The difficulty in a long term plan is to stay focussed. Most people take anywhere from 5-10 years to organize their affairs before they can take off on their sailboats. Right now we are 3 years in with another ~4 years before we'd be in a position to fully retire and set sail. So, this definitely puts us right in the average for preparing to go cruising. However, mentally I'm ready to go now but finances and family obligations won't allow me to set sail quite yet.
We have made a lot of strides in towards living the cruising lifestyle. This includes getting rid of lots of our possessions and eliminating a lot of expenses. There are still things to get rid of and I'm going to concentrate on that this year. If we haven't used it in the past year, it's going! Our savings have gone up since the change but we are still spending too much on vacations and unnecessary items. Ruth and I want to learn how to sail a catamaran in preparation for deciding what boat we should buy. So I have one last ASA course to take. We will follow this up with a fall trip to the BVI with our friends to put our learning into practical experience. In retrospect, this is an expense we could have cut out to pad the cruising kitty.
So, my current mindset is to refocus on the plan. The BVI trip will be fun but will be our last major chartering excursion before we set sail. I'm sure we'll still explore the Chesapeake with our sailing friends for shorter trips but the expensive trips will have to stop. If we can live more of a minimalist existence on shore, it will be much easier to transition the same lifestyle to the boat.
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