by Michele | Apr 18, 2012 | Preparation Stage
I’ve never been the girl who spends hours in the bathroom or at the mall. In fact, most days I can be ready to leave within about 20 minutes of waking up (or at least I could before I had to prepare a miniature person too.) If I’m really being honest, I have nursed a certain pride about how much time and money I’ve saved by not getting my hair and nails done, foregoing makeup most mornings, and wearing the same dry-clean only outfit multiple times before finally giving it away.
This year for my birthday, most of my gifts were money/gift cards to clothing stores. Was my family trying to drop a hint? Possibly. Anyway, I went on a general shopping spree for some new summer clothes, including a shirt that I didn’t realize was “hand wash only” until I had taken the tags off and worn it. Ugh. Rule #1 of clothes shopping: don’t buy anything high maintenance!
And then it hit me: my whole life is about to become high maintenance! Every article of clothing will suddenly become one of two options: hand-wash or no-wash. Not only that, but all those “maintenance” chores that I hate so much are about to become much more plentiful. If I think laundry,* dishes, and mopping the floor are a pain, what about checking the bilge every morning, varnishing teak, and yearly haul-outs on top of making my old chores harder? Just a reminder that we aren’t planning on going on a permanent vacation, but living a new life, complete with all the chores!
Of course, if I’m gonna do chores, I’d rather do them in a tropical breeze.
*I hate laundry. To me it is the least efficient of all chores: unless you are naked, you will never complete it.
by Michele | Mar 31, 2012 | Preparation Stage
I like lists. I just think that lists help keep you on track and give you a good overview of your goal. Therefore, we have created a list of the things that we plan to get done over the next few years as we wait and plan. As we (hopefully) get things done we’ll post about it, and we’ll also keep a separate page available that we will check off as we go. We’ve got our fingers crossed that we get all of this done faster than we think, especially the money part!
Click the button below to check it out.
To-Do List
by Michele | Mar 28, 2012 | Preparation Stage
So, last night I was getting a glass of water for myself after dinner from our refrigerator. We have an ice maker which has a dispenser on the freezer door for our “convenience”. The problem is that it actually isn’t very convenient at all. In fact, I stood at my freezer door for a good thirty seconds and had exactly 3 pieces of ice plop into my glass. I realized, as I was standing there dehydrating, that it would have been significantly faster to just open the freezer door and scoop the ice out manually. The funny thing is, our ice dispenser has been this slow for the last 4 years, and I still continue to sit and wait for each piece of ice to make its way into my glass.
This got me thinking about the illusion of convenience. How much time and money do we spend for something to be more convenient, when it would have been faster and easier to do it the “hard” way? Our dishwasher is another good example: I completely clean off all of my dishes in the sink before I put them in the dishwasher because I don’t trust it to wash my dishes properly. Then what is the point of the appliance I continue to use every day?
Sometimes it’s just too easy to get suckered into the marketing tactics that say the newest gadget will help you save time because we agree with the basic assumption. You need more stuff to deal with the fact that you don’t have enough time. Personally, I know I don’t have enough time, that’s why I want to get rid of the stuff.
by Michele | Mar 24, 2012 | Preparation Stage
“Most of us, swimming against the tides of trouble the world knows nothing about, need only a bit of praise or encouragement – and we will make the goal.”-Robert Collier
Do you remember when you were in school and you finished a test that you felt pretty good about, but you weren’t really sure if you had gotten a good grade or not? It’s not that you weren’t confident in the information you knew, but you just had a little nagging voice telling you all day that maybe there was something you missed. That’s a little like I’d been feeling about our plans for cruising. We were doing all of the research that we could, reading blogs, crunching numbers, but there was still that little voice saying “you’re missing something, this is all going to come crashing down at any minute now.”
Well, the little voice has been banished (for now at least) with some help from our new friends Scott and Brittany of Wind Traveler. I’d been following their blog recently and knew that they were back in the Chicago area awaiting the arrival of their new crew member (see: baby). Dan and I were also planning on going up to Chicago to spend some time with my family over the weekend, so I decided to take a shot in the dark and email Brittany to ask if the two of them would have a coffee with us and let us pick their brains a little. It was a bit of a stretch out of my comfort zone, I don’t normally invite people to coffee that I’ve never met before, but I’m so glad that I did.
Brittany and Scott were extremely helpful and very encouraging to talk to. They really helped validate our plans and gave us a lot more confidence in the knowledge that we had already acquired through reading books and blogs. They also gave us some great advice about how we can be better prepared. (I’ve already been scouring the internet for books/lessons on weather forecasting. I think I’m going to buy this set by Tim Vasquez.) I don’t think that they can fully appreciate how much it meant to us when they looked at us and said, “We can tell you guys are going to make it.”
It felt like a big A on the test.
by Michele | Mar 8, 2012 | Preparation Stage
So, we all know that to live in this modern world of ours, we need money. Money for food, shelter, and basic necessities, like coconut rum. Of course, the continual quest for money is also the biggest reason why Dan and I want to get away from our current life. This leaves us with the quintessential cruiser’s question: How do I get enough money to live and keep my boat afloat without sacrificing my freedom?
In researching this issue, we have found that the average monthly expenses for a moderately comfortable cruising experience will probably range between $1000 and $1500. We’re not looking to “go Hobo” (in reference to the great and venerable Hobo Sailor, who is inspiring in his no money approach), but simply interested in a realistic budget for a small family of three trying to conserve as much as possible while still having some amenities.
The trouble is, while a few cruisers are kind enough to provide good monthly budget information, almost no one talks about how much of a kitty they started out with. We’ve decided that this is probably because everyone thinks that if they put out there how much they are “thinking” about starting out with, they make themselves vulnerable to all the cranky internet trolls out there just waiting to tell people that they certainly do NOT have enough money to leave, when in fact, everyone who has ever actually accomplished the leaving part generally says they wished they would have gone sooner.
Therefore, here is our financial plan for the next couple of years that we think will get us out of Illinois and into the ocean.
1. Pay off student debt. This one we have almost accomplished, as we are now down to about $3000 left, finally.
2. Pay off our car loans. With our current ETA being about 3.5 years down the road, we know that we could just continue paying our normal payments and our cars would be paid off when we leave. However, every dollar spent on loan interest is another dollar not gaining interest in our bank account, and in this game, every penny counts. Also, we expect our two cars to be worth somewhere in the $10,000 range when we sell them, giving us $20,000 in cash.
3. Save at least $50,000 in cold hard cash. Well, not exactly cash, it will be making hopefully some decent interest in our Fidelity investment accounts until we need it with a 60/40 stocks to bonds allocation ratio. Our current budget allows us to save around $1200/month. Add in the extra once our cars and student loans are paid off, and we should more than reach that goal.
4. Keep adding equity to our house. This one is fairly straightforward: pay the mortgage. Based on the current value of our house, we are hoping to get $70,000-$80,000 in cash when our house sells, which we intend to put entirely into our boat purchase so that we don’t have to pay any taxes on it.
That’s basically the plan, $70-80k to spend on a boat purchase/original outfitting and repairs and $70-80k to live on. Using $1200/month expenses and a very conservative interest rate of 4.0% on $75,000, that money will last us almost 6 years with 0 additional input from us. Add in Dan’s plan to become a certified PADI instructor, and his IT experience, we’re hoping to not be hindered from living the life as long as we love it.
We are normal (well ok, not so normal) people that have a dream to see the world and live life as it was meant to be. We both have successful careers in the healthcare industry, even in this terrible economy. We want to break free of the current cycle of trading time for dollars and dollars for more and more things we don't need. So, we have decided to forego the fruits of our economic success and "retire" well before we are 30 and set out to see what is over the Horizon.