newest crazy plan

We love living in Vancouver. We want to stay here - but there is *no* house to be bought for less than a half a million dollars. A mortgage on that is about $4000 per month, and you end up paying 1.5 million, once you include decades of interest. Crazy. We're not too keen on the idea of buying a condo - no basement for tools, no yard. Still several hundred thousand dollars. And we can't rent forever - again, substantially more than a thousand a month, paying someone else's mortgage. We're too old for that.

So, the newest crazy plan (that just might work): living on a sailboat for a few years! You can find really nice old sailboats from the 70's for ~20,000. Then all you pay is moorage - ~ $2000 per year (about one month's rent for a house/apartment!)

Douglas, of course, has been completely engulfed by the idea, and is spending every moment looking at sailboats, reading about living aboard them, scouting out marinas, and planning to sail around the world! I'm a little more cautious, but like the sounds of it. A 30+ foot boat would be a lot bigger than the van, and we lived in that for 8 months. I kind of miss the simplicity of van life. And on a sailboat, we could park in marinas in neighbourhoods we can't possibly afford to rent/buy in - my commute would probably be cut in half.

Heigh, ho, heigh, ho, a sailor's life for me...!