A year? Now try only 6 months!

Back in November of 2008 I wrote about how I thought that a year would go by very quickly. Well now that scary little countdown timer in the right hand side bar shows a scant 6 months and 2 days until our planned departure. Ouch!

Let’s do a follow-up to that post from 6 months ago. I previously wrote…

We have begun to curb our spending, cutting out unnecessary luxuries. An example of this is satellite TV. It is now gone. We created an auto-transfer of an equal amount of funds (to our TV bill) into our boat savings account.

TV gone, along with just about every other luxury (I know that some of our friends do not consider TV a luxury but we do).

We have begun selling off stuff. All funds from these sales are going into the boat fund.

This continues even today. Yesterday we sold a futon, sound machine (makes white noise, etc.) and some old chairs. Ever diligent Rebecca has been keeping track of everything we have sold to date on an Excel spreadsheet, plus a running total of the monies from these sales. WOW! I was quite surprised by the totals!

We have started directing our secondary income sources also into the boat fund. Let’s hope this adds up!

It has been, although winning the lottery would still be welcomed. On a side note we refer to lottery tickets as Antares tickets! Check the pricing of the boats on that site and you’ll understand why.

Our library continues to grow. We now have books on basic sailing, cruising, marine diesel and electronics repair and even fishing! We are reading and studying constantly.

This continues. On Sunday we purchased an instructional DVD titled “Cruising Under Sail,” from the Annapolis Book of Seamanship. It was an excellent review and had a couple of little items that were totally new to us.

The only things we are permitting ourselves to purchase at this time are things that will serve us on the boat. An example of this is foul weather gear which we purchased for our upcoming sailing course, knowing that we will ultimately need it for life on a boat.

With the exception of study materials we have been purchasing next to nothing.

We had our real estate agent over to our house to discuss it’s sale. We didn’t share our objectives yet but were feeling out his thoughts on a fair price for the property. We were happy to hear that his thoughts on an asking price were close to ours. We plan to offer it up for sale in the spring.

As already mentioned as of last Friday the house is gone. Given that in some places the real estate market is very soft we think the whole house-sale thing came together pretty quickly. No doubt our friend and real estate agent Tim would like to take full credit for that! 🙂

With the above progress on our plan I think we are doing OK. Let’s see where another 6 months puts us.