Game Plan Part II

Sometimes I bite off a little more than I can chew. Fixing up the sailboat is not the only thing left. Although, we wanted to cast off the lines and roam the seas till we are too weak and feeble, we needed a little bit more financial security to make things flow better. So just before we got married we decided to buy a house. This is not only to build equity but to hopefully rent out the house and to have a passive income stream to continue our adventures. While tempting as it may be to try and become YouTube stars and join the small ranks of individuals that are able to turn a living from it, I'm not banking on it. We definitely want to upload videos but more so for the shear pleasure of doing so. We want to live simply but still have a good plan in place to support our dreams.

Now in light of so many individuals that have cast off and uploaded their adventures to YouTube, I recognize that the most successful are those that cut ties with land-based obligations and commit to making the dream work. However, we needed a place to live and living with friends or relatives would not work. I have a business and Savannah came with Sprocket.

So we looked for a place to live with an incredibly cheap mortgage and something that suited our needs. Our goal was to live below our means of living and with an untested business I needed a mortgage that I could work at McDonalds if necessary to pay it off.

We found a home that fit that description in Burlington, NC. It was built in 1941 and was selling for 63k and we could live in the house while we remodeled parts of it. The property is just a couple miles from the highway and in a good area to run a small business.

I’ve never remodeled a house on my own before so I definitely was in for a surprise. But as the past couple years have passed, I’ve successfully renovated many parts of the house. We have redone most of the plumbing, electric, landscaping, garage, and so on… There a few more projects that we need to get done this year but hopefully we will be wrapping up by next year to devote all our time to renovating the boat and making it completely seaworthy.

The plan is to rent out the house and hand the business over to an entrusted manager (aka my brother) and build a few alternate streams of income. Do things always go to plan? No… but I don’t see that as an excuse to not make any plans. Indulge me for a sentence or two. When I was a kid I remember a little knick-knack that my mom put in my room and it said, “Shoot for the moon and land among the stars.” I think that is a good motto. You try for something ideal and you have to end up with something. Right?