How Home Exchange Can Improve Your Retirement 

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Cinque Terre from the balcony of a home exchange

Depending on your personality, switching homes with complete strangers may seem like a dream or a nightmare. But this mode of travel has been picking up steam for years. For millions of retirees, part of the charm of travel is stepping into someone else’s life for a while. 

Sharing Homes and Lives 

One day when retirees Marcy Lay and Ben Elliott were spending four weeks in a lovely house in Coffs Harbour, Australia, the homeowner’s brother stopped by to take them mountain biking. Meanwhile, across the world in Cape Cod, Marcy’s brother stopped at her house to take the visitors from Coffs Harbour fishing. 

While home exchanges don’t typically involve swapping relatives, this refreshing method of travel is characterized by the type of trust, openness, and conviviality that make such unexpected moments possible.     

“We traded everything – cars, bikes, relatives,” remembers Marcy. “It was cool and happening simultaneously. We felt completely comfortable in each other’s houses.”  

Lay and Elliott are veteran home exchangers with 40 exchanges worldwide under their belts. They’ve swapped for exotic spots from Cinque Terre (their exchange home view tops this article) to Cape Town to Kauai. Home swap is a mainstay of the globetrotting retirement they enjoy. It allows them to travel affordably, stay in comfortable homes wherever they are, and meet like-minded people worldwide.

What is a Home Exchange? 

Home exchange is an old concept. While there’s no way to know how long it’s been going on informally in societies around the world, its formalization began in the 1960s. That was when a few small companies or organizations in the U.S. helped teachers arrange home swaps during summer months. Then they relied on printed directories that listed homes open to exchange.  

In the early 1990s, a non-teacher named Ed Kushins, took his kids to Washington, DC. He used one of the directories to secure a home stay for the trip. The experience was positive and he thought other people would like it too. He launched his own fledgling home-exchange company in 1993. Pre-internet, the venture was slow to get rolling. After Kushins started HomeExchange.com in 1995, it grew exponentially, quickly becoming the largest home-exchange site in the world. 

Home exchange got a boost in 2006 with the release of “The Holiday.” The film stars Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet as single women who swap homes and find love. The filmmakers consulted Kushins and agreed to have the main characters use HomeExchange.com on screen in the film.   

“We used that as a springboard to propel the business,” notes Kushins. The company had 70,000 members by the time Kushins sold it to owners of a French home-exchange site in 2017. Today the site lists more than 450,000 homes in every corner of the world.  

Other home exchange sites have entered the space since Kushins printed his first directory, the most prominent of which is UK-based Love Home Swap, founded in 2011. A variety of other ventures based on similar concepts such as couch-surfing, homestays, and pet-sitting exchanges have also proliferated. 

The Best Advice for Home Exchange  

There is much to learn about home exchange, but you can learn as you go. Home exchange veterans offer newbies their best advice for embarking on this mode of travel.  

Acknowledge and Overcome Your Fears 

“It’s okay to have fears,” says Emmanuel Arnaud, CEO of HomeExchange.com. “Once you overcome your fears and do the first exchange, you’ll realize that the reality is people are nice and trustworthy. We’re a great community.” 

He tells the story of a first-time home exchanger who was nervous about a stranger coming to stay. He put Post-It notes all over his house, saying things like “Private” for rooms he didn’t want them going into. At his home swap he found a bowl of money, the car keys, and one Post-It that read, “help yourself.”  

“He realized he was putting red tape on all those fears,” says Arnaud. “And the people who were more experienced were like, ‘enjoy; have a great vacation.’”  

Get Ready for a Little Work 

Before you start home exchange, make sure this type of travel is really for you. It takes more work to set up an exchange than to book a hotel. You also have to be comfortable doing a little work during your vacation. Homeowners expect you to clean up before you leave. The rating system keeps you honest on that front, even if your conscience doesn’t. 

“This whole concept is not for everybody; it’s barely for 1% of the traveling population,” says Don Dennis of Marblehead, Massachusetts who has done over 200 home exchanges. “For people who want to be waited on by the pool and have a drink with a little umbrella brought to them every hour, this isn’t the lifestyle for them.” 

Use HomeExchange.com’s Guest Points To Get Started 

One of the changes Arnaud’s team has made to the HomeExchange.com platform since purchasing it in 2017 is implementing the Guest Points (GP) system. This kind of currency makes it easy for people to do exchanges more flexibly. The points, which you can’t buy, allow you to welcome guests into your home without swapping for theirs. They pay you GPs for their stay, which you can use to stay at someone else’s house.  

HomeExchange.com gives you starter Guest Points when you sign up for the platform and list your house for exchange. You’ll start with enough GPs to stay in someone else’s house for as much as a week or even more.  

Arnaud recommends using those GPs to be a guest first, to see what it’s like to stay in someone’s home. Then graduate to hosting after that. “It’s a great way to discover the concept,” he says.  

Think of the Exchange House as a Home Base  

Home exchange is probably not the best option for people who have a very specific and targeted idea of where they want to go and when. Exchanges take legwork to set up. You may have to compromise your plans as you discover what’s available and doable. That means that one good way to approach this form of travel is to think of the house you’ll be staying in as a home base from which you can foray to see what’s surrounding you.  

“You hit upon a spot, and you go there, and the planning is about making sure the home exchange happens and getting your transportation,” says Lay. “After that you don’t have to do any other planning. You kind of draw a 50-mile radius around the house, and you take day trips.” 

Make Your Own House Worth Trading  

You’ll want to think about how your house will feel to those coming to “live” there. Is there a lot of clutter? Will the guests have room to put their things? Are there certain inexpensive upgrades you can make, such as linens or towels, to ensure people will be comfortable?  

Think through how you can make it easy for yourself to put away personal items or empty out some closet space whenever you do an exchange. And for peace of mind, put away any sensitive documents or precious items in a locking filing cabinet or closet.  

‘Travel Anywhere, Live Like a Local, Stay for Free’ 

Many retirees have one major asset: Their home. Why not use this resource that you’ve spent years investing in to your advantage? It can help you travel the country or the world in a wonderfully affordable and serendipitous way.  

Those who swear by home exchange couldn’t be happier with it. As Dennis says, “Generally, we’ve been thrilled, just absolutely thrilled.”   

And the man who started HomeExchange.com sums up the value of the concept best: “When I started the company, I made tagline, and it’s still true: ‘Travel anywhere, live like a local, stay for free.’” 

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