6 Things You Need to Sort Before You Leave on Your Big Lap

Everybody talks about the van, the route and the budget, but nobody talks about the really important stuff that has to happen before you depart on your Big Lap. So here are the six things you need to sort, in order, before you can actually leave.

1. Sort Your Life Admin

This sounds boring, and yes, it is, but it’s really vital, and doing it properly makes for a much less stressful departure date. About 6 months out, start getting it all ready. If you want to leave sooner than that, it’s completely doable, you’ll just need to be organised and condense it all down.

Medical and specialist appointments are the big one. When you’re in the middle of nowhere, you will need to have a chat with your GP or a specialist at some point, so get in front of them before you go. Tell them how long you’ll be away and ask about medicine scripts (some medications can’t be filled in a different state), and whether they can move your appointments onto telehealth. Don’t forget any mental health appointments in there too, just because you’re on a holiday doesn’t mean everything else stops coming with you.

Then there’s the paperwork: make sure your driver’s licence is in date (renewing it isn’t easy when you’re nowhere near a service centre), check your Medicare address and expiry are correct, and if there’s any chance of a cheeky Bali trip while you’re over that side of the country, get your passport sorted with plenty of time up your sleeve, government processing takes a while.

2. Decide What to Do With Your House

You’ve really got three options here, rent it, sell it, or lock it up and walk away, and each comes with real pros and cons.

• Renting it out can help pay the mortgage and even part of the trip, but you’ll need a property manager (or to learn how to manage it yourself) and a real plan for what to do with your own stuff.
• Selling comes with a genuine risk we saw play out during COVID: people sold up, went away for a year or more, then couldn’t get back into the market when they came home. If you’re going to sell, have a real plan B for what happens if the lap isn’t for you after all, because it’s not for everybody, and that’s completely okay.
• Locking up and walking away is fine for a shorter trip, but it comes with security risk, and a house generally needs someone checking the mail and mowing the lawn while you’re gone.

3. Get Your Insurance Sorted

If you’re renting your place out, you’ll need landlord insurance, your property manager can point you to it. If you’re locking it up, tell your home insurer what’s going on, they tend not to love an unattended house, so your premium may go up.

For your car and van, make sure your setup is actually covered to be towed long distances, and check whether you’re locked into using one particular mechanic or free to use any mechanic on the road. Some insurers also have clauses that exclude non-gazetted (dirt) roads, so check that too before you’re relying on it somewhere remote.

👉Sorting real cover before you leave makes this whole step easier. Check AllClear Travel Insurance and compare it against what your current policy actually covers!

Don’t forget health insurance, if you’ve got private cover, check your ambulance cover specifically, a lot of ambulance cover is state-only, and you don’t want a medical emergency turning into a financial one on top of everything else.

4. Handle the Financial Stuff

Get your tax up to date before you go, the last thing you want is to be enjoying somewhere remote and beautiful and suddenly remember your accountant’s been chasing you.

On banking, here’s a real lesson learned the hard way: it’s tempting to keep everything on your phone and travel card-free, until you end up somewhere with no phone reception. Carry an actual physical bank card for the middle-of-nowhere places.

While you’re getting the financial side sorted, it’s worth locking in your actual daily number too. Our Budget Calculator & Planner is the same tool we use to work out ours before every trip.

5. Redirect Your Mail and Cancel What You Don’t Need

Redirect your mail through Australia Post, your tenant (if you’re renting the place out) really doesn’t want to be dealing with it. Better still, switch as many bills as you can over to email while you’re at it.

For physical subscriptions, anything that gets delivered (we had a toilet paper subscription, for example) needs to go on hold, and magazines are worth cancelling outright since you won’t be there to collect them. While you’re at it, go through your recurring subscriptions properly, gym memberships, streaming, Spotify, and any apps you’ve forgotten you’re paying for. Cancel what you’re not using, it adds up.

6. Sort Your Digital Life

Are you working remotely on the road? For us, staying connected is essential, we travel with Starlink, and while it’s not cheap, it’s what lets us keep working, homeschool the kids, and do video calls with friends and family. Work out how you’re going to fund your travels and stay connected before you leave, not after.

Check on your kids’ schooling access, and if you deal with any government portals, Centrelink, NDIS, anything like that, make sure you can actually log in and that your passwords are sorted before you’re relying on it from the road.

Our Thoughts

Here’s the real trap in all of this: the six things above matter, but the thing that actually matters more is picking a real departure date, not just talking about going, but actually setting the date and working backwards from it. If you’re stuck on how to land on that date, we’ve written about exactly that here: How to Choose Your Big Lap Departure Date.

We picked up our own new caravan not that long ago, we wrote about what came next in We Picked Up Our New Caravan — Here’s What’s Next. And if you’re still working through the planning order before any of this, that’s covered in The Big Lap Planning Mistake Most Australian Families Make.