When you are getting ready to take the trip of a lifetime, you want to ensure one thing: that you set your place up to be the perfect sublet. The reason setting up your place to be the perfect sublet is so important is because this can actually make a huge difference in the affordability of your trip. If you have someone covering your apartment back home, you can relax about your spending abroad, knowing that you are probably spending less each day on that youth hostel or short-term rental than in the expensive area you live in back home. While there are so many other things to take care of prior to taking your trip, you need to make sure that you take care of your home space, too.
When our family was getting ready to head out on our four-month trip to China (my wife’s family is Chinese), we had to arrange visas, squeeze in doctors appointments for the baby, get ahead on work and arrange for our work to all continue remotely, line up a home in China, see all of our friends and family as much as possible, and more. It felt extremely busy at the time.
But you better believe I took setting our apartment up for subletting extremely seriously – it was my number one priority, and for good reason. Because we have our apartment’s rent covered completely, we do not have to worry about almost $10,000 in expenses back home during this four month trip. That means we can spend $1,600 a month on a sweet apartment in Beijing and not worry, because we are actually saving $900 a month! But that is only possible because we made sure to invest in great items to round out our place before we showed it to interested parties. Lakeside Collections really helped us fill out our home office, as well as the living room. We packed up all of the baby items, and replaced it with adult goodies like a coffee table, side table, and reading lamp, and voila, the baby’s play area became a comfortable reading nook. Our potential renter fell in love, and wrote us a check for the entire four-month sublet in full, a full two months before she even moved in! Talk about easily funding our trip abroad…
