A Lesson in Lifestyle Re-Design: From the Suburbs to a Sailboat

Editor’s note: This is a FANTASTIC guest post from Doug Mayle. He and his wife recently quit their jobs and relocated their lives to a sailboat so that they could pursue their dream of a global sailing adventure. Currently, they can be found in the Caribbean.

Living the dream

When I look out my window, only a few feet away, I see beautiful turquoise water glowing in the illumination of a tropical sun. I have to pinch myself to be certain that I am not dreaming. The pinch makes me realize that I am quite awake and that this dream-like existence is now my reality.

My window is actually a porthole, because we live on a sailboat in the Caribbean, present location: Culebra, Puerto Rico.

How did they do it?

Three years ago, my wife and I lived a life more typical of the norm in the United States. We were a dual income couple, no kids, with a three-bedroom house in the suburbs. Our journey from there to here is a fine example of goal setting and lifestyle re-design.

Sheryl and I are presently unemployed. The final paycheck arrived in the mail on November 1, 2007. Since then, we have been living off of our savings. Based on our estimated budget, which we have tested in actual practice for the past five months, we should be able to remain happily unemployed for at least the next 5 years, possibly more.

From a financial perspective, people often ask how we can afford to live off of our savings. No, we did not inherit any money. No, we did not get a windfall from wise investments. And no, we did not have CEO-level salaries when we were employed. The answer is short and simple.

We stopped spending so much money!

It took us nearly 5 years of cutting expenses from our budget to realize such a savings, even before we knew what we were going to do with that self-generated largess. We thought about starting our own business, perhaps taking an extended vacation, or even going back to school to start an entirely different career. In our minds, savings would give us the freedom to think outside the norm of having a 9-to-5 job.

Some specific actions that we took are :

• sold one of our two cars
• turned off the cable TV
• slimmed down to a single cell phone
• stopped dining out
• ‘just said no’ to magazine subscriptions and club memberships
• whenever we found ourselves in a store about to purchase something, we asked ourselves if we truly needed this item; quite often, the answer was a resounding ‘no’

With each decision that we made above, our savings account grew. It was a concrete and quantitative measure of our increasing freedom from the bindings of regular employment.

It became almost addictive, “What else can we do without in order to make that number go up?”

Life on a sailboat sounds great, but we don’t know how to sail?

It was during this time of cutting the financial fat that we discovered a lifestyle known as cruising. Cruising involves living and traveling on a sailboat. And, contrary to the rest of society who is telling you that you need –

• a bigger house
• newer car
• flatter TV screen

On the contrary, cruisers applaud frugality. We quickly realized that this was the social circle for us.

Of course, there was work to be done in order to gain entry to the cruising community. First, we had to learn to sail. We started with the purchase of a small, relatively inexpensive sailboat and began to take classes. After numerous weekend trips and vacations aboard our tiny vessel, we decided that living on a sailboat would suit us. It was time to start shopping for a bigger boat, one that we could live aboard full time.

We sold our house, put the proceeds in the bank, and moved to a cheap one-bedroom apartment closer to Sheryl’s office. Numerous garage sales, eBay auctions and CraigsList postings were required to make our possessions fit into the smaller space. And, as a side benefit, a few more dollars went into our savings. We eventually found the perfect boat, at a price we could afford, paying cash because we had long ago done away with any type of loans or credit.

As soon as we sold the remainder of our terrestrial possessions, we moved from the apartment to a 35-foot sailboat in a marina, and Sheryl quit her job.

While I continued to work for a few more months, Sheryl made it her full-time job to prepare the boat for our journey. Much was needed to prepare for the trip, including spare parts, books, charts, and more spare parts. Once underway, we needed to be ready to fix everything from the propeller to the kitchen sink, without having easy access to stores. We were, once again, consumers. However, we were focused in our purchases, researched to find the best deals, and budgetarily restricted ourselves to my current income. We did not want to dip into our savings just yet.

The big day – Setting Sail

Concurrent with that final paycheck, we sold our car and untied the docklines. We sailed off the coast of North Carolina, our home for those last few land-based years, and turned south.

2,300 nautical miles later, we have visited South Carolina, Florida, the Bahamas, the Turks & Caicos, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. All that and the adventure is only just beginning. From here we are restricted only by what Mother Nature dictates in terms of where we can go, as long as we continue to practice what we learned in the process of saving for this sojourn on the water. Live simply, spend only what we need to spend, and enjoy life.

Follow them: Doug & Sheryl live aboard their sailboat Prudence, and write regularly in their blog. They invite you to visit their site: www.sailblogs.com/member/ashiya , to read the details of their story from the beginning and check back often to keep up with them as their adventures continue. Also, check out their FLICKR photo set (where all the pics in this post came from).