Frugal Side Hustle: Airbnb Rooms & Co-Hosting

Published Nov 21, 2023, 7:00 AM

You don’t need to own any property to host an Airbnb and make a couple of extra dollars along the way. This episode, Jen and Jill introduce you to the world of Airbnb rooms and co-hosting—it can be a full-time job or a profitable source of income while you keep your full-time job. 

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Episode three point fifty six Frugal Side Hustle Airbnb Rooms and co Hosting.

Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast, where you'll learn to save money, embrace simplicity, and deliver your life. Here your hosts Jen and Jill.

Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast. My name is Jen, my name is Jell, and today we are continuing our Frugal side Hustle series with Airbnb rooms and co hosting. And this is for people who may be interested in one day owning rental property, maybe one day doing short term rentals I don't know, or wondering if it is for you. This is going to be the perfect side hustle for you because you do not need to own any property at all, or even own your property that you live in, to do Airbnb rooms and co hosting and to make extra money using Airbnb. It's great and we're going to talk all about it.

This is a good one. I learned stuff just reading the article, so I'm looking forward to sharing our new learnings with you. But first, our sponsors. Do you like the sound of three and one, the thought of having one thing that actually does three things? What about a ten in one or better? Yet a nineteen in one kind of like Mulani and makeup brand off.

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Yay.

So, if you are looking to make extra money, which so many of you are, we do a poll or survey question every single friend letter that we send out, and one of the things that you guys are really interested in an addition to paying off debt, is obviously making more money. That kind of goes hand in hand. So we do these Frugal side Hustle episodes every other month to show you that there are things you can do in your spare time that actually do make legitimate money that can either a go on and turn into a full business if leaving your job is something you want to do, or can be profitable and still keeping your full time job. So you know, we don't do like uber eats and teaching English online all these things where you need kind of mostly other platforms to be successful. These are things while we are talking about AIRBNBB. These are things that you can skills that you can take to business off Airbnb. Airbnb is just a fantastic place to get started with them because there are so many people on Airbnb, and we will talk all about that. I am We have done Airbnb rentals for six years, and we started with renting a room in our house and we are currently still quasi doing that. But we'll talk about the lad We've never owned just a property fully for Airbnb. It's always been where we are. We've always used what we have. So this is something that I know a lot about. So I guess I am our guest expert on this episode today. You'll notice normally we talk with somebody who is actively doing this and making money on it, not somebody that makes money selling a course on it. We talk to somebody actually doing it and so sometimes that's hard to find on short notice. But we also have some other episodes like episode three thirty eight self Publishing with MK Williams or episode three oh eight Becoming a Virtual Assistant with Shatoria Smith. So look back in our archives. You can go to Frugal friendspodcast dot com and in the episodes, just search Frugal Side Hustle. You'll see all of the Frugal Side essel episodes we've done. We've done a bunch of great ones, so let's get into this one. Instead of interviewing me because that's boring, we are going to do just a normal episode where we go through these articles, but I will have a lot to say on each of them. Yes, is that okay, Jill?

That's that's more than okay. It's all I ever wanted is to hear Jen's hot expert take while she wears her hot Girl lipstick. So this first article comes from IgMs and it's titled how to make money on Airbnb without owning property. I love it when this can be accessible if you feel like hosting and some more kind of hands on arranging is right up your alley and within your skill set. But you don't have property, or you don't have room within your property to make renting it out feasible, there's still options for you. So the first one, there's ten listed on here, the first one I'm going to highlight is number two, which is the possibility of becoming a short term rental property manager. Now this was helpful for me because I always thought and have seen in my own Airbnb rentals, how sometimes it's not the actual owner of the property who is kind of managing all of the ins and outs and is the person that I communicate with, and I've always deemed them as the property manager. But they are highlighting something really helpful in this where you could be a property manager, and you are. It is what it sounds like, managing the property for the owner, managing the needs of the property owners, confirming the bookings, communicating with guests, supervising the check in process, whatever extent that's necessary, maybe even doing some of the marketing property instructions. Organizing the cleaning and maintenance tasks doesn't mean that you are doing them, but at least organizing them. The cleaning again and maintenance, so that includes anything in everything if something breaks needs repair, as well as the routine cleaning after guests. What they highlight here that was helpful for me and understanding this that in many states there are legal requirements for terming yourself a property manager. Not all states, but some states will require a real estate broker's license or a property manager's license. So just keep this in mind that if you want to go to that highest tier of managing property rentals, just bear in mind that you might need some of those additional qualifications if it's not required in your state. Great, So some of the pros that they list of this way of earning some extra income would be that your hours can be flexible, that you don't need property to get started with property management. But then some of the cons could be that you might need some of that further education or licensing, which can be a time commitment that can be expensive. Managing multiple rentals for other hosts can be a challenging task, so whether you want to be doing this for a lot of different people, it can feel like you're juggling a lot. And what I'm coming to understand is that this property management is maybe kind of the highest tier of managing Airbnb, where you're essentially doing everything except owning the property, which differs from what we'll talk about later of co hosting, which might be a little bit lower tier from the property management. You're not required to have maybe the licensing or background and education. But if you already have this background, it's something you've been interested in. This still could be a real decent side hustle of that highest tier of property management.

Yeah, and so that kind of goes into the third one, which has become a co host to an Airbnb host. And so this is right on the Airbnb platform. This is something that is specific to Airbnb, but you can take the skills you learn as a co host and take it to property management and you can specifically do property management for short term rentals. There's a big difference in doing property management for long term versus short term. So this includes confirming bookings, communicating with guests, supervising check in and check out, property inspections, organizing maybe some light cleaning, but it could involve full cleaning, maintenance, restocking, and writing reviews for guests. So that's kind of what is included in the co host It's a definitely property manager light but I would say so you don't need experience like hosting on Airbnb. But if you have experience hosting on Airbnb, it helps you so much with co hosting, and so I'll add in. So there was a reason we skip number one. The first one on this list, we'll just say is Airbnb arbitrage, which means you rent a property for the sole purpose of subletting it on vacation rentals. This is very risky. This is not allowed in the terms and conditions of many many rentals, So we don't recommend it. Not like it if my tenants rented out my house on Airbnb without me. It's It's different. If you are living in a place and you know you're going to be gone for a month and so you try and rent, you try and sublet it on Airbnb. That's different. But there are actual people who rent houses or our apartments and then list them on Airbnb, and that is a big, big no no. This is how Airbnb gets banned from cities like New York. It's not the only reason. So I would say, let's add in a little caveat to Airbnb rooms right here, because that's not necessarily in this article, but I did want to touch on it. I think co hosting is going to be more accessible for most people. But I don't want you to discount renting a room in your house that you own on Airbnb. We did it before we had kids. Definitely would not do it with children, But before we had kids, we had we owned a three bedroom, two bath home and our master suite was in the very back of the house and then there were two bedrooms in a bathroom at the front. So it just made it perfectly laid out to rent one of those extra rooms and the guest bathroom on Airbnb for short term rentals. And we did that for probably around two or three years, and we were the money we made on that was we are actually technically still using that money to do the renovation on the house that we're in now. And a lot of people so I did a YouTube video on this that's still relevant. I did it like three years ago, but it's all the information is still relevant, and I'll put it in the show notes. But essentially, the biggest barrier people have to renting one of their rooms on Airbnb are the same concerns people have when renting rooms on Airbnb, right is the safety and the cleanliness and the interaction. So Airbnb started as essentially rooms. That's Airbnb Rooms is what started Airbnb and launched it, and so in May of twenty twenty three, they kind of did a relaunch of Airbnb Rooms to push them out more and they've created all of these things to help people choose rooms over houses. There's definitely if you want to rent a house, you want to rent a house. Usually if you want to rent a room, you rent a hotel room. So this is Airbnb's kind of answer to all the people going towards hotels is Airbnb rooms. And so we rented a room out before all of this was even available. So it's just made it that much easier for people to connect and find rooms to rent. But I would say we met some of the coolest people renting out our room on Airbnb, because the type of person that rents a room on Airbnb is not looking to hang out at your house. They are literally looking for the cheapest option, just a place to sleep while they are exploring the city. They're in town for work, they're in town for family, they have somewhere else that they want to be. They just don't want to sleep there, and so that's the type of person. Also, a lot of Europeans Europeans don't care about that. I mean they love sharing rooms or sharing houses. So we got a lot of people from Europe and it was just an amazing experience. Most people did not use any of the shared spaces. We set our kitchen, our living room, our patio all up for grabs, and literally ninety nine percent of people just stayed in their room. They loved having the private bathroom in the shared space, so we did not use the guest bathroom when we had people there, when we had people renting, and so that got us a lot of extra bookings saying that there was a private bathroom, even though it wasn't in the room, it wasn't a non suite, it was just across from the room. Still that like definitely people said that that's what they looked for. And people from Europe used the kitchen. It's just because that's like they didn't they don't go out to eat as much or didn't want to go out to eat as much. But all the Americans, they all went out to eat. None of them used the kitchen. So that's kind of that was my experience doing Airbnb rooms. We loved it. We of course, I mean had over one hundred people. We had over one hundred stays because right now we have one hundred and twenty eight reviews, so we had we had to have had over one hundred stays just in our room, and I can count on one hand maybe the number of bad experiences we had. So I would highly I put out there, do Airbnb rooms if you can. Airbnb is pushing rooms. It's a great time to get into rooms. I think you if you do Frugal Friends podcast dot com slash Airbnb, you might get a bonus for signing up to be an Airbnb host. I am not one hundred percent sure that is our link, so don't quote me on it, but sign up through that link and see what happens. You might you might get a bonus after you first host your first day. I'm pretty sure. I just don't know what it is, but highly highly recommend if you have extra space, renting out a room on Airbnb and that will help you, even if you just do it for a couple months to get your feet wet, or maybe do it for like one weekend a month, whatever. It doesn't have to be like this full time thing where you always have people in your house. It gets you a little extra money and can train you to become a really good co host.

I love hearing your positive experience with it. It has definitely reduced my barrier to entry just in considering renting a room. Still haven't done it, but I consider it way more because of how you speak of it and how well that went. Just to clarify something that you said earlier for our listeners, you're describing that it wouldn't be a good idea correct to rent a room in a place that you yourself are currently renting, Like that would be considered a sub letting situation that you think is not the wisest.

No, if you do not own the property, I would not recommend doing any sublet. So you can sublet if you are honest with your landlord and being like, hey, I'm gone for a month out of the country. Can I sublet? On Airbnb? There are a lot of longer mid term it's called renters on Airbnb. So we have a property in the back of our house. We rent that out to midterm, so like one month or longer, but less than a year. So we do that and honestly most of our guests are from Airbnb. We have it listed on Airbnb and furnished Finder, and I thought most of them would come from furnished Finder all the month. Two months stays are coming from Airbnb, so it's great for that too. But you have to be honest with the landlord. Do not hide this from the landlord because if they find out, one hundred percent chance you'll get evicted, like very likely. So don't put your steady. Yeah, don't put yourself at risk for that just to make some extra money. But if you are, if you own a home, and maybe this is your first home and it's maybe a little outside of your price range because of home prices and mortgage rates, this could be a really great way to subsidize the cost of your housing. We're always talking about the big three housing, transportation, food. This is one of those housing choices that can recoup your cost of your house one thousand dollars a month if you want to do it all the time, so like you could live for almost free if you do this. So it's really great if you own your home as a way to subsidize this cost, maybe just for a little while before you have kids, or maybe you're not choosing to have kids. People love dogs. If you're just honest on your listing that you have a dog. That could be a selling point, you know, So you just have to be smart about it. Do not try to gain the system.

So to keep ripping through this article. Another way that you can make money off of Airbnb without owning property is to become an Airbnb consultant. This would be a good option for you if you have already had experience and managing Airbnb rentals, whether your own or other peoples, but you no longer want to be involved in the actual physical space or again you don't have physical space yourself for this becoming an Airbnb consultant helping others to learn how to get started and up and running with their short term rentals, what they're going to need to do to maximize their bookings, how to maybe identify a specific niche just there's so many questions people have as they get started in becoming an Airbnb host, and so if you kind of want to be the person that they can come to for answers, that can be a whole other little side hustle for you.

Mm hmm.

Next would be to start an Airbnb cleaning service. That's number six, and this is great because people are always looking for cleaners for their airbnb. It's very expensive, and cleaning for an airbnb is typically less than cleaning a regularly lived in house. So when we were we were hosting in our house, it was great because all I had to do was kind of like wash the sheets and make the bit because I was already keeping everything else clean because it's my house, so it was I never had to hire a cleaning service for the apartment in the back of our house. I have often considered it because while they're not in there for very long, so they don't make a ton of mess, it's still substantially more so this is something that every people who owned propers. I So after doing this for six years and doing a whole house, like a whole apartment and a room, I really it's And now we have our other original house as a long term rental. We were considering doing that as a short term rental, but the idea of cleaning it frequently stressed me out, and I could have hired a cleaning service, but with only one rental, it's it takes away so much of your profit. Right, if you have ten rentals, it makes sense to hire a cleaning service. So if you found one job as an Airbnb cleaner, you've probably found nine more. Essentially, because you can be the cleaner for one person, they're probably going to have more than one rental. So it's really easy. If cleaning is something you love to do, if you love talk, if you watch cleaners on Instagram and TikTok, and you want to create media cleaning stuff, this would be a really good one for you. I'm sure you will have no shortage of work. You will have to be there. You will have to be flexible on when you're going to be there because you might have to do a quick turn on certain days. But so this one would require flexibility, but I assure you if you can do it, you will have no shortage of work and you probably only need to find one person to work for.

Yeah, the last few things I'll say on this article are just their other suggestions. Number seven, you could host an Airbnb experience. So this is just completely a part and separate from property whatsoever. If you've got a hobby or a program or a skill set, or do you live in an area that is just prime time for a guided tour of some sort, or you have the skill sets to host a cooking class or you name it. Get creative. What does your area have to offer that you think others might be interested in, And you can just post an Airbnb experience that people can pay for, sign up for that kind of a thing. And then lastly they kind of just mention other adjacent services that you could offer to people utilizing the Airbnb platform, like becoming an Airbnb photographer. That's something people often need when they are first listing their properties is good photos. As good as our cameras can be on our phones. Oftentimes people will want to pay a little bit of money to get those really awesome shots that are going to just elevate their listing. So if you've already got a camera, you're a good photographer. Boom right there, Flexible hours, Airbnb copywriter and yeah, that's about it, so writing out the Airbnb copy that we again need to go on the listing. So those are some other things that you can look into as a side hustle related to this without having property.

Yeah, and as a SuperHost, you can choose they give you a reward. You can either choose one hundred dollar Airbnb credit or you can choose to get pictures taken like professional pictures taken of your unit. So if you can figure out how to become one of those professional photographers that Airbnb sends out, then that could be a good way to add to your photography income. But I personally always take one hundred dollars. Our next article is going to be specifically on co hosting because that's the thing I think is going to be most accessible to most people. Rooms. I think you can make the most renting out a room. We I mean, we made one thousand dollars a month easily, sometimes more when we were renting a room. But not everyone's going to be able.

To do it.

Not everyone's going to want to do it. So co hosting on Airbnb can be a really good way to make money on the platform, create a skill set that can be taken off the platform and potentially scaled to be a full time job if you want it, or can continue to just be short term virtual in house. There's so many ways to do it. So this one is from short term stage dot com and it says co hosting on Airbnb can you do it without prior hosting experience? And the short answer is yes, yeah.

So essentially what this is is the step below being a property manager. You are helping another person to manage the tasks and responsibilities associated with having an airbnb or vacation rental property, So kind of taking on just the labor, which a lot of people are looking for that especially if they've got multiple properties or they want to rent it but they don't want to deal with all the back end stuff. So being a co host on the platform and doing these tasks for a person can be a really great way of bringing in some extra income and they give a lot of really helpful resources from videos and extra links on this particular website. But I do just want to highlight here too, along with the kind of what is it, what are the general responsibilities. So some of this can include getting the place ready, So this could even be from the very beginning if you are a part of co hosting from the start before the airbnb is actually established, that could include some of the design, decorating, purchasing of the essentials, creating the house manual. I always love that part whenever I go and stay atification rental reading and going through the house manuals, and man, there are some that are just stunners. People really did an excellent job with it. So if that's something that you enjoy from there, it's going to be managing the listing, coordinating the photo shoots, possibly uploading updated can making sure if photos are updated. That's a big deal if someone gets to an Airbnb property and it is not as advertised, so making sure that the listing is up to date, Coordinating the calendar and pricing, screening guests, messaging them, coordinating their arrival, welcoming them, kind of possibly having the twenty four to seven assistants while guests are staying there, addressing any issues, Coordinating the cleaning and turnover. Sometimes this could include actually also doing the cleaning. It doesn't have to, that's just going to depend on what your arrangement is with the person you're co hosting with, reviewing the guests after they stay, providing the guests with that review, which can often help with the Airbnb themselves getting a review, communicating with Airbnb for any issues that need to be resolved, and just all around acting as the virtual assistant. So if all of these things sound again really within your wheelhouse something you enjoy, this really could be a great side hustle. So that's kind of what it is, and then we want to go into how would you do this? How would you start coming in and go home?

Yeah, there are a lot of ways to customize your co host responsibilities and abilities, and again to take them off platform, because that's the best way to scale something. So at first, like this very first one, getting a place ready, like informal interior design stuff like that. It instantly made me think of my friend Sarah Weaver. She runs aria Design, and so she's a real estate investor. But her company Ariya that she co owns, all it does is help investors launch their furnished rental businesses. So this is short term rentals and mid term rentals. That's literally all they do. They will buy the stuff on Amazon, set it up, make sure it's all well and stocked and ready for the people who have bought the house to start hosting these short and mid term rentals. So there's a lot of ways to monetize your co hosting skills and to kind of take what you like and make money off of that, even if you aren't in a place to buy a property for short or mid or long term rental. So how do you start with co hosting? So first, that says that you want to launch your co host profile on platform, so you can first launch it on the platform, but also you will have to market your services additionally. So there are co hosting marketplaces. Two of them are co host Club and co host Market, so you can create listings there to let other property owners know about your services. And then you can also go on platforms for freelancers, but I think co host Club and co host Market they're targeted, so they are probably the best. You can also join vacation rental groups and forums to get some leads. They say. Air hosts is a forum dedicated solely to hosts and property managers. Bigger Pockets also has one for property owners and investors. But you can also use social media. So when I was talking about like starting a cleaning service and recording yourself cleaning, like that's not a joke. That's to market your services if that's something you want to do. Or rearranging the stuff in your house. You don't have to buy new stuff, but just rearrange and like pretend to decorate your house and record it and use that as marketing for your social media. To become a Airbnb home decorator, like my friend Sarah and you don't need one hundred thousand followers to get this. People value location and you know that they want a little bit of experience, but mostly they want you to be local and so you don't need to be local, but because like Sarah will fly around to all these different places and do this. But it does help a lot if you're local because then it's cheaper for the investor. They don't have to pay for you know, flying you out or anything. So Facebook groups in the rental property industry, the host Nation is from short term stage. I think it has twenty seven thousand members. So find these places to mark, like first create your profile on Airbnb and then find ways to share it on all of these places.

Yeah. I like how they also mentioned from there having all of those things set up. But other ways that you can find work is just getting to know the property owners in your community. Are there landlords who'd be interested in renting their spaces? Are there people already doing this but they might need extra help. Some of that's going to come from social media and kind of going online and finding the people on Facebook or yeah, seeing do they need additional help with this. Having your profile set up already is going to help. One other thing that they also mentioned with setting up this side hustle for yourself is just expectations on how much you can make. That you could either choose to charge a flat rate for your services kind of per booking, or a percentage per booking. So they say that generally people are making twenty to twenty five percent off of the booking as a co host. So that's just something that you can be expecting with that. So then related to the amount that you charge, having an agreement drawn up with your co host on payment. So Airbnb particularly is going to send revenue directly to the listing owner's account twenty four hours after the guest checks in, So there isn't going to be a way for you to have the money go straight to you from Airbnb, and that's where an agreement with the primary host is going to be best to have written up signatures all of that. Then decide upon if you're going to do bank transfers then mo, PayPal, you name it on how then the owner will pay you and in what time frame, and whether you're doing a flat rate or a percentage.

Yeah, the twenty percent thing is what I mean by people with one or two listings. Are not going to be hiring these out because that's a big chunk of your limited income. This is going to be for people with probably more than one listing, or for people who live people who live out of the city. Maybe they want to keep their house but they had to move for work. They're going to hire a property management company or some kind of co host to help. Most of the time, it's going to be people with more than one unit that are going to be using your services. So if you can find one, you are like really set set up for success. So that's why kind of getting familiar with the platform and everything involved with hosting gets you ready to be a really good co host so that you only need one or two clients to have like a full roster of co host stuff. Because twenty percent, i mean of the listing and I'm I'm not sure if they're charging per like, because we just had a listing for a booking for six days, we are going to get four hundred dollars. Maybe it's not it couldn't have been six days. We're going to get four hundred dollars, but we saw we can see what the renters getting and they're paying six hundred, So airbb is getting like two hundred dollars in fees, So you're probably going to be making twenty percent of what the host is getting their payout. So that is something to take into consideration. If you're doing all virtual for sure, twenty percent. If you're doing anything that requires you to be local for sure twenty five percent. And then if you are doing any cleaning, you're going to charge a flat fee for that. In addition, so I would look at the Airbnb rentals available in your city, look at the hosts, because a lot of them are going to have either companies as the host, or they're going to have a co host listed that is a company, And you can google these companies and see if you can become a co host for them, or if you're you can click on a host's profile and see how many units they have. If they have a bunch of units and they don't have any co hosts listed yet, you can reach out to them and see if they need co hosting services. Say you're just getting started, you'll start out, you know, charging fifteen percent to see how it goes, and then if it goes well in ninety days, you jump to twenty you obviously want to get all this in writing and signed upon, but these are just some ideas to help with if you want to, you know, get take some you know, some work off of these people's plates. Like start small, say like, hey, I'll just do the virtual stuff, and then they'll get really used to having the free time. Because I know because this happens to me, Like with the podcast, somebody will we'll hire someone and I'll they'll take stuff off my plate and I'll be like, oh my gosh, this is so great. Please take more off my plate and you can grow with these hosts.

Yeah, that's a good point. Do you know what takes work off of our plates and also doesn't require you to own property?

Oh yes, and you need also no experience for this.

The bill of the week.

That's right, it's time for the best minute of your entire week. Maybe a baby was born and his name is Williams. Maybe you've paid off your mortgage, maybe your car died and you're happy to not have to pay that bill anymore. That bills, Buffalo Bills, Bill Clinton. This is the bill of the week.

Hi you guys, this is Sarah. I'm excited about my lack of spending the past couple of weeks, I committed to not spending anything, which unfortunately coincided with a baby shower I'm supposed to help with. So I wanted to get a really special gift for my friend, but wanted to spend as little or nothing if possible. And I was able to find a bunch of old fabric and quilting supplies in my house so I didn't have to buy anything. I handstitched everything and just pick the colors based off of what I already had, and it turned out so much more beautifully than my usual baby shower target purchases. I also had to make cookies for the shower and just use the ingredients I had, and to make them fun, just grab the sprinkles that I had, and I literally hand picked out the colored sprinkles that I needed to match the.

Color scheme I like random Christmas and Easter sprinkles. I was getting very creative and I didn't spend a dime and I'm so excited about it. So thanks for all your podcasts inspiring me, and I know you'll be excited too.

All that's so wonderful.

I love it, Love this Bill Holy Smokes. Also your voice sounds very familiar, and I really want to take a guess that this is actually my friend Sarah, but she didn't specify, so I'm just gonna have to text her. But this is double fun for me because I love gift giving that is homemade and thoughtful. It obviously took you a whole lot more time than if you were to have just bought a gift, And sometimes convenience is fun, but sometimes creativity is fun. And sometimes picking out the sprinkles that don't make sense just because you don't want to spend money is also fun. So I am sure that your friend felt so cared for and valued in all of the thought that you put into this. Well done, Sarah.

So excited, Sarah Bille, Yes, I love again. The creativity that frugality inspires is one of my favorite things about frugality. We get resourceful, we get creative, and we don't have to get cheap to get creative. You created a beautiful, handmade item, awesome cookies, and they weren't cheap, they were just resourceful and creative. So well done, Sarah.

If you're listening and you're just resourceful and you don't mind spending some time for some extra meaning and money savings. Or your name is Bill and you don't even know why you're here, but you're here and I'm calling you out. Now visit frugal friendspodcast dot com slash Bill, leave us your bill, and now it's time for.

A pew All right, what's the one thing you wish more hosts would do in their Airbnb rentals?

M Mine is the same as yours. Okay, we'll just go I'll choose something different because I do have another answer.

Okay, you go with yours, so well, no, you.

Go first, because yours makes the most sense and mine's just silly.

Okay, so ours our unanimous vote, and I'm sure you will agree, whoever you are listening to. This is for hosts not to require you to clean the airbnb and then have the audacity to charge a cleaning fee on top. Hate it. I've never made I've never left a list for any of my guests. In my home. It didn't matter. I literally it was just the bed. Nobody had to do anything before leaving with our rental in the back. I say, don't do anything. Just you know, do you just turned the the ac either to if it's in the summer, I say turn it up a little. If it's in the winter, I say turn it down a little because I may not get in there for a day or two. And that's it. That's all I tell them to do. I will strip the bed. It's my job. It's that's it.

Yeah.

Yep. Honestly, when it comes to this, there are times I'm about thirty percent more likely to book a hotel just because they're not making me do anything. So yeah, there's there's something for airbnb hosts. And then just all the rules. If there's an airbnb with just so many rules. This just happened to me recently, pages and pages, and it just felt what was the most ridiculous rule? Don't yank on the hot tub straps. Yep, that was a rule. Be gentle, don't yank on the hot tub straps, don't rip on the hot tub straps. Although, to be fair, it's funny because I did kind of understand it. We Eric and I have a hot tub, and lo and behold, hot tub covers are very expensive. It is almost more cost effective to buy a used hot tub than it is to buy a replacement hot tub cover. They're so expensive, so clearly they had a bad experience with someone ruining their hot tub cover and then they had to spend one thousand dollars to replace it. But it would cost you more if you ripped their hot tub cover than if you smoked inside their house. Their fee for you smoking inside their house was lower than if you tore their hot tub cover, of.

Course, because of cleaning. I mean it's cheaper to you know.

I mean, some smoke is hard to get out. But my more silly Airbnb thing that I wish more had, but I find myself saying it every single time I say in an Airbnb is more hooks. I don't know how these people be out here living and vacationing, but I can probably count on one finger the amount of times I went into an Airbnb and was pleased with the amount of hooks that they have. Just never enough hooks for new towel, all of it, Yeah, mostly towel. My biggest complaint is typically in the bathroom. Just where am I putting my clothes and where is my towel going? And what do you expect people to do? Do you really want people to be storing their stuff on the toilet? That's gross? More hooks, more hooks.

All right, Well, there you have it. If you are co hosting or renting room in your house, more hooks in the bathroom and fewer rules on the hot tub. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this episode helped you figure out if co hosting or renting your room on Airbnb is right for you. And if you want more tips to save money, then definitely get our newsletter, the Friend Letter. It goes out three times a week, and we know you are loving it because we get really cool emails like this from Carrie. She says, Wow, wow, Wow, I read every word of your newsletter, one of only three I can say that about, and this one is my favorite. I've learned a ton about financial trauma and how to make good choices even while recovering and in the midst of life falling apart. Thanks for your work.

Wow, Carrie, what a kind, thoughtful email to send back. Clearly we're reading your emails. We do care, we do write, We write every single word of that newsletter, So I'm real glad to know that you're reading every single word in that newsletter. Yeah, thanks Carrie for this.

Thank you, Carrie. Yeah, if you want freebies saving tips, values based spending hacks sent to your inbox every week. Head to Frugal friendspodcast dot com. Get the goodies and share them with your friends if you're already getting them. There's a referral link at the end of every friend letter, and you can earn cool Frugal Friends merch for free just by sharing it.

See you next time.

Frugal Friends is produced by Eric Sirianni Jill Again. So I got the last time we were supposed to do a guest and we ended up doing just the two of us. We made a mention of it, and somebody made it a point to come to my Instagram and say, I didn't know there was a pattern.

I love for our community.

Don't know what it is about twenty twenty three. We've been doing this podcast five and a half years and nobody has ever stood us up. And this is our second guest stand.

Up in.

Like two months.

Yeah, I don't know.

What they I guess we invite that. Here's the problem is that we turned down ninety nine percent of the guests that reach out to us, and we just look for guests that fit the topics that we want to talk about, and they don't necessarily want to be on podcasts. They just talk about things that we want to talk about. And this is the here in lies the problem.

Yeah, we're the problem.

It's me.

Yeah, it's me.

So that's when we come.

The two times that it's happened, it's been on things that you and I are expert on or have experienced trill. So it is fine. You know what, if you're not going to show up for our podcast, We're just going to talk about it ourselves because we know how. We've been doing it for six years.

This is true.

Listeners don't know the pattern.

If you have a cool person that talks about how to save money on something cool or make money in a cool way, let us know. And if they want to be on podcasts, I think that's maybe the.

Number one they will show up for the time that we scheduled them for. That's really the only qualifier.

That's it. We're easy to please. We don't. We don't gatekeep this show. Everybody can be on the show, but only when every three right, that's true.

If you reach out, we do care someone to kind of gatekeep.

So uh huh, yeah, well, well this is our call. This is the one and only call. Will ever do for guests. That's it, that's it. Come on in

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