Today I looked at our bank accounts.

A few days ago, we spent over 3000 on doing a new dodger, bimini and adding some stuff like grab rails, and mounts for the solar panels above the bimini (instead of THROUGH it like the previous set up).

Our poor, little checking account takes a pretty good hit every month from the marina bill. Next month it will be boat insurance, and also our storage locker. December, car insurance. We get a really good deal on the storage locker though. We pay a year in advance and get a month free. So, next year, we should be good until December or even January!

Today, my first Social Security check made it into the bank, just a few days after my military retirement check. A whopping “boat buck”, plus a little bit. We think of a “Boat Buck” as an amount that, should something break, we’re going to end up spending about $1000 on it (whether up front or for parts, labor, time, extra parts, trips to the store for MORE parts, etc).

Other than me working in the marina, this is our first real income in forever. Five years nearly. The marina wasn’t much. Maybe a few hundred bucks a month at most. Ice Cream and Beer money usually.

(Our income now consists of my military retirement pay, plus SS, not a LOT, but good enough.)

In December, JoAnne can apply for Social Security. That should give us enough to live on month to month. We still have out little “nest egg”, sitting there, drawing interest too!

When we retired, we hoped to go for five years, without working, from funds from our house. And, we have, or close enough anyway, along with multiple cross-country trips, massive medical bills and insurance costs for the boat and car. I took the marina job because it was 1) something to do, 2) I can do it with my eyes closed, 3) It’s not difficult, 4) it’s fun, 5) my commute was 3 minutes walk to the office/docks from my boat.

Everyone who is interested in becoming a cruiser asks “How can I survive? What can I do? How can I make money?” They also ask numerous questions of us about how we do things, how we make money, how can we live without a television (very well, thank you) and they insist on knowing about bathrooms….

A lot of people work their way up and down the coast, or around the world, taking on odd jobs and various other ways. Some folks, they just have it made with lots of cash in the bank, drawing interest from a previous life of proper investing or rental incomes. We don’t have those things.

And lots of people take the “easy way” out, by creating visual/video appealing Youtube sites and monetizing them. More power to them, but, I don’t click on them. I read a rare few blogs myself, but I don’t watch monetized sites, or click on the stuff. I HATE, utterly DETEST Ads. (I’ll explain why in a moment.)

People who have the artistic ability to create informational videos abound, but not all of them are very good at it. Some get lucky and actually make money. Most do not. And the amount of work it takes to shoot video, edit it and put it all together in a viewable format is more than I want to deal with sitting at my lap top. I do enough of that writing and reading. I honestly don’t want a desk job on my boat.

Then there’s the thing with “Internet ads”. Most sites, Youtube included, can be monetized, so that ads show. My issue with ads is simple. Almost every one has to “pay” to access the Internet. We are paying for “bandwidth” (another concept I find ridiculous, having worked in IT for years) and find themselves throttled (slowed down) after so many gigs of data pass through. Because… why?

So Internet providers can pull more money from retired people, and young people alike. There’s NO need to throttle a service. Ever. Limit the incoming stream to x-amount all the time, so they can watch a movie or whatever, BUT, don’t limit it at the end of the month under the implied rule “were’re trying to make it fair for others to get data too!”

That’s BS. Back to ads. Ads use bandwidth too. If you’re watching television or listening to radio, that is a FREE service, paid for by ads. The Internet is a PAID service, paid by you. Why do *I* have to pay for an ADVERTISER to feed me data, using MY data stream? They should be paying ME to view ads. Give me free data every time to feed me a BS ad, and I’ll still ignore your ad.

I don’t personally find it polite for people to stick ads on everything, and therefore this is one of the reasons I avoid video blogs 99% of the time. I’d rather read a book or read a blog. (This text-only entry is about 2-3 kilobytes of data).

Most people wait until they are old, like me, to retire and move on into retirement spending their savings. Younger folks, I’ve found work their way around the planet on boats. They spend time in a place, find they have some particular asset that makes them “wanted” in a particular market, such as bar tending or working in a marina (something I can do, the marina thing, not bar tending).

Others do odd jobs, cut hair, they do wood work, sell hand made items like jewelry and wooden carvings.

If you’re on a boat, there are monthly fees on things, regardless of what you do or don’t do. You have to pay for fuel, propane, gasoline, water, bottom cleaning, top cleaning. Even if you do most of the jobs yourself, you still need to eat, keep warm, get cool, buy products, spend energy many times even moving your boat.

Most of us today, in modern times, do NOT give up our engines no matter for the old days when there were men and boats to pull you into the water ways. Those times and people aren’t here. I can’t sail out of my slip easily due to the weight and size of the vessel, so I require fuel and an engine. Otherwise, I have to get some local friends in dinks to pull me out, or use lines to warp out of the area and into the ICW. Not fun, and not cost effective.

At WORST, I could call SeaTow and ask them to come and move me out to the water way, but I’d not do that. So, we all pay for energy somehow.

How do we make money? We have a retirement income. But, I’m looking at an alternative. Above I mentioned something about “bottom cleaning”. Our boat gets full of wild life on the bottom after a few weeks and it costs me anywhere from 100 bucks a month to 175 bucks every quarter to clean the boat. I have to call a dive service to do so. They aren’t cheap. And they are pretty much the only “game in town” around here.

They claim to give “discounts” for those who do monthly service, but…. the math goes like this:

$110 * 12 = $1320 monthly
$132 * 6 = $792 bi-monthly
$175 * 4 = $700 quarterly

Typically, I call them every three months. They do a “one time cleaning fee” or 175 so for 700 bucks per year, someone comes and cleans my boat, checks my zincs and so forth. They will not give me a quarterly contract, because “You don’t use your boat enough”. Hmmmm

So, I don’t see a SAVINGS by going with monthly, I see more outlay for cleaning if I went to monthly. And I am not sure about someone having the nerve to tell me “You don’t use your boat ENOUGH” to qualify for a quarterly thing?

This brings me finally, to my actual point – if you’ve stayed with me long enough here, and I hope you have, I will be diving my own boat for cleaning from now on. The cost of the equipment is LESS than the “quarterly fee” I’ve been spending.

I have the skills, time and ability to dive the boat myself. Except, I don’t have all the equipment other than my snorkeling gear I need. Today, I hit the “buy” button on a few extra items I need. A surface air supply (compressor and tank), fifty feet of air hose, first stage regulator, a diving hood (to keep critters out of my ears) and an inline oil/water separator for the air supply.

I will eventually need a full wet suit (for diving in the cooler waters here in North Carolina) as well as a battery to power the compressor for diving. I figure I can stick the gear in my dink, row over to someone’s boat, tie off, kill the AC on the dock/boat and dive the bottom, or do my own any time it’s not terrible weather, or too cold (I’m not diving cold waters or weather, I’m getting too old for that stuff now).

But, in five dives, I will have paid myself back for the gear. Anything after that is simply money in the bank. And I don’t have to do other’s boats. But, I don’t have to pay for mine any more either.

I’ll spend time practicing on my own ship when we get further south in a month or so, in clearer water.

If you’re a cruiser reading this, how do YOU make money? Comment and let us know what you do, and think!

Time to go catch a fish for bait for crabs!