While we are happy to share with you our monthly expenses of this journey (coming soon - starting with February expenses), gear we have aboard and our outfitting and maintenance expenses (an always changing/live document), we wanted to discuss the real magic behind all this.
We never buy anything we can't afford to pay cash for. There! That's it! While we still had a ton of fun while getting ready for this new chapter in our lives, we spent frugally and put lots of money in the bank. We bought and sold boats (usually at a small profit) and went out to dinner when we felt like it. It saddens me to hear how some people get nickel and dimed to "debt" buying useless things they've been told they need.
- NEED/WANT ANALYSIS - We always asked ourselves Do I NEED this or do I simply WANT this? Most importantly, is this something I can someday use on the boat?
- Pay ME first! We set up an automatic payment to our savings accounts on pay day. By making it a little more than we thought we could afford it made us pay more attention to our spending habits. The checking account never looked very conducive to shopping and the savings just kept growing!
- Housing We have never owned any real estate. It wasn't for lack of want. Some rental income while cruising would have been nice but was out of our reach due to the housing bubble. By the time that bubble burst we were close to our monetary goal and buying a rental-house would have set us back many more years.
- Cars We buy used cars that we can pay cash for. Period.
- Credit Cards - We use them for everything and then pay them off monthly and collect the cash-back and travel points. By using credit cards you can also track and analyze your spending a lot better. I use Mint.com.
- Clothes I like to have a lot of clothes and new shoes. It's a problem I'm learning to deal with. Shoes just don't fit anywhere and are always in the way on a boat.
- Dining out - We love to go out to eat after a long and stressful day at work! Really after any kind of day - there is nothing like someone else bringing you drinks and doing the dishes. We're trying to cut down....
- Travel - As is quite apparent from our blog we love to travel. This is why we're doing this whole thing anyway, right?
- Furniture - Goodwill! Neither one of us has ever owned a single piece of expensive furniture. Our homes in our 30's looked much like they did in college. When it was time to get rid of our furniture we took most of it back to Goodwill.
- Coffee Shop Coffee - This is actually one of the first things we did to start saving because we were shocked at just how much money we were spending every month. By reducing our fancy coffee habit to once or twice a week we started looking forward to "coffee day" (usually Fridays to celebrate the last day of the work week). After a while we just naturally stopped going as much and were down to once or twice a month.
- Subscriptions and Memberships - Have you ever added up all those memberships and subscriptions you pay for every month? Cable TV, internet, Netflix, Hulu, newspaper, gym membership, phone, phone data plan, magazines, etc. We try to re-evaluate what is really important every month. All we have left is Netflix since we like to watch a movie once in a while. But with slow WiFi connections here in Mexico it's about to get cut too.
