Ditch Work for a Year and Live your dream

You can take time off of work, and survive. Live your dream while you are young and able to do the things that you want to do.

What would you do with your year? Travel? Get an RV and spend time visting all the National Parks in the United States. Get a Boat and sail around the World? Visting a different country every month? Anything but going into work for a year. You can do it.

Can it really be done if your not a millionaire?

Yes with planning, and determination.

I struggle week to week with bills, there is no hope for me right?

Wrong. We were that way 6 years ago. We made a plan, and stuck to it. Do we feel deprived? No, because we know this is the year that we are going to remember for ever.

This is our story of how we planned, saved and are going to be living our dream in a few months.

The Dream

Our children are grown and on their own. Now it's time to spend time on us. Our dream is to spend a year living on a boat. Cruising the Intercoastal Waterways of the Eastern Seaboard, going from New York to Florida and visiting the towns inbetween. We did consider doing the great Loop which would take us through Canada and the Great Lakes going down the Mississippi River circiing around Florida coast. This trip can take up to a year. But with the gas prices rising so fast, the cost of the gas would take a huge chunk out of our budget. So we opted for the East Coast Cruising, which can still be interesting and loads of fun. Just thinking about 1 year of no rushing, no working, enjoying life and Nature and learning new things is so exciting.

We want to live on the boat, stopping at as many ports and marinia's along the way, getting off the boat and seeing many things at the stops.

The Planning

Once we got our dream planned, we knew that we had to get our finances under control. We like most people had debt. Debt was the one thing that was keeping our dream out of reach. So we knew that we had to elimate debt and save for our dream.

5 years ago, we needed to get a grip on many things. But now we had a reason to get of debt. A good reason. We weren't going to work for every at jobs till we retired, we had a mission.

We wrote down all of our debt, our expenses, and figured out our budget and made a plan that would be painful, but also would allow us to reach our goal in the next 5 years.

Once you pull out the budget you see exactly how much money you spend every month on things that you don't need. Cable Television is one of the many things that could be cut back on that you really don't miss. We took our cable down to basic channels cutting that bill way down. We did the same will all of our bills. Car payments? We were lucky, hubby is able to fix and repair cars, so we didn't need the new car. After all the people with the new car and the payments to go with that new car aren't planning to take a year off. So selling the car and getting a second hand car that we paid cash for was the way to go.

Once we went through all the bills, and figured out what we didn't need, we then decided how much money our year off would cost us. This would include the price of the boat. We bought an older boat, that we were able to pay cash for. We got creative on how to make extra money so that we not only had the money from the paychecks to save but also extra.

We learned that you can not plan to take a year off with bills hanging over your head. You will never be able to leave a weekly check with bills that you need to pay every month. Unnecessary bills have to go. Cut up the credit cards, and pay off the loans that you don't need.

Finding and earning extra Money

We bought several cars fixed them up and resold them for a profit. That was the money for our boat. This was heartbreaking when we sold some beautiful cars such as our 1970 Chevelle that hubby restored from a rust bucket, but once I saw the look on his face when he saw the boat, it was all worth it to him.

Side jobs were another way to earn some cash. Since I sit at a desk all day, I have gained more than a few pounds, so I knew I had to get in shape for this trip. So I talked to neighbors, and relatives, and made a few bucks on the side cutting grass. This not only made me money for the trip, but meant that I didn't have to pay the Gym every month.

We have sold on Ebay, cashed in on writing articles for Associated Content, Hubpages, and blogs. While this hasn't made us a huge amount of money, it all went to trip fund, every little bit of money you can stash for the trip is one more day you can spend on your dream trip. Every little bit of money helped.

Saving Change:

Change has added up for us quickly. We started 5 years ago saving all the change. We cash it in when the jug gets full, then bank that money. If you don't spend the change in your pocket, and bank it instead you can really have a "huge chunk of change" at the end of the timeframe. We banked over 5k doing this alone over the years. Makes us wonder how much did we blow over the years by NOT doing this?

Weekly Payroll deductions:

While neither of our employers offered Saving Bonds deductions, we set it up on the website to take money every pay and buy Series I bonds. This doesn't make us as much money as other options may have, but it was painless for us. We can cash them in anytime after 1 year, and we started this 5 years ago, so we have money that all we have to do is log in and have the money directly deposited into our banks during our year off. This will help us budget throughout the year. We won't see a huge chunk of money in the bank at once and the few few months we think we can spend what ever we want then have to come home early. We can have the money put in our bank and then we would be forced to live on a budget.

Also from the payroll deduction, we had direct deposit into the savings account. As well as the 401k. If we didn't see the money, it was less painful for us to save it.

Now we need to plan on how much money we think we will need for our year off. After all we won't have a regular paycheck, only what we can creativly earn during that year.

Since our dream is boating, we figure out what we will need, marinia fees, gas, food, repairs, clothing. ect. We wrote down every expense we could think of that we would come across and added that to a list. No matter if we thought it was stupid or not, but it all went on paper we could then sort through it later. We knew that we had some bills that we would have to keep, such as insurance, medical insurance once we quit our jobs we need to get it on our own.

I know that I will need an Aircard for Internet since I have several niche sites, and a website, and can make easy money writing for online. I am planning on writing to pay for the aircard payments every month, so it doesn't affect our overall budget.

Since we have a power boat. Gas is going to be our biggest expense. We have a budget for the gas for the month. When we are getting close to reaching that limit for the month, we will stop and stay till the next month. After all we have no concrete plans on where to be on any given day. We don't need to rush. We just need to stay within our budget and have fun!

Once we figured out what we think we will spend we added 20% to that total for cushion on the budget.

So far we haven't addressed the home that we own. One of the nice things about getting older and living at the same place so long, our home is paid off. Our kids have moved out of the area so we are moving from the area when we return, so we will sell our house. We don't want to spend that money, so we will bank it, pretending like we don't have it on our trip so when we return we will have money to buy a new home.

While on our trip we won't need our vehicle and our furniture we will have to include storage unit for this stuff. We are only keeping the essential things that we need.

Eating out and food budget:

Our boat has a full kitchen (gallley in boat terms) so we are planning to eat home cooked meals as much as possible, and only eating out when I am able to earn the money online to treat us to the special meal. We will be off the boat, able to eat picnic lunches I think we will be fine.

If you plan what you want to do for the year, and then consider ALL possiblities that you want to do, think you may want to do you can create a realistic budget.

It has been 5 long years of planning, saving, and it's been fun to do this. It has brought us closer together as a couple, and we are both working hard to reach this goal.

Are we crazy for doing this? Maybe, but we both lost a parent before they reached retirement age, and they never got to take their dream trip. We never know what life holds for us, and we want to enjoy life while we are physically able to do it. Plus if we didn't make a "life change" and get out of this rut of work, eat and TV and Computer with no time for physical activity, we aren't going to make it to retirement age.

Here's to your dreams coming true.