Quarantine Update — the Dangerz

We’ve now been stuck on the boat in Quarantine off the coast of Antigua for almost 7weeks. That’s a lot of time to think and rethink and overthink. To make plans and change them. To hash it all over again and again.
We have spent so much time talking about money and finances and our futures over the past few weeks it’s simply exhausting. As if the other topics of the day (a global pandemic and massive economic meltdown) aren’t heavy enough…

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve been here before… we’ve had to sit down and look at the crux of numbers and admit to ourselves that we were months away from running out of money. But this time the financial stress seems different than before, and oddly not even because of the pandemic and meltdown currently taking place..

I haven’t really been able to put my finger on why…
Maybe it’s because in the past we always knew it was coming. When we quit our jobs and left for the trip of a lifetime, we knew it was temporary and we departed with a savings that tied that trip to a deadline. We not only knew that our savings would eventually be depleted, but we also had a rough timeline/expectation for when. Towards the end we were actually thrilled at how much longer we had made it last than originally planned, but we still knew it would eventually be gone and we would have to go back to work (or figure out some other way) to make more money.

This time however… we actually thought we were okay.
We thought, believed, bought into the fact that our investments had finally moved to that point where they were making money every month instead of losing money every month - and that’s true… they were.

When we decided to sell our rolling home for a floating home the “plan” was working…. For a while, we were actually making passive income and things seemed to finally have reached that “tipping point” in our lives, but between a series of mistakes from our property managers back home, some absurd political changes in Portland that completely changed the landscape/laws of rentals and with them the ability to be a successful landlord; we found things changing dramatically over the last couple of years. Suddenly instead of making a small amount of passive income every month we were back to losing a bit of money every month… and this time we don’t have a huge savings to fall back on because the “plan” had changed.

As it turns out, the value of passive income is that you don’t have to have a huge savings to live off of, because money is coming in every month and the savings is growing over time rather than being depleted… and we had adapted/changed to the “new” plan and thought we simply had to wait for things to keep growing. But then after we had purchased the boat, after we had sailed away, after we no longer had the ability to make changes on the fly (because we’re now thousands of miles away from home, have limited connectivity/wifi and are quite literally are floating in the middle of the ocean)… we found out that things had changed dramatically. Suddenly our passive income had disappeared and our properties were costing us money again instead of paying us.

We aren’t completely stupid and missed the writing on the wall.. we actually saw the change happening, fought to get things turned around with our rental management teams but due to lease cycles etc, it may take a couple years to get back to where we were. Sadly at the same time, we also happened to be living on a boat and putting almost all our energy into learning to sail, fix and keep that boat afloat… so it was easy to punt the topic a bit down the road. We also had been planning for almost a year to sell our first house back in portland, which has a ton of equity and the portland market has been screaming (so there was little to no doubt that the sale would put us in a much better financial situation to wait out that time period).

That… that’s where the pandemic and economic meltdown came in to play as that fallback option pretty much evaporated when the virus outbreak began and people stopped viewing homes and making purchases. We allowed the last tenants’ lease to expire, did some small repairs on the house and listed it for sale (approx. 3 days before the lockdown)… deep sigh. What can I say, we never claimed to be good at timing, and while the plan seemed solid - we certainly never saw any of this coming.

As if a vacant house wouldn’t have already changed the financial landscape, it certainly didn’t help that many of our renters lost their ability to work at the same time meaning our properties went from losing a bit of money every month to being nothing more than payments we have to make.

Again… we’ve been here before. Well, not HERE. Nobody’s been HERE before.
None of us know exactly what to do in these unheard of times… But we have been in this situation of having to make some tough financial choices moving forward and knowing that we’ll be out of money soon (or worse yet, realizing we already ran out of it).

But somehow this time it feels different. This time it’s not a conversation about the trip being over and having to go back to work… even then we knew that we still had our investments to fall back on. The work we had already done would still be there. We just had to make some more money to live for the next few years and/or in order to get back on the road again… but the longer range plan was always the same.

This time, we suddenly find ourselves talking about complete financial ruin. We’re talking about the very real possibility of losing ALL of our investments. Of having to start over - with nothing. I literally spent the last several nights reading up on bankruptcy law and we’ve been talking about how our best plan forward is to figure out how to keep just one property. To choose one place to try to keep - that we could use to try to rebuild from and start anew.

But how is that possible?
My logical brain tells me that just doesn’t make any sense.

Before, in those other times- we had nothing. We had run out of money and had to go back to work or find a creative way to make money… but our foundation, our properties/investments were never at risk.
So, how can they be now? What has changed to make that a sudden reality? Is it simply our removal or the fact that we’re thousands of miles away? Is it our unwillingness to go back because we’ve fallen in love with this new lifestyle? Because if indeed everything fails, then we’re clearly going to have to go back - and in that scenario it’s going to be a lot worse and we’ll be back and working for far, far longer in order to rebuild.

Should we be looking at going back now??
Okay - we can’t go right now... that’s part of the problem. There’s a global pandemic and we can’t travel and even if we could, is there even work for us? Is there a job to take or clients to find? 30million americans have already filed for unemployment. Our economy is in ruin.

Who knows…but will there be any more or better opportunities later - if we waited until the whole thing burned?? At that point we will be starting over from from nothing and have SO MUCH further to go. At that point we may well be working the rest of our lives just trying to get back to where we are today, with a good foundation and living on our own terms.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled we did this. That we’ve made all the decisions we’ve made, lived the life we’ve lived and experienced everything we’ve experienced. I don’t know of any decisions we would go back and change even if we knew that they would lead to us having nothing and starting over from scratch in the end…. But IS that truly only option in front of us??

Something just hasn’t added up about this conversation since the beginning and maybe it’s not the math after all - maybe it’s been our unwillingness to admit that we simply can’t afford to continue living this lifestyle right now. I hate it - but that doesn’t make it untrue.

Isn’t there also an option of going back earlier, before it’s all gone and fighting to keep it, rather than waiting until we simply can’t make payments, lose our properties and then have to sell the boat, go back and start all over from scratch?? There has to be.

What does it look like? I don’t know… but how is this so much different than other times in our life where we’ve run out of money and the properties were losing money every month? We weren’t worried about losing everything back then - just that we might have to go back to work. Clearly we don’t love the option of going back to work now… we’ve finally settled into a lifestyle that looks EXACTLY like we want our lives to look. But IF we’re actually admitting to ourselves that we will have to go back anyway - isn’t it better to go now before we lose everything than waiting until after its gone??

For well over a month now we’ve been trying to stay positive by trusting in the universe and knowing that if we have to rebuild from scratch we can and will… we’ve reinvented ourselves before and we can again.

But this morning we had an epiphany.
A change of heart.
Losing everything we worked so hard to achieve over the years and starting over from nothing?? Fuck that!!
We will do whatever it takes to stop this from getting to worst case scenario.

Now we find ourselves running through every scenario in our heads:
- Maybe the house sells and buys us some time to figure things out, and we envision ourselves back in a place without worries at all at least for a while… and then we circle back on logic - “hope is not a strategy”.
- Maybe we turn around, dock the boat in FL and return home and simply pause the boatlife for a while. In reality the cost of a marina means we’ll have to make twice as much money and the boat will still be sitting in the hurricane zone, (and a boat sitting unused is truly not a good idea in any scenario).
- Maybe we head to FL and list the boat for sale (at a huge loss in these times I’m sure) and head back home to work and figure out a way to get ourselves back on top financially.

Ouch… that last one stings for sure.
But in reality if we run out of money and can’t survive on the boat, then we’ll be going back soon enough anyway. Isn’t it better to list the boat now, and put our hopes in it selling rather than the house that’s already sitting unsold back home (or trying to sell them both and hoping one or either comes through as a much needed lifeline)?
Isn’t it better to simply let the boat go if we’re already preparing ourselves for the worst case scenario of letting it and everything else go?

Do we give up a boat and a lifestyle we love, or do we give up our entire foundation, portfolio and plan? Keeping the boat won’t rebuild our portfolio… but keeping the portfolio will likely allow us to rebuy a boat at some point in the future.
One purchase/home lost versus everything lost.
That seems like a no brainer.

So there it is. We’ve cleared the emotional hurdle.
We will do whatever it takes.
We will return home, sell the boat, work our asses off.. whatever it takes to protect the foundation we’ve worked so hard to build all these years. We didn’t live/sleep on the dirty floor of construction zones for the first 10years of our relationship just to have to start over (from scratch) now. Not if there’s anything we can do about it! It’s ON!

Oh wait… there is still that global pandemic and we do still find ourselves stuck in quarantine thousands of miles from home while trying to figure out how to protect ourselves from a rapidly approaching hurricane season - there is still that….

Update:
We filmed a little video about our current status Stuck on the boat in Quarantine and how we’re trying to work through things and stay positive…. Sorry, as always about our lack of comfort in front of the camera and looking like stuttering idiots.