'Cheaper than living at home': Meet the family who spend just $5 a day on a place to live

When any dreamer decides the 9-to-5 grind isn’t for them, a decision to travel sometimes follows, often made at the expense of past or future savings.

The idea being, of course, that you can’t put a price on experience. But what if you could do it all: spend little while seeing the country?

Kirby and Jacob Gibbons from Tasmania, with their three children, have managed to do both, travelling around Australia for the better part of a year while averaging just $5 a day on accommodation.

“We discussed doing it for a long time – not seriously, but we always brought it up,” Jacob says.

”We would always say, one day we should do this, one day we should pack up everything and go travelling.

”We were up in Queensland, I was working ridiculous hours, and when that job ended, we just packed everything up and decided to go.”

The couple sold their 35-acre farm in Tasmania and anything that wouldn’t serve their lives on the road and got moving.

“We didn’t really have a plan. When we came off the boat in Melbourne from Tasmania, we thought we would just go left and go around Australia that way, because it’s easier to turn left with a caravan.”

Their caravan was set up to function completely off-grid.

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“It’s set up for free camping and there’s space in the van to store a couple of hundred litres of water. We have an en suite with a toilet and shower, so we can pull up somewhere and be self-contained for two to three weeks, because all our power is solar.,” Jacob says.

“We were surprised, living on the road is a lot cheaper than living at home, less maintenance and less bills. Without a mortgage, it’s just another big thing you’re not paying for. We watch what we spend, we don’t eat out a lot.”

The family were conscious of what they spent, with Jacob recommending a couple of apps to any keen travellers looking to take some time off work and make the road their home.

“We used a couple of apps to keep our costs down. The first was Fuel Map, which is an app that allows anyone to log on and update the price of fuel locally. If we have a long drive, we can have a look on the app and have a rough idea of where the cheapest fuel is to fill up on our drive,” he says.

“We also use Wiki Camps, where people can go and add reviews of campsites in any area. It’s good for us to log on to see how much a place to stay might cost, and whether people recommend it for kids.

“Our accommodation cost was about $5 a day on average for the first year of travelling, because we were able to find low-cost or free camping.”

He adds that the best investment they made was making their home-on-wheels entirely self-sufficient.

“If you do have the ability to just pull up anywhere, you save money and you can get to some pretty cool spots.”

Gibbons is an electrician and says he will try to pick up casual work on the rest of their travels so the couple don’t dip into their savings too much. They intend to stay on the road for a little while longer.

“We were actually thinking about buying a house in Queensland earlier this year and started looking around at houses. When we did, we realised that we weren’t ready to stop traveling yet. We’ll keep going and do another year at least.

“A couple of times in the last year or we have visited people we know and would move into their house for a few days,” he recalls. ”Those first few times, it unsettled the kids a bit and they weren’t sleeping as well. They are so used to sleeping closely and being close together.

”When we do buy again, we will probably have to stick to something fairly small. You don’t need lots of stuff, that’s one thing we have realised. Everything is much easer when you have less.

“The whole time when we were living and working in Queensland, we just wanted to pay off the mortgage. But I was working all these hours and not seeing the kids, it just kind of changed our mindset a bit.”

You can follow the family’s adventures on Instagram.