by Michele | Oct 19, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Our first batch. Those strawberries were delicious!
As you may have figured out by now, I don’t exactly consider myself the “domestic” type. This would certainly include my cooking skills or lack there of. My father-in-law used to joke that my best dish was bagel-bites and that wasn’t really an exaggeration. That is why you will find “Learn to Cook” on our To-Do List page. My best dish is no longer bagel-bites but I do still have a long way to go before I could peruse a Julia Child cookbook with confidence.
At the beginning of the summer, I heard an ad on the radio for a local crop share program which ran once a week from May through October. I figured this would be the perfect way for Dan and I to get a taste of what it might be like to only be able to cook items that are readily available, instead of relying on out of season fruits and vegetables. We know that there may be a lot of new foods in our travels that we haven’t eaten before and so we wanted a little practice with finding new recipes and getting out of our comfort zone.
Well, it sounded good in theory anyway. In the beginning of the season, we were doing pretty well trying out arugula in chicken breast with sauteed radishes. We had some fabulous green beans and spinach, fresh garlic and blue potatoes, corn on the cob and delicious blackberries. However, those were all the things that we had eaten before and already knew that we liked to eat. When we started getting shipments of squash, parsnips, turnips and beets, we were significantly less successful in our enthusiasm. Mostly, we would just drop off our whole box of food at Dan’s parents’ house and go out to eat. Not exactly what we had hoped but I guess that’s life.
I’m not sure if we learned more about cooking or about ourselves in this exercise. We certainly know that we have a long way to go before we could live reasonably on $1000-$1500 a month, which is our eventual goal. Maybe we’ll just start by eating bagel bites and move on from there.
by Michele | Sep 12, 2012 | Preparation Stage
So, I realized today that’s it has been a good three weeks since our last blog post. Holy cow! I’m sorry we have been such big slackers for the last couple of weeks, it’s been crazy at our house! We fully intend to never go this long without a blog post again, dear reader(s). *Scout’s honor* (ok neither of us was ever a Scout, though I was in Girl Guards for a while.)
Anyway, the biggest thing that’s been happening lately is we are working furiously to prepare our house to sell it. I’ve been sorting through clutter and giving things away to Goodwill for a couple of months now, but over Labor Day weekend we got down to some serious business. I’m talking scrubbing toilets, trimming bushes, repainting doors and trim…serious business. We made appointments for last week with a couple of local realtors, so we wanted the house to be in ship-shape (pun intended) before we had people coming in to determine the value of our house. It was certainly the most laborious Labor Day in my memory.
Finally, the day had come to find out how much our house is worth. Kind of. We had done some of our own market research on our area and similar homes to ours before calling for an outside opinion but it was still nerve wracking. What would we do if the professionals thought we were way over-valuing our home? I actually had a nightmare that all of the realtors came back and told us it was worth less than we owed! It is a rather frightening proposition because we are essentially counting on the sale of our house to fund the purchase of our future boat.
Luckily, the verdict came back very favorably. Two of the realtors (both of whom we had already liked) came back with the exact same recommended list price, which was only about $5,000 less than what we had thought on our own. I think we did pretty well considering how much more training they have in the business than we do. The third realtor was waaay out of the ballpark, suggesting a list price lower than what the house was purchased for in 2003. We actually just laughed at her, especially because we had already written her off after our original meeting with her. She obviously just didn’t know what she was doing.
All-in-all we got some good advice, and have chosen our listing agent for the house. We’ll keep you posted on some of the things we did to spruce up the house for almost no money and what the agent’s home staging specialist has to say as well. The best thing is, we’re finally moving forward and my house has never been cleaner!
by Michele | Aug 15, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Yea, it scares me too.
For those of you following closely, you will know that LASIK eye surgery is on our To-Do List before we leave (aka lose insurance coverage.) Both of us currently wear glasses and contacts and while we understand that people certainly can go cruising with prescription lenses, we would prefer not to. Losing or damaging expensive glasses is an inconvenience when it’s a pair of sunglasses, its a danger when its a prescription that allows you to see anything farther away than the bow of your boat.
The flip side of this coin is the fairly high cost. Eye surgery is considered an elective procedure by most insurance companies and is generally not covered. We’ve been quoted $1000-$2000 per eye depending on the type of lasers used and the warranties included. That’s a total cost for 4 eyes of up to $8000, a cost that will be coming directly out of our cruising kitty. Seeing as how we’ve moved up our planned departure date by a few years, that’s quite a chunk of change that has to be seriously considered.
After a lot of consideration, (and some help from my parents’ insurance plan) we have decided to go through with the surgery. This Friday to be exact. Let me just say that it definitely does make both of us nervous. While LASIK is a very common surgery at this point, there are no true guarantees that something won’t go wrong. It is a little scary when going wrong could mean permanent damage to our vision.
We’ll be heading up to Chicago for our surgery Thursday night for our appointments Friday morning. And if you think of us as you’re getting to work on Friday, send a little prayer our way. Hopefully, we’ll “see” you on the other side!
by Dan | Jul 18, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Now that Michele and I’s cruising plans have been put into high gear, getting ready to “retire” and begin cruising is hard! No really, it is. Let me list a few of our current projects for you…
- Get the house ready to sell
- New Fireplace Mantle DONE
- New Bedroom Carpet IN PROGRESS
- Carpet removed DONE
- Carpet pad removed DONE
- New carpet picked out
- New Paint in Bedroom IN PROGRESS
- Remove hideous 90’s wallpaper border from Bedroom DONE
- Finish Crown Molding in Kitchen DONE
- Paint the Shed IN PROGRESS
- Become a PADI Divemaster
- Assist with Open Water Diver classes IN PROGRESS
- Attain 60 logged dives IN PROGRESS
- Become better sailors
- Join local yacht club DONE
- Sail as often as possible IN PROGRESS
- Sell my Saab
- Meet with potential buyers IN PROGRESS
- Get LASIK eye surgery
- First appointment DONE
- No contacts for 3 weeks IN PROGRESS
- Surgery August 17th in Chicago UPCOMING
Dealing with the above (and more… part of which I’m really excited about, but it isn’t ready to show you guys yet!) while trying to continue in a job that my heart isn’t in anymore has been weighing on me recently. When it gets bad, I close my eyes and remember standing with Michele on the beach. The sand, wind, ocean… they all comfort me even tough they are a thousand miles away. Michele and I are doing our best to bring them quite a bit closer, however. The sacrifices we make now will allow us to cruise more comfortably (and sooner!) in the future, and I’m glad we’re making them. But life is not always mai tais and mini umbrellas… but at least it is exciting to be making progress in following our dreams.
by Michele | Jul 11, 2012 | Preparation Stage
“Success always comes when preparation meets opportunity” -Henry Hartman
And so begins the next step of our journey. Ladies and Gentlemen, Dan and I have officially changed our mindset (and actions) from what we like to call the Planning Stage to the Preparation Stage. As I said in my last post, we are preparing now to be ready to cruise by the end of next year’s hurricane season. We’ll be (hopefully) saying Happy New Year 2014 from an anchorage in the Bahamas. That being said, there is a LOT to do in a year if we really want to be prepared to get out there.
First and foremost among items on our To-Do list is getting our house sold. We are frantically fixing up all the little loose ends around our house that have been left undone in the almost 4 years that we have lived here. Prime example: the family that lived in our house prior to us moving in apparently decided they like their mantle piece on the basement fireplace too much to leave it behind, (totally bizarre I know) so we had to put a new one in. Luckily, we’re hoping to have the vast majority of those things completed within the next 2-3 weeks, as we would like to have our house on the market by the beginning of August. Speaking of getting our house on the market, anyone know a good realtor in Peoria?
Secondly, we have instituted a policy of no spending that is not beneficial to live on a boat. While that may seem somewhat broad, the biggest part of controlling our spending is based on the mindset of looking at every dollar going out of our bank account. Every dollar we spend on land is another dollar we won’t have when we’re living on a very fixed income on the boat. Going out to eat? No way. Visible home improvements? Sure. New swimsuit? Maybe. There are still quite a few large purchases/financial obligations that we will need to deal with before we can leave, but hopefully many of those will help us make money (like Dan’s scuba instructor certification) or save money (like getting LASIK surgery) in the future.
So what’s next, quitting our jobs? buying a boat? telling our family? duhn duhn duhn. Coming soon to a blog near you!
Follow your Dreams. Follow the Horizon.
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.