Personally, I find it really difficult to avoid spending money when I'm in 'regular life'. When I'm at home, with the car and subject to all of the obvious and subliminal 'buy this, buy it, buy it RIGHT NOW' messages, the temptations are enormous. Actually, I'm amazed that there isn't more of a debt problem for people. When I'm off in my own 'personal paradise', it's very different.
When I'm off living out my dreams, I actually have to work to (or seriously think about) spending money. Lunch out? It's not a 'convenience' drive through and inhalation of some horrible food on the road, it's a special event, a treat. Most of the things I want to do are right in, on or around the sailboat and I don't need to purchase entertainment. Since I started doing the things that make me happy, I greatly reduced the money I spent on a never-ending quest to buy happiness.
The cost of 'living' versus 'living regular life' is quite low. You need food and shelter, some entertainment. There is the cost of health care (which is admittedly lower in the UK than in the US), but what would the cost of health care be if you had time to focus on preventing illness rather than curing it after it takes hold? What if you had a lifestyle that allowed time for eating well, keeping fit and keeping stress levels virtually non-existent? Costs of 'living' are much less.
(I've used sailing as an example for this discussion, but substitute almost any other dream lifestyle for sailing and the points still hold true.)
A lot of people think going sailing is really expensive and it can be very expensive, but it doesn't have to be. You certainly can spend a fortune on a boat, staying in marinas, and eating out frequently at restaurants. (And actually many people do this in regular life, live in an expensive house, stay at hotels, and eat out all the time – sound familiar?). You can also spend very little if you choose.
Anchoring your boat in a beautiful Bahamian harbour is absolutely free. Having a freshly caught fish for dinner in your cockpit with a view better than almost any restaurant? The cost of a bottle of white wine to go with it. Spending your days exploring, snorkelling, walking on the islands, free.
Your expenses? Once you're past the initial acquisition costs for the boat, expenses are food, fuel, repairs (they can be big or small depending upon your skills), entertainment, health care and communications. Some people spend $100 a week, some people spend thousands a month – it depends upon your skills and your choices.
Initial acquisition costs for a boat (or an RV or place in the country, whatever your dream is) don't have to be high if you have the skills to take something and fix it up. We've met people out here in new sailboats the same size as ours costing $200,000, ours cost less than a third of that and is of better quality (new stuff isn't always best). If you were a young couple, you might not need a 41-foot, two bedroom, two bath sailboat. You might be like the couple we saw tanned and trim in their 20's on a 30-footer. It is smaller, but it's cheaper to acquire (probably a third of what we paid or less for a fixer upper, particularly in this market), cheaper to run and maintain. Also, they're out living their dreams now.
Something that makes things so expensive is that we don't have the ability to do things ourselves anymore. Here's a really simple example. How many people learn to cook really, really well? If you cannot cook well, you turn to restaurants for a nice meal, and there are some wonderful restaurant meals out there. But what if you cooked as well as the restaurants? It took us about a year of focused effort, but we now cook as well or better than the majority of restaurants out there. An expensive meal that used to cost us over $100 (or £100) now costs us less than $15 – with wine. If we go out now, it is for the experience (and a nice meal) rather than just to be able to have a nice meal. For the $100 we used to spend, we now have 10 nice meals.
If we buy another car (notice I said if, not when), it will be an older one that Steve can fix himself rather than a new one that has so many electronics that it must be serviced by someone else. So many things are more expensive when you pay someone else to do them.
People think living out your dreams costs a lot of money. I would argue that not living out your dreams costs more. Because you're working (and you don't have the skills), you pay someone else to fix things, to prepare things and you then 'treat' yourself for all the time you spend working (to pay for the things you don't have the skills to do). We're just as guilty of this as anyone, when I think of the money we've dished out to do things we could have done ourselves I cringe.
It depends upon your skills and your choices, but it doesn't have to cost a lot to live out your dreams!
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