As travel therapists we have the coolest opportunity in that we can do our profession anywhere in the world and live in states we never thought possible! I’ve lived in 10 different states now over the course of just 4 years. Some of my favorite being Colorado, Washington, California, and now Hawaii!! I am by no means done traveling, but I don’t know if any future placements will beat this one. As fortunate as I am to be working in Hawaii for the next 6 months, getting here was more difficult than I thought it would be. Everyone will have different experiences and different processes but let me tell you my experience to give you a little insight as to what it will take to get here if you are considering a Hawaii travel therapy contract.
HAWAII APPLICATION
First things first when applying for travel contracts is to make sure you can get that state’s license in time. Some jobs are willing to wait for the license to come through, but just to be safe it’s better to already have the contract underway when applying for your next contract.
After changing plans from Alaska to Hawaii, I knew a potential set back in securing a Hawaii travel position would be the fact that I didn’t already have a Hawaii license. Hawaii is not a part of the compact so you must file for a full state licensure. Luckily for me, the Hawaii licensure is one of the shortest and easiest applications I’ve applied for! However, that doesn’t mean it has the quickest processing time.
I was told repeatedly by my recruiter that it would take a bit of “pestering” to get the Hawaii state board to process the license quickly. Since I had a job on the line, I did not mind doing that at all. I updated the board every step of the way. I made sure to email when all appropriate forms where in the mail or important documents were being sent via email.
Unfortunately, the biggest hang up with getting the license approved was needing licensure verification from every single state that I currently or have ever been licensed. Fortunately, many of the states I’ve worked in have been compact states and don’t fall in this category. But even still, that required 6 other states to then send Hawaii a licensure verification or provide instructions on how to verify online myself. This was a tedious process, especially when each state has different rules.
As tedious as this process is, the other states processed things fairly quickly for me and I was able to get a Hawaii license approved and issued in 2-3 weeks. I was originally told to expect 6-8 weeks. You never want to be overbearing when reaching out to state boards for “expediting” your license, but I’ve found that establishing a line of communication early on and letting them know that you have a travel position lined up soon has helped me get most licenses processed much faster than the expected timeframe.
WHAT NEXT?
So, you just got hired for your first Hawaii travel therapy contract and secured your Hawaii license, now what? Do you ship or rent a car? Do you rent a furnished or unfurnished apartment? Should you ship all your belongings or check multiple bags on your flight? What is going to be the most cost-effective strategy? These are all great questions to be thinking about! We didn’t have anyone telling us what the best solutions were. But that’s why I’m here, to help you so you can go into your Hawaii travel therapy contract with excitement instead of stress.
RENT OR SHIP CAR
As soon as I signed my Hawaii travel therapy contract, I started looking at what the best option would be as far as having a car on the island. Because I signed a home health contract I HAD to have a vehicle. That was non-negotiable. I looked into the cost of renting a car for 6 months. The total was near $7000. Ouch. It would have been nice to put miles on someone else’s vehicle, but I couldn’t afford that. Luckily, we were living in California and to ship a car from Long Beach, CA to Honolulu, HI was around $1,500 (one-way). There are a few different companies you could go through, but we ended up booking through Car Shipping Hawaii.
A FEW THINGS TO BE AWARE OF WHEN SHIPPING A CAR:
SHIP YOUR CAR FOR SURE
Working with Car Shipping Hawaii was such a great experience for us! We had absolutely no problems and they walked us through every step of the process. I would highly recommend using them! Shipping our car to the island was a no-brainer. The total cost will be about ~$2,500 (it’s cheaper to ship back to Cali).
WHAT TYPE OF HOUSING SHOULD I RENT?
Oh, the dreaded housing search. This is our least favorite part about signing new travel therapy contracts. Packing up our belongings, finding a new temporary house that is within our budget, reasonably close proximity to work, and makes us feel safe is a lot harder than it seems! Especially when you have to commit to a place before you really get to see it or the area it’s in. This is ultimately one of the big reasons why we purchased our RV, “Georgia”, three years ago. It gave us some sort of stability through this dreaded process. Yes, it’s fun to live in new homes, but sometimes those homes can be cockroach infested, have bad landlords, make the commute to work extra-long, or out of budget. Check out my blog post TRAVEL THERAPY HOUSING PROS AND CONS for more insight. So, what should you do in Hawaii?
UNFURNISHED APARTMENT
The main benefit of renting an unfurnished apartment is that it is going to be the cheapest option. I would hope because there is nothing in it. We played around with the idea of this. We could save more money by signing a 6-month lease on an unfurnished apartment with a full kitchen, bath, gym, pool, extra amenities. The downfall is we would have absolutely no furniture. No bed, couch, tv, pots and pans, kitchen utensils, washer/dryer, you name it. However, we were planning on bringing our backpacking equipment: blow up mattress and sleeping bag. Maybe we could get away with no bed??
The average monthly cost of an unfurnished apartment that we were seeing were around $900-$1,200. There are companies on the island that will rent furniture month-to-month. If you do the bare minimum, you were looking at around another $300/month. Now you’re at $1,500. You can find furnished apartments and not have to sleep on a mummy mattress for $1,500/month. Thank God!
FURNISHED APARTMENT/AIRBNB
Luckily, there are quite a bit of furnished apartments on Furnished Finder, as well as great options on Airbnb. I found that Furnished Finder had cheaper options month-to-month vs. Airbnb. The average cost of a furnished apartment varied depending on location but ranged anywhere from $1,000-$3,000/month. Obviously, there are some really nice homes you could stay at if you wanted to ball out, but I think most of us are going to look for budget-friendly options.
Another thing to consider is are you looking for a shared house or a separate unit? I travel with my wife, and we have done shared housing before, but for an extended period of time we find we will pay extra for privacy. If you are traveling alone, then a shared housing unit really isn’t too bad for cost of living in Hawaii (we just lived in California and Washington, so our “too bad” is relative).
In the end, we went with a furnished beach front studio condo for 6 months at $1,400/month. The apartment complex comes with a pool, small gym, full kitchen (we will have a full-sized fridge which we are very excited for, RV’ers IYKYK). Because we could only move in on July 1st, we still needing housing for 19 days.
Finding housing for that long was turning out to be VERY expensive. I mean its Hawaii, if it was cheap everyone would be here all the time. But we found the cheapest option was to book 1 month on Furnished Finder in a shared housing unit. We have a private bedroom/bathroom and share the kitchen with one other person. There are other tenants, but they have a separate floor/shared living space. And honestly, we are loving it. The tenants/landlords are kind, there are fruit trees in the backyard that we can help ourselves too, we stare at a beautiful mountain out our bedroom window, and we’re just across the street from the beach. For 19 days, $1,200 was manageable.
HOW DO I GET MY STUFF TO HAWAII?
You’ve landed the job, got your license, you shipped your car, you have your housing figured out, now you just need to get there! But how do you pack for 6 months and how do you get it there? Fair question. We struggled with this one because we are both over-packers. If you don’t have too many things and live out of one suitcase you can just skip this part, it’s not for you. But for my over-packers, keep reading.
Honestly, I didn’t even look into what the cost would be like to ship your things via UPS or USPS. I figured those rates would be astronomical. We booked our flights through Southwest, which means you get two free checked bags, a carry-on, and a personal bag. That’s already 4 bags per person! However, don’t get carried away and go over that 50lb weight limit on the checked bags because that will be an extra $100/bag. I would suggest purchasing a luggage weight. It helped us tremendously. We were able to pack our bags to the tenth of a pound and didn’t have to deal with the frantic last-minute “stuff clothes in your carry-on” situation.
Alright, you know you can have two large bags and two smaller bags, that’s still not a whole lot of space for the over-packer, especially when you want to take camping gear, hiking gear, snorkeling gear, and paddleboards. Yes, we could just rent some of those things in Hawaii, but at the rate at which we will be using said gear just doesn’t make sense for us. But also, the rate for each additional checked bag is $125. Getting to Hawaii is adding up quickly and I don’t really want to spend all my money on getting clothes there. I laid out everything I wanted to take and quickly realized there was no way I could take all that. After sifting through and removing more items about 5 separate times I finally could fit what I needed for my Hawaii travel therapy contract.
OUR TRAVEL NECESSITIES
We ended up spending $250 on two extra checked bags. That’s 10 bags total. Honestly, it’s still probably too much and we could have made 8 bags work, but you know, we’re over-packers, it’s what we do.
IS THERE MORE?
Everything I’ve said up until this point are really big items to cross of your list for getting to Hawaii for that travel therapy contract. You will definitely come across smaller expenses you may not have been prepared for, but it happens. You don’t have any food or condiments, so you are starting fresh there. Because Paige doesn’t have a car, she has to get a bus pass which is $80/month. If your car isn’t in Hawaii yet, you may need to rent a vehicle for a while. And I’m sure more unexpected expenses will pop up, they always do. Is it all worth it to be living in Hawaii for 6 months? Absolutely!!
As I said earlier, everyone has a different experience and will do things differently than I did. We planned our entire trip in under two weeks, not because we wanted to but because we had to. I’m sure there are more cost-effective ways to do things and by all means comment below and let future travelers know! If you have any other questions regarding the process of getting to Hawaii for a travel therapy contract, please contact me here. Goodluck and be sure to follow me on Instagram for some epic Hawaii adventures. Mahalo!