Most all my Admirals report a similar approach to handling their finances while cruising. They have placed their funds with a bank or investment brokerage house with online banking, enabling them to get complete summaries of all accounts – checking, investment, and IRAs –and to pay any bills that come up, all via the Internet at any time from anywhere. Many have chosen a firm where they maintain a relationship with a money manager who is willing to communicate with them by email to move monies as needed from checking to investments and back again.

Simplifying recurring expenses wherever possible really helps. Boat insurance and health insurance, for example, can be paid in one annual lump sum, often earning a discount. Membership fees can be set up to be renewed automatically (DAN, for example) or paid for several years at a time (SSCA), and other recurring payments – loans, phones, storage rent, and credit cards – can be set up for automatic debit. Similarly, income items like social security, pension benefits, investment dividends, or earned income can be automatically deposited.

As recently as ten years ago, cruisers avoided credit cards unless they had someone at home they could rely on to monitor charges and pay the bills. Sometimes this was a professional bookkeeper, but often as not it was a family member. Online banking has changed all that, although it can still be a challenge to make monthly payments on time. Several Admirals hedge their deadline bets by keeping a positive balance on their cards at all times.

These days, most cruisers carry several cards, keeping one exclusively for getting cash from ATMs and at least one other for making purchases. For ATMs, choose a card that doesn’t charge cash advance fees, usually either a debit card or a card that is attached to your money market fund. Some of these, like our Merrill Lynch Signature card, function as a credit card 29 days a month and then become a debit card one day to automatically deduct expenses from your account. Yvonne of Australia 31 uses a Visa Gold card from their Australian bank, because their gold card saves them ATM fees. Bank fees are always changing, so be sure to investigate your cards before you leave, and be sure to set up PINs and passwords for cash advances!

For purchases cruisers, for obvious reasons, tend to favor cards that earn frequent flyer miles. On Tackless II, we’ve switched to Capitol One because our earned miles can be applied to tickets on any airline instead of just one. Another consideration when choosing a card might be what kind of travel or car rental insurance is included and whether or not they charge foreign currency fees on international transactions.

Whichever card you choose, it may be prudent to carry both MasterCard and Visa, as cruisers can find themselves in locations that will take only one or the other. Also, foreign travelers occasionally get caught short when the system flags a “suspicious charge” (as when you order a part from the US and then buy fuel on the other side of the world!) or when a card company has a membership list compromised. When that happens, replacement cards can have a hard time catching up.

American Express, of course, has long been the traveler’s ally, as much for their travel services as the credit card. Donna of Exit Only used American Express offices for getting mail forwarded on their circumnavigation because they hold mail for cardholders until you either pick it up or send them forwarding instruction, unlike post offices which often have time limits on holding mail. Donna and her husband Dave are the exception among my Admirals in distrusting online banking. Instead they used their satellite phone at the end of each month to pay the charges on their one card.

Even cruisers armed with a full house of credit cards are very careful about where they use them. Some areas have bad reputations for credit card fraud, and THAT can really ruin a voyage. All in all, it is probably safest to get cash straight from bank ATMs (some people feel independent ATMs can be suspect), and pay local expenditures in local currency. And for those online purchases, a Pay Pal or Amazon account, set up in advance, can help protect your credit cards from Internet exposure.

It is, of course, important to track all these transactions online whenever possible. This, of course, means getting connected to the Internet, which unlike email has not yet followed us effectively to sea. Many harbors worldwide have wifi and most have internet cafes ashore, but it can be risky to do banking via a public computer. If you must, be careful to log off and clear the browser of any temp file trail you’ve left.

Prudent cruisers continue to carry a reserve of US dollars (still the international currency of choice), because there are yet places in the world without ATMs…or even banks. Don’t waste your time with travelers’ checks. These days, in our kind of destinations, they only add hassle. On the other hand, be smart and check exchange rates online before sailing for the next country and, if possible, change some money in advance. Occasionally you’ll find yourself needing to pay entry fees in local currency in ports where there is no bank.

Surprisingly, checkbooks can still have a place in the cruising life. Some overseas businessmen – like marina owners or marine contractors – keep accounts back in the US, so a US check is quite convenient for them. Additionally, there are times – such as extended stays for boatyard work – when setting up a local checking account is convenient not just for paying contractors but for having money wired in from home.

There is one financial obligation we all have that persists in being problematic for cruisers, and that is taxes. Cruisers who make regular trips home often try to plan them at tax time to take care of taxes personally, or if that doesn’t work, file extensions until they can. There is of course much you can do long distance. You can download a free version of Turbo Tax, download tax forms, check W2s, K1s and 1099s etc. all online these days. If you use an accountant you can have him/her send you prepared tax forms in PDF attachments to print out to sign and fax home. Or you or the accountant can e-file.

The one thing that just doesn’t happen over the Internet is you can’t get the tax guys to use email for those nasty notices telling you something’s amiss. “I came home this cruising season,” says Jane of Lionheart, “to a whopping tax bill due to a previous filing error that had an even nastier interest bill attached…all because someone won’t use email!”

The system may not be perfect, but for sure we are in much better touch with these things than we used to be. It’s hard to be sure, though, that all this is an advantage over the good old days when cruisers sold everything, closed accounts, cut up cards and sailed away to a life of simplicity.

Contributing Admirals: Yvonne Katchor, Australia 31;Judy Knape, Ursa Minor; Jane Hockley, Lionheart; Lisa Schofield, Lady Galadriel; Debbie Leisure, Illusions; Ellen Sanpere, Cayenne III; Donna Abbot, Exit Only; Kathy Parsons, Hale Kai; Maribel Penichet, Paper Moon; and others.

This article was published in the June 2008 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

The decision you make will depend on many things, but chief among them are going to be your financial situation and the planned duration of your cruise. If you are planning a finite trip — say a season to Mexico or a year-and-a-half jaunt around the Caribbean, selling out makes less sense, unless you are just hankering for a fresh start. If the planned cruise is longer or even open-ended, it will come down to practical and financial realities. Many people simply don’t have the choice; there is only enough money for one or the other, the house or the boat. Jean and her husband Tom of the CSY 44 Jean Marie, for example, are currently prepping for their second circumnavigation, and Jean says, “Neither time have we chosen to keep a home. We don’t have the money to maintain both and we have never wanted the hassle of having to deal with a rental property from afar, the only way we could have afforded it.”

Without doubt it is easier to let go and immerse yourself in the cruising life when there are no strings attaching you back home. Strings have a way of getting tangled, and trying to untangle them long distance can be a challenge. But when you come from an area where real estate values are going wild –California’s Bay Area, for example – the hassles of renting out your home may be worth it. Lisa of Lady Galadriel says, “It was never a question for us. With the cost of housing escalating as it is, if we ever wanted to go back, there’s no way we could afford it.” Like many cruisers wanting to maintain a toehold in their home turf, they have rented out their house while keeping a room and storage area for themselves. But, houses need maintenance and rentals need management, and holding on to real estate will often require long distance communication and expensive and inconveniently-timed trips back home. “You have to budget for repairs, insurance, taxes, etc on top of your cruising expenses,” Lisa adds, “and renters will never care for your home the way you did. By the time you get back, your home may not seem like home any more.”

But even when selling out is the logical thing to do, must you do it all up front? What if you don’t like cruising? Hard to imagine, but it does happen. I remember meeting a family four months out on their first cruise. They’d sold everything – home AND business – ready to embrace cruising fully. Only it wasn’t working. The passage down had so unnerved them all that they simply couldn’t keep going. What a bleak prospect, knowing all your bridges are burned behind you! Yet, other cruisers I’ve known have tried to hold on too long from afar, only to find the house or business has run downhill in other hands, and they have to quit cruising to go back and salvage things.

What can be hard to realize up front when you are shrewdly hedging your bets is that the cruising life is addictive. It’s not long before the boat is truly home, and everything else is “back there.” Plans expand and years go by, and what you expect from life has been changed by the world you have seen. So when the time comes to wind down and bury the anchor, many cruisers opt to settle far from where they started. We have cruising friends settling in Panama, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii.

This brings up a point about STUFF. “Before we left on our voyage,” says Vicki of Firebird, “we put a lot of stuff in a locker in Florida, but here we are in Hawaii! I’ve been paying the rent on the locker for years, but now what am I going to do with it?”

When cruisers do go “back,” family is often the catalyst. It seems a general rule that cruisers with kids aboard find their way back to land about the time the oldest needs to start high school. Sometimes, cruising families continue the adventure by living aboard in a marina in a new area, but others swap the boat for a house, and those who kept their original home just pick up where they left off.

For older cruisers the family draw “home” is often aging parents or new grandchildren, but in this day and age, the mobility of families often means that neither the folks nor the kids are where you left them. Kathy B of Sunflower, who sold their home in Kansas to circumnavigate, tells how her daughter has since moved to Michigan. “When we return from cruising, we want to be near them, so it’s just as well we sold when we did.”

It’s an irony, I think, that after years of living like a turtle, carrying our homes with us, one of the hardest parts about suddenly needing to be back ashore part-time is not having a consistent place to lay our heads. Motels and guest rooms get old quickly! For this reason, many cruisers like Kathy of Sangaris have taken the condo option. “After years of schlepping duffels to family and friends’ houses during visits to the US from Europe, we eventually bought a condo where we could empty out our storage locker, keep an eye on our auntie in assisted living, and just have a place to land. We decided after all a few strings might not be too bad.”

Some couples buy the condo in the original decision to downsize before cruising, hoping that the investment will pay off over time. Others wait a bit to see where they might want to roost. And others, after years as vagabonds, can’t commit. My husband Don and I fall into this category, and our solution for the months we spend Stateside as grandparents, is an RV. I call it “a boat in a box,” or the “rolling suitcase.” The lifestyle is similar to cruising, and there’s enough storage on board to leave behind our stateside clothes. It has all the other comforts of home, yet we need not be fixed in one place. Then, when we return to the boat, we park it, close it up, and forget it. Unfortunately, unlike a condo, a motorhome is a depreciating investment!

Whatever you decide, pulling up roots is never easy, nor, quite frankly, will be putting them down again when the time comes to dock for the last time. But the reward of the broadened horizons of cruising is well worth the gamble for most of us. Even though we are not fixed in one place, we add up to a huge community, with “air-roots” (so to speak) the world around. You’ll know you are a real cruiser when someone asks, “Where are you from?” …and you find it hard to answer.

Contributing Admirals: Jean Service, Jean Marie; Lisa Schofield, Lady Galadriel; Ellen Sanpere, Cayenne III; Vicki Juvrud, Firebird; Mary Heckrotte, Camryka; Kathy Blanding, Sunflower; Katherine Briggs, Sangaris; Iretta Micskey, Rigó; Kathy Parsons, Hale Kai; plus others. (And thanks very much to my webmaster, Sherry McCampbell on Soggy Paws)

This article was published in the August 2007 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.