Years ago, on a Sunday afternoon, I sat across from my wife Gayl in a taco stand and told her that I thought we should sell our house, quit our jobs and sail to Tahiti. “Terry, we don’t know how to sail,” she said.
She had a point, but I was much more worried about the financials of how we would bail out of society for two years and not end up begging in the streets of a foreign country. I was a magazine editor making less than $50,000 a year; she was a surf industry production manager making about the same. To make matters even more complicated, we had just bought our first house and had no savings.
Yet while she dreamed of starting a family, I dreamed of starting an adventure — anything that got me out of my cubicled existence. It took a hard sell, a lot of beer and promises of future parenthood, but somehow I convinced Gayl of the plan. Three years later, after taking everything from basic sailing to advanced anchoring, we quit our jobs and set sail in an old, leaky boat on a two-year, 6,000-mile journey to Mexico and the South Pacific.
Financially, the most difficult part was getting away; once Gayl and I were traveling, without even attempting to be frugal, we spent only $600 to $1,000 a month. That was less than our mortgage alone had been.
The trip, and preparing for it, convinced me that, when properly motivated, anyone can take two years off to travel the world. Here are the 10 top things we did to make our dream adventure a reality.
SEE ALSO: 6 important lessons I learned from being broke
1. Get or stay debt-free
The one thing Gayl and I had going for us is that we were debt-free — if you don’t count a $225,000 mortgage. We used credit cards sparingly, usually to get the rewards.
Most financial advisors will tell you that paying off high-interest credit cards should be your first move toward financial freedom. Unfortunately, Americans are not so great at that, with the average indebted household holding approximately $9,600 worth of credit card debt, according to a 2015 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Even with a relatively low interest rate of 15 percent, it will take you more than 16 years of paying $300 a month to pay that off. You’ll also pay nearly $16,000 doing it.
So ask yourself whether you’d rather spend that $300 on “stuff” like big-screen TVs to watch other people’s grand adventures, or on scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef or hiking to Machu Picchu yourself. The point: Before you do anything else, pay down credit cards.
Related: Travel Prep: 10 Financial To-Dos Before Going on a Trip
2. Downsize your life
Gayl and I did the ultimate downsize, from a house on an 8,000-square-foot lot to a 32-foot sailboat with about 200 square feet of living space. We sold the house and anything that wasn’t useful at sea — i.e., everything. The house netted us the money to buy our boat — a swap to give any financial planner nightmares. The yard sale chipped in more than $1,000, much of it for things we hadn’t used in years.
We moved into a small apartment for a year before we left to save money and prepare the boat. By doing this, we saved about $450 every month. Before we left, we also sold our cars and netted close to $10,000 more for our travel fund.
If you rent, chances are you can always move into a smaller apartment and save money. Either way, downsizing sooner rather than right before your jump will not only save you money, it will also help you see how much unnecessary “stuff” you have been collecting and give you practice in living with less.
3. Never eat out, ever
Everyone enjoys eating out. Maybe that’s why, in 2015, for the first time, Americans spent more on dining out than on groceries. Unfortunately, eating out will kill your world-travel dreams faster than a dengue fever outbreak.
To see why, consider a study by marketing company Restaurant Marketing Labs about the dining out habits of millennials, Americans born between 1980 to 2000. On average, they spend $174 per month on dining out, whereas other adults spend about $153 per month, the study found. That $150 will buy a lot of tacos in Mexico.
For this reason, Gayl and I stopped dining out a year before we set sail. We weren’t big fine diners to begin with, but the decision still saved us about $200 a month. Whenever we were tempted by the thought of white linen and a $15 glass of wine, we reminded ourselves that for every hour at a fine restaurant, we could spend about four days in a tropical port instead.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider