Barb and I like cruises, but I’m not sure we like them this much:
When Angelyn Burk, a recently retired Seattle accountant, decided to crunch some numbers one evening last year, she made a stunning discovery: It would be cheaper for her and her husband to spend their retirement perpetually aboard cruise ships than to continue living on land.
“This is how I want to retire,” Angelyn, 53, decided in that moment. “Life is too short.”
She turned to her husband, Richard Burk, and said: “We can do this. Let’s make cruise ships our home.”
To her delight, he was onboard. The couple had thoroughly enjoyed the nearly 10 cruises they had been on together in the past, and they have a mutual love for travel as well as a shared disdain for airports.
They looked online and determined that, on average, they could string together voyages on various cruise ships for markedly less money than their collective cost of living on land. All they had to do was hop from ship to ship with some small breaks in between.
“We calculated that we can probably live reasonably well with about $100 a day together, with what we’ve saved up,” said Richard, 51, who retired as a computer programmer last month.
$100/day per person? At first thought that seems high but after some estimates and crunching my own numbers including infrequent things like home maintenance, vacations, and car purchases that probably isn’t far off. But looking at the cabin type and cruise lines we prefer the cost would be significantly more than $100/day per person. I did find cabins in that price range. So, if you didn’t mind having a tiny interior cabin with no view you could live your life like that.
The risk of being a victim of violent crime would be much lower. You would get maid service and great food with no time investment in shopping, cooking, washing dishes, etc.. My gun activities such as competition and reloading would be left behind. And we would not see our long time friends nearly as often.
I’m thinking the answer is no. But it is an interesting idea…
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