Wild old women, about those loans, and a music blog I follow makes a very good point...
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."Charles Dickens could have taught a lot of cruisers about the rather simple facts relating to the economics of cruising and his pre-rocket science observation still holds up pretty well in 2012.
Charles Dickens
Dickens view of living within your means seems pretty simple and obvious but then again I just read a rather heated argument where someone wanted to cruise on a $500 a month cruising budget but felt he needed a $500,000 boat with all the toys to do it in, so obviously, it's not quite as obvious as you'd think but hardly surprising in a culture where living beyond one's means is the norm rather than the exception...
Over the last year or so I've been paying a lot of attention to the whole "cruising on $500 a month" thing and it is not as un-doable as some would suggest or as easy as others claim. The hard part is not about fiscal responsibility but more akin to fiscal awareness and allowing that fiscal awareness (the spidey sense for those on a budget) to steer them in the right direction and roll with the flow.
To answer the big question... Of course you can cruise and live a very comfortable rewarding life on $500 a month. That said, it won't be the same life you had before or anything like the life of the guy in the anchorage with the $500,000 boat who eats out five nights a week. The thing to remember is that having your life be "different" does not equal "worse" it simply means different...
Lot to be said for being a little different...
Listening to Elvis Costello
So it goes...
