I saved cash by quitting a student room to become a petsitter

theguardian.com:

My university lecturer is in full flow on my laptop screen. Once upon a time, I’d have been surrounded by fellow students in a lecture hall. Or, earlier this year, I’d have been cramped at a desk in my shared house. Today, my lecture buddy is a rescue dog named Riya.

I didn’t initially consider house-sitting as an accommodation solution. It was a cheap way to experience a new city, definitely. When travelling across Australia, I’d sat for pets in exchange for accommodation using the platform Mindahome. It wasn’t until my second year of university that the budgeting dots connected.

I am a student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where a room on campus costs £5,000 a year on average. Despite the teaching for my course finishing in March, campus accommodation contracts run from September to June, leaving a huge portion of wasted rent.

Similarly, while Egham, where the university is based, has cheaper rented accommodation than central London, most contracts are a year minimum, and you’ll compromise lots for budget-friendly leases.

So, in December, I arrived at the TrustedHousesitters homepage. In exchange for pet care, sitters get free accommodation and occasionally a fridge of food or spending money at the owner’s discretion.

I set notifications for sitting jobs within an hour on public transport from the Royal Holloway, University of London campus and applied for all the suitable dates that came in. After two weeks, I had secured jobs to cover February and March, so in January I could hand in my one-month notice at my shared house.

My first job put me in the company of four labradors: Bean, Frog, Luna and Toby. Their home was a 16th century Tudor house in a village in Surrey, heated entirely by a wood-burning stove and