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August
9, 2002 - HOW TO FIND THE MONEY TREE
(written June 2002 in Chagos)
One good thing about going to Chagos--it's hard to spend any money there. Of course there's nothing there to spend money on: no shops, no restaurants, no cinemas, no buses, no nothing. It does take a fair bit of money to get you there, and when you are provisioning and gathering the spares and everything you think you will need for 4 or 5 months, the money seems to go through your fingers like water.
We are often asked about financing our travels and our lifestyle. The answer is pretty simple--we work. How nice if our parents had unloaded big inheiritances on us. How nice if we had won the Lottery. How nice if we had an oil well in the back yard. But no. We work. When we contracted for SUNFLOWER to be built, we were working in Guam. We each had a full time job--Al is a Licensed Land Surveyor, I am a teacher. We also started 3 businesses that kept us busy part time: a large laundromat (60 washing machines, 27 dryers), a contract drafting service, and a canvas/sail repair business.
But working is only part of the story. The key thing is saving the money you earn, and that's not an easy thing for a lot of people. We earn a decent salary when we work and we are able to save a good percentage of that money. One reason is because we have a moderate lifestyle, and we have moderate needs. No new cars, flashy clothes, nightclubbing for us. We live well (in our minds), but we do watch our expenditures. And generally we have a specific goal to be saving towards. So the working part and the saving part we've got under control.
The real problem is how to keep the money you save, and even more so, make it go to work for you, even increase. It's nice to see income every month. It's nice to know you are covering your expenses with money that is coming to you regularly. In the past when it looked like the out-go was taking over the in-come, and we were dipping into our capital balance, we knew it was time to go back and work for a while. Now Al has Social Security and I have a small pension which help keep up the bank balance. We have investments that provide a regular inflow of cash into our account. We are cruising in an area which is pretty economical too, something a lot of people forget about when they plan to go cruising.
I'd say that pensions, property, and investments are the main things that fund cruisers these days. Investments? We don't have any answer here. It's been a trial-and-error procedure for us for the past 37 years! We've made investments that did extremely well and others that crashed around our ears. Some of those things were our fault; some we had no control over. Whatever you choose, you need to be comfortable about it. Just remember, a money tree grows faster and bears better fruit if you fertilize it with compound interest!
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