Wednesday19

Not A House - A Home Instead

We’re selling our current house in order to “downsize.” While 3800 square feet of house on 5 acres is pretty nice, there are other things we’d rather do with a big chunk of that monthly mortgage.

So, what about our next house? The plan right now is to rent for a while so we can be sure of what’s right for us. And at this point, I’m hoping our next home will look a lot like this…

That’s a Privilege 39 catamaran, and yes, I want to buy one of those (instead of a house) and live on it. Where? The US West Coast for starters, and then hop down the coast to Mexico, into the Sea of Cortez for a while. Then down into Central America to hit Costa Rica, etc. And when we’ve seen everything we want to see on the west side of the continent…

…we’ll sail through the Panama Canal and head for Nicaragua and Belize, then over to the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Bermuda, etc., and then over to the US East Coast.

After that, who knows?

As long as I can hit a wifi spot every 3-7 days, I should be able to work from anywhere. And if we decide at some point in the future to head across the Pacific to the South Sea Islands, I’ll just hire someone to watch my business for the 3 weeks it takes to get from one wifi spot to another. =:)

My kids are 11 and 13 right now and if we wait too much longer to do this, it’ll be too late to do it as a family — and I really want to give them a taste of life that’s out of the mainstream.

After all, anybody can do mainstream — that’s simply what happens when you do what everybody else does. It doesn’t take any effort to be mainstream.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re not going to sell everything you have and wander the world, please do NOT think I’m putting you down — some people like mainstream. Some folks like the normalcy of living in one neighborhood, raising their kids with the same group of people, etc.

I don’t. At least not right now.

So I have my work cut out for me, because a used boat like the one above costs as much as a house. We’ll probably need around $200K for that, plus there’s usually some kind of hefty outfitting needed — but even before that expense, I told my wife we’d pay off everything else we have, vehicles, etc.

That’s my dream — debt-free and sailing with my family while I continue working my internet-based business from ports around the US and world. That’s a big-honkin’ dream.

But it’s a cool one! =:)

Technorati Tags: cruising, sailing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 6:17 am and is filed under Sailing / Cruising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.