What is MV Valkyrie? For those seeking instant gratification, the simple answer is – It’s a boat. Fortunately this initial response is not a spoiler for the rest of this post. If we pull back to focus the forest and not the trees, the true meaning is represented by the combined experience of a far more complex journey evolved over years and told over paragraphs. Spanning ramen-noodle dinners with rainbow cookie desserts, to self-made millionaire status. For me, Valkyrie represents a John Wick level of determination and commitment for a future lifestyle few get to attain. To understand fully, let me paint a picture of my journey and maybe through this website provide some lessons learned that I hope to share with others and help them on their own path.
It was not until around 2011 that the name of the the path which I was inadvertently traveling came into focus, financial independence (or FI). Prior to this discovery my work career was centered around low paying jobs and volunteer work which, unbeknownst to me became a critical foundation to frame my FI on. Working in restaurants and later working a register and stocking shelves, gave me enough money to get by and learn methods available to me that could save a few hard earned dollars and offer a free meal.
A fond memory (perhaps one common to anyone working convenience stores) revolves around the concept of “waste”. Working an 8 hour shift as a young adult leaves a strong hunger for only the finest, most nutritious meals, to keep you going. This is where ramen & rainbow cookies come in. For the uninitiated, a rainbow cookie is a tri-colored sheet cookie with strawberry jam between the layers, encased as a large block in chocolate and topped chocolate sprinkles before being cut into squares. In my honest opinion, it’s cookie perfection. The problem was that a box cost about $4.00 and that represented nearly an hours work for me to earn, and as a result was too steep for me to justify financially outside of all but the most important celebrations.
At that time, my boss on the other hand weighed in at around 250-300 lbs and liked to get high during work, so the mental barriers separating his munchies from a “free” box of cookies were quite low and frequently crossed. For years, he learned how to skim from the bottom of inventory and take advantage of delivery inefficiency to provide himself with daily meals and supplies, in addition to his hourly wage.
The way it worked, during deliveries, boxes of goods are frequently tossed around, stacked, unpacked and handled in one form or another and sometimes get damaged. For instance a case of pre-made pastry would arrive via hand truck stacked 30 high and the individual box on the bottom would sometimes get crushed by the weight of those above or have a corner smashed in during the loading process. What was inside the box was still perfectly good to eat, it just didn’t look pristine any more and was unlikely to sell. The pasty company knew this was a fact of doing business and asked for the empty boxes to be returned as credits, and expected the damaged pastry to simply be thrown away. By now, you should see the opportunity that presented itself. Given average volume, the normal damage was more than enough to feed 3 people daily and never raise an eyebrow.
For the rainbow cookies, it was very unfortunate for them that they were packed at the bottom of deliveries, and thus subjected to frequent crushing and damage. Luckily for me, a damaged cookie still taste delicious.
After a few years of working this system, what this re-enforced for me, beyond the opportunity for a free meal, was a nurtured sense of frugality. By exploring the ‘less traveled paths’ of inventory management, my dollar could stretch further than normal and in many ways it also brought me a sense pride being able to live on the cheap and take advantage of a lesser known loophole.
My frugal mentality was further refined, hardened, and honed though necessity as a broke college student. After graduation, it was fully cemented and cured into my being. Once in corporate life, keeping a frugal mindset allowed me to save at a rate well beyond my peers.
Coming back to 2011, after being in industry for a few years, nearly all of my time was spent working, given the memory of the 2008-9 financial crisis was still clearly visible in my rear-view. Rarely taking a day off, the next thing I knew, my pay stubs indicated I had reached the maximum amount of personal time off backlogged, and my boss insisted they be used. My lifestyle was firmly entrenched in work and frugality, albeit without necessarily a clear direction.
I knew I needed to save….but didn’t know what I was saving for?
I knew I needed to invest in retirement…but didn’t know how much?
I knew I needed a vacation….but didn’t know where to start?
My savings were quite healthy at this time so my mind traveled around searching for something unique or uncommon to my current situation. Thinking to myself, what would a week in Europe look like? maybe Italy? or England? or Norway? They all seemed exotic and fun, but the devil was in the details. Being fascinated by history, Rome seems like an awesome place to go, and so the planning began.
An international flight was around $800…immediately I was thrown off. That’s a lot of money to spend just to get there, not to mention eating up nearly an entire day for travel and not counting costs for parking and taxis. Still, I’ve been working hard, and thought ‘I deserve it’ as a primary justification (deserve – Today I’ve learned to hate that word). Ok, once landed, you have to sleep and want to be close to the center of things to take advantage of your limited time, so better choose a nice hotel…$175 a night.
Crap… Now its costing nearly two grand just for the privilege of sleeping in a foreign city for a week. We have not even started covering entertainment, souvenirs, or daily meals. Frugality is great, but don’t expect me to pay $2,000 in flights and hotels to just to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on grocery store brand “Italian bread” for 7 days straight once I get there. I’m ordering something unique to the destination every night possible. Specialty pizza, Tiramisu, Pastas, Wine, the list goes on, and should be epic.
At the end of the day – the math was gnawing at me. Averaging out only the cost for flights and lodging translated to $285 per day. It was simply too much to ignore and presented a mental barrier that needed to be overcome in order for non-work travel to be anywhere in my future. Brainstorming started, and quickly devolved into some far fetched ideas: Is there a “crushed pastry” equivalent for flights? Can I groupon 6 nights in 6 hotels? Does goodwill sell a 6 night/7 day Rome vacation package with the purchase of a $5 coffee table?
Finally, one thought stood out – What about a boat? Not something extravagant like a cruise ship, or small like a center-console for fishing, but a medium sized, 1-2 bedroom boat with all the amenities needed to live aboard for a simple life. Thinking about it, most major cities are usually located near and ocean or river, and anchoring is usually free, so in theory you could just travel to a city of interest and live like a local, albeit on the water. The cost at that point would be just to maintain the boat, which if treated as your primary residence means it might just equal or could be lower than what you were already paying in the form of a mortgage, taxes, upkeep, and the utilities.
Now with a mental string to tug on, thoughts about logistics, costs, options and execution tumbled around in my head for a few weeks as I tried to smooth out rough edges and determine if this plan was even feasible. To romanticize some fantasy lifestyle is easy and a good way to pass the time, but being an engineer by trade, I’ve learned details are important if you want to see it actually work.
Throughout my research, it turns out my outlandish idea is actually not only possible, but already has a small community of people (called cruisers) that already do it. Traveling on a permanent or semi-permanent basis and living out of their boats, these cruisers see many of the destinations I only dreamed of. The cost? At the exchange of a simpler overall lifestyle (living on a boat averaging around 40 ft in length an only a few hundred square feet) most could do it on and average, or lower than average American salary depending on what sort of luxuries they considered essential.
Ok – So this is doable. Now its time to try and make this a reality that I can work towards. Every boat must have a name, and so the idea of Valkyrie was born. Resources online provided answers to many of the questions needed to solidify my plan but one glaring obstacle remained.
…How the hell do you pay for all of this?
My goal of not wanting to spend a few thousand dollars on flights and hotels is now somehow solved by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a ‘go-anywhere’ boat. (Take -that- big hotel and airline chains!) This may not sound like the most logical outcome, it definitely sounded better in my head, but my mind was made up. A plan is needed to perpetually pay for all this that doesn’t involve traditional 9-5 office based paycheck.
– enter FI stage right.
The thought behind FI (Financial Independence) is simple, but the execution is a bitch. The older folks in the world may know it as another name, “Retirement”. To me, retirement implies you intend to stop working completely, which I don’t plan on doing. Instead my goal is to do something fun, that may pay like crap, but brings me joy.
So what does the math look like for FI? Let me try and explain with an easy example:
Everything in your life now can usually be boiled down to some sort of recurring expense. Rent/mortgage, entertainment, utilities, groceries, beer, coffee, etc. All of these things cost money, and for many people money comes from working. If you don’t work, you don’t get money and either need to cut back, or find yourself in a difficult situation making tough choices.
If coffee is a requirement for you, and every day you buy a $3 cup from the local coffee shop, this represents about an $1,100 expense per year. Thinking of it another way, if you had $27,500 invested in the stock market, in theory the returns from this amount would pay for your coffee for the rest of your life and your original investment would likely grow over time. You getting a coffee every morning is no longer dependent on having a traditional paycheck.
This is where the sticker shock kicks in for most people. Lets face it, over $27,000 just to pay for coffee is a lot of money. Start adding bigger ticket items like a car payment or mortgage and that number a lot bigger. If your total yearly expenses add up to $40,000 and you use the same coffee math – you would need a million dollars in the market to perpetually pay for it.
An unwritten goal of FI comes in for the impatient among us – lifestyle deflation (ie: cost reduction). For instance, If you pay your home off outright and don’t have a mortgage, the yearly cost may drop from $12,000 to $3,500 to cover taxes and insurance only. Cut out cable TV and that’s another $1500 a year back in your pocket. A paid off vehicle could bring it down another $5000 a year. All totaled up your new yearly expenses of $25,000 only need $625,000 invested to perpetually pay for themselves forever!
If you trust this math, then as mentioned earlier the journey to save that amount can be a bitch. It’s also where I am at the time of this writing. Valkyrie remains not just a boat, but represents an end to a financial and emotional journey that will span well over a decade. It will mark the start of a new transition in my life and allow me a new degree of career flexibility, unchained from location or monetary requirements.
I invite you to to follow along my journey and listen to my mindless ramblings, and hope it either helps to pass the time on your own path, or inspire you to do something you feel is meaningful and worth your time an effort.
Here’s looking to the future! Cheers to FI! Welcome to Valkyrie!