6 Year Financial Plan to Sail Away and Retire Early

So how did we come up with a 6 year financial plan to sail away and retire early? We tracked our finances, lived within our means, planned, and worked hard to make our dreams come true.

Getting Started on our Financial Plan to Sail Away

As I put in my notice at work, and was planning to leave my 9-5 job (ok, more like 7-5+ job these days), I was often asked how we came up with the idea to sail away. Did we just wake up one day and decide to quit our jobs? Not exactly. While I can’t pinpoint the exact moment that we made the decision to sell everything and sail away, I can tell you we made this decision 6 years ago. What I am amazed at now, is that 6 years later after all of life’s twists and turns, we are still on track with our “6-year plan” to go cruising this amazing planet. I’ll go through our financial mindset to where we are 6 years later, which is getting ready to untie the lines and head out on our new adventure.

Finances

We knew that we didn’t want to work until we were retirement age. At this time, I wasn’t familiar with FIRE, or Financial Independence Retire Early, but we knew we needed a financial plan and start saving as much money as we can. We lived well within our means and put any extra money each month into savings. Any pay increase, bonus, tax refund when directly into savings without thinking about it. A great resource to get you started and learn how to invest can be found at investingbestie.com.

Once we were on the mindset that we would eventually be selling our house and moving onto a boat, it really changes the way you think about what you buy. I stopped buying things like Christmas decorations, decorations for the house or kitchen appliances that wouldn’t fit on the boat. Purchases such as shoes and clothes for work, that we didn’t intend to wear or keep after we quit our jobs, reduced as well. I never felt that we were living frugally, just giving serious thought before making purchases to see if those items could come on the boat with us.

Vehicles

At the beginning of our 6-year plan, we had one vehicle paid for (2007 Suburban) and one we were still making car payments on (2016 Jeep Renegade). We paid off the Jeep in 2020, and took the car payment amount going forward, and put it straight into savings. Knowing that we would be selling both of our vehicles, we didn’t want to be stuck with more car payments, just to have a newer, more high-tech vehicle. 

House

We did buy a house within these 6 years (we were living in an apartment when this idea started). We found a house well within our means, and our mortgage was much less than our ever-increasing rent at the apartment. The difference in the two went right into savings. We owned the house for 4 years, still just under 2 years away from our target date, when the housing boom was going on. At this point, we owned the house, and found our sailboat that we would stay at every weekend. So, we sold the house a little earlier than we planned, but were able to sell it for greater than we expected and moved onto the sailboat in July 2021.

Sailboat

At the beginning of our 6-year plan, we owned a 13 foot sailboat, a Chrysler, then a very rustic 1983 Seafarer. We would take them out on day sails and the Seafarer out on occasional overnights.

We knew we would need a bigger boat, and I steadily dreamed about what that bigger boat would be. One cold winter day in January 2020, we decided to go look at our future liveaboard boat. It didn’t take us long (third boat we looked at) before we fell in love with our current boat Pelagia, a 1998 Hunter 450 Passage.

We did bounce around the idea of a catamaran, which admittedly is what I thought I wanted initially, before we found our dream boat in a monohull. Catamarans tend to be far more expensive that monohulls, both upon initial purchase and maintenance. While they do tend to have more storage space than monohulls, generally speaking, we found that we have more than enough space on Pelagia for two people and a dog. We were also able to purchase Pelagia for a cost well below what we were looking at in catamarans.

Budget

What does a sailing budget look like when you are out sailing around? I’m still wondering this too! Since I didn’t know (and still don’t know as I write this) what the costs are to travel around, I thought the first step should be to track where all of our money was going. I started seriously tracking our spending in 2020, putting each purchase into a category, so I could get a good sense of how much we were spending on things. This really is helping me out now to give me a good understanding of our spending habits, and give me a starting point to create a budget going forward. 

Update: 6 months into our sailing adventures, we have established 11 sailing budget expense categories that we use to track our boat and personal expenses. Check them out here in Sailing Budget: What Expense Categories You May Want.

Family

Either our family already knows we are a bit on the wacky side, or we have just been talking about our plans with them for 6-years, that it was no shock to them when we told them we actually put in our notice and quit our jobs. They have all been truly supportive, and I’m actually expecting to see my sister out on the waters very soon! 😉

As I write this, we worked our last day two days ago, and are officially unemployed/retired. We have about 1-2 weeks of finishing up some boat projects before we set off on our sailing adventure. Our 6 year financial plan to sail away has served us well to help us stay focused and on track with our financial goals. I will be going into more detail in future articles on the topics I touched on here to help you with your planning for your adventures.

Live your dream,