projects," says Owens, 41. "This property is beautiful. It's something (we) could never afford. They're paying us to live here."
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Some jobs require only that you be there. Catherine Reichling spent two and a half years on a 2-acre property about 20 miles outside Fort Worth, Texas. Temporary jobs brought in enough scratch to cover food and other expenses.
"I had complete and total freedom to do whatever I wanted," Reichling says.
She's spent most of the past 10 years housesitting, sometimes for friends and sometimes for people who advertise in The Caretaker Gazette. Reichling, 53, has lived in "some luxurious places," often with swimming pools. Mostly she's taken jobs that simply require a place "to look lived-in."
Not just a free ride
Without someone on site, properties are ripe for theft, vandalism or maintenance snafus. Some clients are ordinary homeowners, and some are wealthy folks who use a multimillion-dollar vacation home just a week or two a year.Lately, Gazette Publisher Gary Dunn, himself a former caretaker, has been taking ads from real-estate investors whose properties proved unflippable, thanks to the economic downturn. "We get (investors) who say, 'I just spent $5,000 on repair after a break-in.'" Having a resident keeps a home from being stripped of its copper pipes or from being turned into a party house or a shelter for squatters.
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Expenses NOT to trimWhen times are tough, there are some expenses you should try not to cut.
Elke, a 63-year-old Florida resident who asked her last name not be used, is the groundskeeper on an 18-acre property in exchange for a two-bedroom cottage. She's also around to pick up the mail and feed the pets when the homeowners are away.
Elke was a real-estate agent when the Florida housing market and the economy tanked. She sold her town house and sought a caretaking job "because it takes care of such a huge chunk of monthly expenses."
The work takes about 15 hours a week and has produced an unexpected benefit: increased physical fitness. Elke has begun to manage a few vacation homes in the area; in time, these references plus her caretaking job could lead to positions elsewhere.
"I've seen ads (for jobs) in South America, in Europe, in Canada," she says.
Continued: We're on wheels, and they roll
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