As part of our new eating-at-home regimen, Dan and I decided to make a small garden in our backyard this spring to help get us some healthy, fresh food options. Last year, we attempted to solve this issue by joining a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) group where we bought a “share” of local farmers produce crops that we could pick up once a week. As noted in our post Julia Who?, we didn’t do too well with making use of the many unknown vegetables that ended up in our kitchen so we decided to try out our green thumbs this year.

We started by picking out a spot in our backyard and tilling it with a borrowed gas-powered tiller. A few things came to our attention pretty quickly. First, the soil in our backyard is amazingly rich and black, as in potting soil black. A neighbor told us later that our house used to be the “manor” on a large apple orchard that encompassed most of the neighborhood in years gone by. Because of this, we didn’t need to add any additional garden soil to our bed but just added some tasty cow manure fertilizer. (Carter kept telling me very seriously “there’s cow poop in there, Mommy.” I think he was concerned.) The other thing we noticed was that one side of the garden is almost certainly located over an old gravel driveway which we didn’t realize until after tilling the whole area. Now we have some nice white rock mixed in with that row. Oh well, you win some you lose some I guess.

Next, we attempted to shop the local greenhouse by bike to pick up our preferred crops but unfortunately had to defect to visiting Lowe’s when we couldn’t find much more than flowers. I mean, flowers are nice and everything, but I’m more of a practical girl myself. If I’m going to be down in the dirt, I’d better be getting something delicious out of it. We returned with 3 tomato plants, 1 red bell pepper plant, 1 cucumber plant, a bunch of red and yellow onions, broccoli, arugula, and seeds to grow lettuce, spinach, and cilantro. Being the gardening noobs that we are, we weren’t quite prepared for the amount of plants that 1 little tray actually buys you. We are going to be eating a lot of broccoli and onions in the coming months, that’s for sure!

This week we had a bit of a frost scare (in May, seriously?!) but luckily didn’t lose any plants. Our seedlings are all popping up on schedule and we are looking forward to some fantastic veggies in the near future. Last night we harvested our first small batch of arugula and it was certainly worth the effort! We’ll keep you posted on whether the rest continues to produce such excellent results.

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Just one of the stunning views we enjoyed on our hike

If someone asked you what was the happiest day of your life, what would you answer? Most people would probably respond with things like “the day my child was born” or “my wedding day”. These days are very special to us as a culture and as individuals because they hold such precious meaning to the rest of our lives. But what if ordinary days could be filled with more joy than the ones surrounded by all the fanfare? Instead of our happiest days being milestones in the past, being able to look forward to them today.

Dan and I had such a day just a week or two ago. We both took a Friday off of work and had nothing planned. There is something amazingly refreshing about warm sunlight on your face gently calling you into consciousness and having time to talk to your spouse over morning coffee while the baby is still sleeping. When Carter finally woke up, we all had a delicious breakfast of omelets before heading out on a bike ride and walk at the park. Our “walk” on the park’s trail quickly turned into a beautiful hike through the woods taking us over hills and valleys where we saw a family of deer, a field of wildflowers, and some amazing views just a few miles from our home. The day was absolutely beautiful.

After miles of hiking and a visit to the local nature center, we finally made our way back to our bikes with our worn out toddler on our backs and made our way home after stopping for lunch. That afternoon, Carter napped for 3 hours during which we did nothing but relax. No housework, no yard work, no rentals, just total relaxation sitting in our backyard. We finished our lovely day with dinner and a movie at home, reading, playing with Carter, and all of us falling asleep together in our bed. Just a perfect day and certainly one of the happiest I’ve ever had.

I think it’s best said by this verse of “Happiness Is…” from the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown:

Happiness is being alone every now and then.
And happiness is coming home again.
Happiness is morning and evening,
Daytime and night time too.
For happiness is anyone and anything at all
That’s loved by you.

P.S. Thanks everyone for participating in our first contest! We will be emailing the winner today to get your shipping information, so keep an eye out for it! Once the winner has confirmed we will do a special post announcing the winner.

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Once Upon a Gypsy Moon

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book:

The world has a way of working itself out, in my experience. There are things unseen. Life is not always easy or pleasant, and it is often unfair, but it seems to unfold according to some plan of which we are only peripherally aware – like a dream, the details of which are vivid only when we are sleeping. We cannot remember- much less comprehend- that dreamworld with the powers of a rational mind.

Sailing has been a love of mine for almost as long as I can remember, and that love endures…But over the years, the idea of sailing long distances over oceans, unobliged to return, became for me less about adventure than escape- a kind of trapdoor beneath the uncertain footing of a marriage and a personal and professional life that seemed at various times to teeter on the brink of collapse… With no escape hatch, we have to face life head-on, admit our weakness, rely on our relationships, and trust others to catch us when we fall.

The insight in the book was compelling, though at times it did get a little dry. The boat journey was somewhat less exciting than the cover lead me to believe as it was mostly individual legs of a trip broken up by repair stops on his old boat rather than a continuous time line. The final chapter entitled “The Loss of the Gypsy Moon” was certainly the most thrilling of the book as *Spoiler Alert* Michael did eventually have to abandon ship during bad weather after a nasty knock-down and subsequent rescue by the US Coast Guard. Maybe someday she will be found and resuscitated but it seemed a fitting end to the tale of a man who no longer needed his escape hatch.

We would like to pass the book on to one of our readers in our first giveway! If you would like the chance to read Once Upon a Gypsy Moon yourself, there are four ways you can earn entries to the giveway:

1. Subscribe to this blog via email (look for “Receive updates by email” in the right sidebar)
2. Leave a comment on this post
3. Follow us on Twitter @sv_horizon
4. Like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/FollowTheHorizon

Each way gets you 1 entry into the drawing, for a maximum of 4 entries. We’ll do the drawing next Tuesday evening and announce the winner on the blog next week! Hope to see your name!

 (In March, we were contacted by Center Street book publishers to do a review on a new memoir that they released on April 16 called Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley. We agreed, so they sent us a pre-release copy of the book that for some reason we didn’t receive until a couple of weeks ago. This is the first time that we have been contacted to do a review so we’re pretty excited that we are starting to pop up on the radar of the sailing blog world.)

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A financial safety net is just as important as a physical one.

Whenever we are dealing with finances Dan and I like to plan for a pretty decent margin of error. (Dan would appreciate it if I would practice this a little more in dealing with scheduling as well; I am consistently 5 minutes late.) If you could listen in to some of our mini-planning sessions we frequently have, you would hear the phrase “worst case scenario” at the beginning of most of them. We figure that if we plan for the worst case – within reason of course, we aren’t going doomsday here- then we will be left with a much higher comfort level and safety net in times when we’re living on the other end of the spectrum.

The margin of error is especially important when we are talking about making a budget for a lifestyle that we have never lived before. Sure we think that we will be fine living on $1000-$1500 per month based on our research, but that’s all it is right now, research. It’s crucial for us to know that if that doesn’t end up being true we aren’t left high and dry (pun intended). The whole basis of this adventure is our desire for freedom but you can’t have freedom if you are constantly worried about how you are going to pay for the next time your engine needs a tune-up.

There are a couple of big ways that we are dealing with the margin. The first is in how we are planning out our rental income. Dan has created a spreadsheet that we use to evaluate any potential rental properties that we look at which takes into account all expenses (including property management costs at the highest rate we’ve seen in our area) and also vacancy rates of our tenants. We have separate columns for vacancy rates at 0%, 4%, 7%, and 11%. The current accepted vacancy rate in our area is a very low 2-3% but we use the 7% rate as the amount that we use for budgeting purposes. We hope this will give us a very safe expectation of income from our rentals even if the market worsens a bit before we leave. Hopefully we’ll continue filling vacancies within a week or two as we have done with our first 2 houses and also find a manager we like at a lower price, but if we don’t we are still fairly comfortable.

The second part of the plan is maximizing our income earning potential while cruising. Dan is currently a certified PADI Dive Master and plans to become a PADI Open Water and Specialty Instructor as soon as possible. Because PADI is recognized worldwide we are hoping that this will give us a nice back-up option if our income falls short of expenses. We also intend to log our sailing time once we start cruising to begin the process of getting Coast Guard Captain’s licenses (6-pack at least) which would allow us to complete deliveries and also increase Dan’s marketability as a SCUBA instructor who is licensed to carry divers himself. Finally, investment income on other savings and maybe some future swing trading as described in Live on the Margin in addition to some small income from this blog (yes we have recently added ads to the site) eventually could all add to a few hundred a month for extra flexibility.

Best Case Scenario: our costs will not overextend our rental income, we will have renters who stay for years at a time and financial stress will be a thing of the past in our new life. Worst Case Scenario: we have crappy renters who tear up our houses, our boat breaks down too often and Dan has to take up part-time work doing his favorite hobby. Sounds like a pretty nice life either way.

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Everything you need to know about cruising is in here!

So far in our month of finance posts, we’ve gone over our savings goals and reducing our current spending. But of course all of this is meaningless unless we have a plan for how much we will be spending while we cruise. People have asked this question on every blog and every forum available to cruisers of all levels and with something as individual as personal spending it is a fairly difficult question to answer. The most common response is “it costs whatever you have” or “that’s the same thing as asking how much it costs to live on land…its all up to you.”

While I appreciate the idea behind the answer, I also think that there is a way to generalize expenses for people. I can tell you that it is possible to live on $750/month or less for a couple in my town if you rent or own a one bedroom shack, eat peanut butter sandwiches every day and don’t own a car or have other insurance. You could spend $2000/month living in a small 3 bedroom home, eating good meals at home, driving one car rarely and being otherwise frugal. Or you spend $5000/month on a nice home in a good neighborhood, drive expensive cars that get terrible gas mileage as much as you want, and eat out for every single meal to normal restaurants. I can’t tell you how much it would cost your family, but I can give you the basis to help you figure it out on your own.

That’s exactly what Beth Leonard has done in this fantastic article entitled “How Much Will Cruising Cost You?” and also in her book The Voyager’s Handbook. She details the spending habits of three fictional cruising families: the Simplicity’s in a 33 ft cutter, the Moderation’s in a 40 ft catamaran, and the Highlife’s in a 54 ft ketch. In my opinion, this is the best document on cruising budgets that I have found in any of my research, and is what Dan and I based many of our calculations on when trying to figure out how much we would need monthly and yearly to live at the level we desired. We believe that we can budget somewhere between the Simplicity spending of 8,000/year and the Moderation level of 20,000/year leaving at somewhere in the $1000-$1500 per month range. This budget was also verified by a seminar called Three Cruising Budgets given by George Day of Blue Water Sailing magazine at Strictly Sail Chicago this year.

Obviously, we don’t know for certain yet how much we will spend once we start sailing, but it is important for us to have some sense of direction to work with while planning. No one else will have the same budget as us (and certainly not one man on a forum that told us we would need at least $50,000/year…he and his wife spent $1500/month on food alone!) but we think that using a generalized picture has given us pretty realistic expectations. We’re always open for comments or suggestions, so leave one for us below!

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Sure it can eat through mud and snow…and your wallet.

Now that we’ve taken care of most of our “big-ticket” items to improve our savings, Dan and I are trying to tackle the smaller ways that we can find extra dollars in our budget. Not only is this important for increasing our savings to maximum levels but it also is helping to prepare us for living more frugally while cruising. If we want to have any kind of decent chance at living on $1000-$1500 a month than we have to get serious about knowing where each of our dollars goes and how to cut that down as much as possible.

The tracking part is made much easier by the online financial website that we use: Mint.com. We have all of our bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and investment accounts tied in so they automatically update whenever you long in. We’ve used this program for a few years and we’re pretty happy with it, though it can be a lengthy process to set everything up and figure out what budgets you want to set for yourself. Once you have been using it for a couple of months, it can really help to show you where your money is going every month. For some time now, it has been giving us a pretty clear indication that we have been spending too much in the Food and Gas departments, so we’ve finally decided to get those under control.

Food was first and it was somewhat daunting to me to be honest. Not to play the martyr working mom bit, but it is really hard to provide home cooked meals during a working week. There’s just not enough time to be able to figure out what to make every day and go pick things up from the store so I had to find a different approach. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that we have purchased a subscription to 5meals1hour.com for five dollars a month. Well, we’ve completed the first months’ worth of recipes and I can honestly say that we are way ahead of where we were last month, but I can’t give all the credit to the menus. We only used about 1/3 of the recipes on the menus, but we have still been eating at home on average of 5 days a week, which is a huge deal for us. I think just the change in mindset about grocery shopping every two weeks for actual planned meals has been the biggest positive change that 5dinners1hour has made for us. We can still improve a lot in this area, especially because I’m not a very experienced grocery shopper yet so I think we’re paying too much for our groceries, but we’re seeing a definite change in attitude and habits.

Gas spending is our other cash hog. Like a lot of people we know, it’s just something that we haven’t taken seriously before. But looking at our accounts, we have spent almost $1300 in gas alone since February 1! That’s averaging $18.50 per day, yikes! Here are a few strategies we are implementing to help us cut down this silent killer.

1. Drive less…obviously. Eating meals at home isn’t just saving us money in the food department, it means less driving too.
2. Walk and Ride Bikes, and not just for leisure riding. Dan has started riding his bike to work most days and we are planning to use our bikes for trips to the grocery store, library, and other close to home errands.
3. Get rid of the gas guzzler in the driveway. We’re still working on this one, but the goal is to eliminate one of our 15 mpg SUV’s for a 30+ mpg compact car. Even if we have to spend some money over the sale of our Jeep, we should get most of it back in the end when we sell it in a year. This one has the potential to save us in the realm of $250/month!

Hopefully, we’ll find some good success using these strategies and find others to help us keep our everyday spending in check. If you have any suggestions, let us know in the comments!

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So, we when started our retirement planning in 2011, it looked something like this:

Income: $95,000/year or ~$5,500/mth after taxes, 401k, and health insurance deductions

House: $150,000 value, $50,000 equity, $1200/mth mortgage, property taxes, and house insurance

Cars: $40,000 value, $0 equity, $900/mth car loans and insurance

Other Debt: $5,000 student loan debt, $50/mth payment

Other Spending (food, clothing, entertainment, etc.): $2000/mth

Savings: Income ($5,500) - Spending ($4,150) = $1,350/mth Savings (though in reality it was usually closer to $1,000/mth that would make it into the savings account)

As you can see, $1,000 a month into a savings account was pretty nice savings compared to most people, but $12,000/year was going to take a long time to turn into enough money to live on the interest and buy a boat, especially because we were starting with around $5,000 in the bank and whatever assumed equity we had in our house. So we needed to save more money and find some better investments that we could use to live on. As you can see above, we were spending a whopping 40% of our after-tax income on our house and cars. In America, banks will tell you that is perfectly affordable and it was…if we wanted to “afford” a 9-5 job for the next 30 years.

Here is what we have done in the last year and a half to improve on our savings rate and investment income:

1. Sell our over-priced luxury vehicles and buy two dependable used cars with cash. This saves us money on payments and insurance, since now we only carry liability insurance. Cost: $5,000. Savings: $800/mth
2. Eliminate student debt. The payment wasn’t high, but we didn’t want to have that liability while cruising. Savings: $50/mth
3. Sell our house and buy a smaller one which will become a rental or get sold when we leave. Savings: $800/mth and $25,000 in cash (after down-payment and repairs on new house)
4. Purchase 2 rental homes using cash from house sale. Cost: $18,000. Net Income: $700/mth.
5. Moved $6,000 from savings account into Vanguard 80/20 investment account. Anticipated income: ~$30/mth
6. Adjusting spending habits (still in progress). Savings: $500/mth

Current Cash on Hand: ~$22,000                  New Rate of Savings:  $3,000-$3,500/mth

Saving money is always a work in progress, which we will go into a little more later this month. Our goal is to purchase 2 more rental houses by the end of this year to solidify approximately $1,000/mth in net profit after expenses and vacancies. Then, we are off to the races to save somewhere in the $50,000-$75,000 range with which to purchase our new floating home. It will be a challenge, but I think we’re up for it!

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Our first step was selling both of our Saab 9-3s

When we talk with people about cruising the first question people usually ask us, after getting over their disbelief, is “How are you going to pay for it?” In the spirit of tax season, we’ve decided to do a short mini-series in April devoted to finances, both for cruising and anyone trying to get a little more bang for their buck.

Have you ever looked at someone in a luxury motorized throne (ok, imported luxury vehicle) and thought, “Wow, sweet ride! I wish I was wealthy enough to have one.” Okay probably not in those words… but the reality (according to the authors of The Millionaire Next Door, two PhDs with over 20 years of research on the subject) is that most people living in affluent neighborhoods and driving luxury vehicles actually don’t have very much wealth. Sure they can afford the payments on their McMansions and land yachts, but many of them are living paycheck to paycheck. They are constantly teetering on the edge of financial ruin, saving less than a few percent (if at all!). Sadly, retirement is only a pipe dream to many people from all levels of the tax bracket. They think about in abstract terms, hopefully they’ll have enough to retire at some distant point in the future… definitely not something attainable in the near term.

However, with the right approach retirement is not only attainable, it’s attainable in a relatively short amount of time. Michele and I are recently followers of Mr. Money Mustache, who retired a few years ago at age 30. He explains it best:

It is not an easy journey to begin, but it is a path that leads to what I call time freedom. Time freedom doesn’t necessarily mean sitting on a beach somewhere doing nothing all day, every day. It simply means having the freedom to spend your time the way you wish. Michele and I have been blessed with a great starting point on our journey. We were able to very quickly build and capitalize on equity in our first home. We’ve been able to turn that into a portfolio of rental homes (we close on our third next week!) and traditional investments. These properties and other investments will provide a decent income when we retire. More importantly, we’re learning to live on much less than our current income while maintaining an extremely high quality of life, which is precisely what we are expecting to continue doing when we go cruising.

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Each one of those is about 21 seconds of cruising. Start counting!

I am a sucker for new beginnings. New Year’s, birthdays, and even Mondays can generally make me feel like this time is going to be different. True, I’m usually right back to my normal routine by Wednesday, but there’s always next week, right? My most recent enthusiasm for new beginnings has been brought about by finally moving into our new house this last weekend. I mean, I love Dan’s parents for sure and am super grateful that they’ve welcomed us into their home for the last 2 months, but there’s just something about having your own space.

We’re hoping that with a new house will come some new habits and a new budget to go along with them. We’ve developed some habits in the last few years that are hard to break and hard on the pocket book, namely eating out almost every day and constantly being out running around for entertainment. You wouldn’t think that the running around part would be that big of a deal, but with $3.50/gal gas prices mingled with the propensity to buy random stuff we don’t need when we’re walking the mall for fun and then the  added likelihood of eating out if we’re already out of the house, and maybe you can see how kicking that habit could add almost $1000/month to our cruising kitty.

So how do we plan to change our bad habit? Well, first we have to start by wanting to be at home and therefore having plenty of entertainment for ourselves, sans television preferably. If the only thing we have to do at home is chores, then we don’t exactly want to spend a lot of time there. That means games, books, and possibly a new garden in a nice spot in the backyard. Also, our new neighborhood has sidewalks (yay!) and is fairly close to a couple of different parks, so walks and bike rides are definitely in our future – assuming of course that the future is warmer than today. Thirty degrees in March is precisely why winter is on its way out of my vocabulary.

I’ve also found a new meal planning subscription that we are trying out called 5 dinners 1 hour. One of my biggest problems with cooking at home is planning what we are going to have before I want to make it to ensure that we actually have the food on hand. No one (in our family at least) wants to go grocery shopping after work and then still come home and make dinner. 5 dinners 1 hour is a subscription service that provides 5 dinner recipes a week with a full grocery list and advanced preparation instructions to have all five of your entrees ready to go in an hour over the weekend. Then all I have to do is heat it up and whip up a side dish during the week. There are even 3 separate menu types to choose from: classic, clean eating, and gluten free (we chose clean eating) so you can find the right plan for your family. We just started this week, so I’ll try to post an update in a couple of weeks on how we like using it.

Do you have any suggestions for us to try? Games or great books to read? A recipe that your family loves? Leave a comment and let us know!

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Here’s what happened. Carter has recently been climbing in and out of his pack-n-play and we could not figure out how he was doing it. Monday afternoon I was playing with him in his room while Dan was taking a nap and Carter started throwing the cat toy (as seen flinging across the video) into his crib and then climbing into it and out of it simply by lifting himself over the side like a gymnast doing the pommel horse. It was amazing actually, that kid is strong! And what did I, as his mother do? Whip out my phone and start video taping him of course!

That’s when things got interesting. As soon as I started filming him, he started having trouble getting his feet over the side of the crib (I’m assuming he was probably getting tired). So he decided to enlist some help from the handy computer chair, and well…you know the rest. The problem is, now that he knows that we all thought it was funny, he keeps trying to do it again. While I may have had a lapse in judgment the first time I allowed him to do it, I really don’t want him to get hurt, so we’ve moved the chair away and keep the door shut to that room for the moment.

Yesterday, Dan posted the video onto YouTube. Within a few hours, we received a phone call (you aren’t as anonymous as you think I guess) from a reporter at Right This Minute wanting to use it for their show. Then last night, Dan got an email from ABC asking if they could show it on Good Morning America! We accepted and are eagerly awaiting our new boat fund to begin flowing in any minute now…okay maybe that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves. But watch the video (and click on some ads please!), send it to your friends, and maybe we will  be buying a boat this year after all!

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