Where Do We Live Just Before Setting Sail

As we think through the logistics of our departure plans, one of the interesting coordination items we are queuing up is our lodging when our apartment lease expires.

Our apartment lease ends the first week of November 2010. Between then and when we set sail, where should we live? Our boat will be on the Atlantic, in Savannah GA, a bit far for a commute to work (3.75 hours each way).

So where do we live between the first week of November 2010 and the day we set sail? This transition period could be 1 month, 2 months, or maybe 3 (depending on a number of factors).

Our basic transitory period lodging strategy is as follows:

We will be offering up to our friends and family, with pets, to house and pet sit for them in the months of November and December.

We have 2 sets of such people that have already indicated that such a situation is desired! Those 2 sets cover a 28 day period! This would imply living space in exchange for taking care of their houses and their pets. If we can find a few more such folks/situations, then we would be all set. No outlay of cash, and everyone wins.

If we can't find more such situations, one fall back position is to leverage all the Priority Club points that I've acquired over the years of traveling I do for work. We can use the Priority Club points to stay at an extended stay hotel like a Candlewood Suites or a Staybridge Suites.

Another fall back position is to rent an RV, from a friend, for a month and live in it if need be. There are a few family members and friends whom have already told us that we have this option.

No, I don't want your service!

Back in April, we cancelled our TV service. We had noticed that we were watching the TV instead of spending time with each other. This had to stop. We decided to suspend our service for 6 months to see if we still wanted it. Suspending the service allowed us to stop the service and the bills without disconnecting from the service. This would save us the connection fee if we decided that we wanted to keep the service.

Well I received a call from our TV service provider the other day to remind me that my service would be turned back on mid-October. I immediately told the representative that I wanted to cancel our service. When the representative asked why, I said that we haven't missed it in 6 months and I see no value in continuing the service. To cancel the service the representative had to transfer me to someone else. They tried and tried to get me not to cancel the service. They offered me all kinds of discounts and credit for free months, but I stuck to my guns and told them to cancel the service.

Not having the TV service saves us $55 per month or $660 per year. We spend our nights having dinner, playing games, talking, reading, and just being together.

You may not want to cancel your TV service, but you can use the possibility of cancellation to obtain free service and credits from your provider.

Culinary Skills

Culinary skills are close to the top of the list of skills we need to live self-sufficiently.

Before starting to prepare for our journey, I would describe my culinary skills as basic. I could basically cook most things from a box, can, mix, and frozen foods sections of the grocery store.

In our research regarding provisioning for the boat, we came to realize that frozen foods would be out of the question and that I would need to learn how to cook. I needed to find a teacher. A teacher that could work around my busy schedule of being a full-time wife and mother of two small children.

Enter Jacques Pepin: Chef Pepin has been the most encouraging, empowering, flexible teacher I could ask for and not to mention free!

I became familiar with Chef Pepin while watching season 5 of "Top Chef" on Bravo and I became a fan. Chef Pepin has authored/co-authored over 20 books and has had several cooking shows on public broadcasting. There are also several websites courtesy of KQED public media of Northern California. These websites have episode videos and recipes from Chef Pepin's cooking shows and his books. My favorites are "Fast Food My Way" and "More Fast Food My Way". The videos cover how to make the recipes from start to finish with culinary techniques explained as an added bonus. After watching a couple of the videos, I felt confident enough to try the recipes and to tweak them to my family's preferences.

Here are the links to where you can find out more about Chef Pepin and where you can view his videos and recipes.

http://www.kqed.org/food/jacquespepin/
http://www.kqed.org/w/jpfastfood/home.html
http://www.kqed.org/w/completepepin/
http://www.kqed.org/w/morefastfoodmyway/
http://www.kqed.org/w/theapprentice/noflash.html
http://www.kqed.org/w/jacquespepin/

Exploiting Surveys in Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are those programs set up by companies to build your allegiance to them. Companies know their best customers are the loyal ones. They try hard to set up a system of points that cause people to become addicted to the system. The addiction can be so strong that a consumer can be labeled as a “Points Junkie.” Because the Points Junkie is so proud of all they “get for free”, the moniker is a point of pride. Points Junkies are the best friend of companies. Period. They want more Junkies.

As we prepare to sail, we have been diligent in accumulating points so that when we cast away, we can have “free rooms”, “free airfare”, and other “free stuff.” During this process, we’ve learned about an interesting phenomenon that allows us to exploit these point systems.

Now that we are accumulating points, we find that surveys tend to find us more frequently. We considered them a nuisance and passed at first. However, once we realized what they were trying to do, we turned the tables and found ourselves with some pretty amazing offers.

Tying all this together, companies want more junkies and what they need to do is identify them. They do this based on spending patterns and surveys. When we get a survey from a company that has loyalty programs, we now overstate what we spend with their competitors! In fact, we way over state it. We lie. We tell them that we spend gads of money and that we are super junkies.

The consequence? We get some pretty interesting offers. Some we can’t take advantage of (because we are not really the super-premium-triple diamond-platinum-gold we pretended to be so we don’t have documents to prove we are), but others are easily taken advantage of, like “stay with us for 2 nights and here is a bazillion points.”

Have fun, turn the tables, and hell yeah you traveled to Bora Bora last year. Twice! ;)

Remember, this is war!

Free Summer Entertainment

Check out your local sub-culture nespaper. These are most easily found in cities with a million people or more and in college towns. Look in record stores, or boutique shops in the trendy parts of your town.

These newspapers are a gold mine. Chalk full of free events and nominally priced events, your summer will be overloaded with stuff to do. Many of the events are music or art oriented. The art ones, nicely enough, may include hor’dourves!

The free events are especially pervasive in the summer time. Take advantage of them and all the freebies that are handed out.

Smile Money Smile

Try something this weekend, be extra extra nice to every person you exchange money or goods with.

Being extra nice causes many folks to give you things, including rounding totals in your favor, or spot you a few cents to make the change returned to you “even.”

We use this a lot very successfully for everything from money to free meat (the lady at the local grocery store just loves talking to Val and the girls and always puts extra slices of meat in our stack, plus KJ gets free cookies!).

Remember, every clerk you deal with is a human being too. They probably get shit all day long from folks whom are pissed off about life. Imagine what a treat it is to them to have someone nice. I'm not suggesting you be nice because it is the right thing to do, I'm saying be nice because it pays off.

Free DVDs, Internet, and More!

The library has a fantastic selection of DVDs that we can get … all for free! Further, our library is part of the county system with an online capability to order DVDs from other libraries in the county so the selection is quite large.

Another way the library provides fantastic savings is through checking out books. Yes, it is obvious, but we’ve saved a ton of money getting our books this way. If a book is so good and important to us that we keep checking it out, then we will buy a copy.

For our trip around the world, we identify many of the places we want to go through National Geographic magazines. The local library sells old copies (anything more than a few months) for $0.20! Used books go for $0.75.

Then there is the no cost Internet access.

Pile on top of all this the various children’s activities (e.g. story time) at no cost and you have one hell of a place to save money. If you can walk to yours, like we can, even better!

Here is another way to look at it. You pay the taxes to keep your library going… you might as well get some, or all, of your money back.

Redbox

Ever want to watch the latest release DVD for $1? Ever want to get the movie right now? Ever want to avoid the ding dong behind the counter at BlockBuster video? Enter Redbox, an incredible self service, kiosk based, latest release DVD provider.

As a geek, I'm thoroughly impressed with how integrated their systems are. You can go online and reserve your movie, then go pick it up at a Redbox location. Or, you can go to any of their kiosks and browse the titles on the machine.

There are Redbox locations in McDonalds, Walmarts, and other places too. Get this, you can pickup a movie at any Redbox location and drop it off at another. If you're on a roadtrip, pick up a movie, watch it, then drop it off down the road. All this for a buck!!

We walk to the Redbox kiosk location. If you add up the walking to get + watching + walking to return, the cost per time of entertainment is fantastic. Another bonus is the number of Free Rentals that Redbox gives you. Fill out a survey and your in for a free night of movies!