At this point I wouldn’t really call this website officially launched so if you’re looking for adventures on the high seas, we’re no where near there yet, we’re on the three year plan. We are still caught up in the dreamer stage of things, so who knows if we will actually make it out of here, out of careers, out of our scheduled lives. I think this site will continue to be totally rearranged right up until we cast off. We are still in the dreaming stage and not totally committed for this round the world cruise thing because of our other commitments. Erin is more or less ready to go, it is me who needs to finalize a bunch of stuff. Some minor things that I need to settle. After buying the boat with just about every penny I had, there were a couple things that sunk me into the negative. Provincial Sales Tax… What a piss off. I knew I was going to get dinged, but was pretending that it wasn’t going to happen. It ended up being a little over $12,000 Canadian (that’s probably about $11,000 US right now). In Canada, the sale of your primary residence is pretty much tax free, so when you buy your next primary residence you also don’t have to pay PST. The problem with going and buying a boat with the proceeds is that as far as Revenue Canada is concerned, a boat is not allowed to be a primary residence. There is an exception to this. If it has no method of self propulsion, then it is ok. I.e. if it has an engine, or a sail, you’re screwed. It would be fine if your home is just randomly floating around and bumping into things, but as soon as you give it the means to locate itself into a logical location, that’s not a primary residence. Who came up with that crap. Another thing about this that I’m pretending to ignore: Eventually when it comes time to sell the boat, am I going to have to pay capital gains on the boat? Not that it will go up in value, I’m quite aware that it’s going to go down, but what about the value itself that was originally gained on the sale of my house that was at that point free of capital gains? If you know, and it’s bad news, don’t tell be, I’d rather not know. Ignorance is bliss when it comes to taxes I’m just going to assume that it will be sold at a loss. I could have avoided the PST if I didn’t import the boat up into Canada. I could be wrong here because this is not what I did, I did end up bringing the boat up from the States. Even though my boat was already registered in Vancouver Canada, I bought the boat when it was parked down in Point Roberts, Washington. I may have been able to not import the boat up and not pay the PST, but I think technically that would mean that I would have had to pay Washington taxes. Or from what I understand Oregon has little or no sales tax on boats. I don’t know, it all seemed a bit convoluted, and we’re not planning on going anywhere yet so I just paid their dam tax when the letter came for Revenue Canada.
One of the diesel engines ended up throwing a rod and needed to be replaced last summer. I mean the entire engine needed to be replaced. That put me another $11,000 CND in the hole. Not a lot I can say about that without repeating myself. I wrote about that on my “Shit happens” page of my website.
Student loans: I’ve paid most of it off when I sold the house and was pretending that I wouldn't need to pay PST on buying the boat, but I still have about $6,600 CND left to pay off to the Federal Government.
I guess my point of all this is before we cast off into the wild blue yonder, I’ve got about $16,000 CND that I have to pay off in debt. With the exception of my favorite weakness of going down to the Fringe Café (local pub in Kits) and blowing 30 or 50 bucks on beer about once a week, I’m scrimping my pennies and putting about a thousand bucks every pay cheque, every couple of weeks toward paying the debt off. Probably about a year to get even as long as there aren’t any other major unforeseen mechanical failures. Erin calls it being squeezey with her money and she’s a lot better at it than I am. From what I’ve read of people who are currently cruising around the world, you can get by fairly comfortably on about 10 or 12 thousand US each a year. Some do it for a lot less, and others probably spend more in a week than I do in a year. For a three year trip, Erin’s already got the money together. Me on the other hand, its going to take a couple years after I settle my debts to get that together so we are on a three year plan at this point.
A lot of people won’t understand this but the other big factor on leaving is Louie Bert the freckle faced dog. We have a commitment to each other that is beyond description. If a stranger, Louie and I were in a plain, that had run out of fuel and was about to crash and we only had two Para shoots… Louie would definitely put one on (he’s almost that smart) and give me one and we’d jump together leaving the stranger in the plain. Louie is about 9 1/2 I think. It would kill him if I left him and as far as commitments go, this is the strongest commitment keeping me from leaving, so we are here for probably not much more than three years while Louie is still around. You probably don’t understand, but you probably have never lived with a Border Collie. They are not your average dog.
A lot of people won’t understand this but the other big factor on leaving is Louie Bert the freckle faced dog. We have a commitment to each other that is beyond description. If a stranger, Louie and I were in a plain, that had run out of fuel and was about to crash and we only had two Para shoots… Louie would definitely put one on (he’s almost that smart) and give me one and we’d jump together leaving the stranger in the plain. Louie is about 9 1/2 I think. It would kill him if I left him and as far as commitments go, this is the strongest commitment keeping me from leaving, so we are here for probably not much more than three years while Louie is still around. You probably don’t understand, but you probably have never lived with a Border Collie. They are not your average dog.
