As an accountant with an interest in personal finance and financial independence, I’m always curious how individual loopers make the dream happen. What steps did each Looper take to be in a position to take a large boat on a cruise for a year or more? Are there models and patterns? Is there a model that might work for me? The purpose of this website is to highlight a series of case studies of actual Great Loopers and their financial back story. This could be useful information for those in the dreaming and planning stages.
As we make our financial preparations, I want to study what others have done and collect their stories in one place. Enjoy!
Our Story 2019 version…
We are Brenda and Lance, Looper wannabes. We have big dreams of buying a livable boat and taking it on the Great Loop, a cruise of the eastern seaboard and river system of the USA and Canada. We live in the Pacific Northwest, over a thousand miles to the nearest navigable entry point to the Great Loop, so it really is a big dream. UPDATE 2022 – We bought a Bayliner 4087 in Lake Superior. We’ll start our loop from there.
We’ve had the dream since, oh, the mid 2000’s, probably. It was always a long way in the future. Well, now the future is only five years or so away, and it is time to get serious about making it happen. UPDATE 2022 – We’re less than a year away!!
It’s not that we haven’t been serious. We have a plan and have been implementing it over the past decade. We’ve had a plan to pay off the mortgage on our house and then save up for a boat. We joined the America’s Great Loop Cruisers Association in 2011 to become familiar with the trip. We joined the Tacoma Power Squadron in 2012 to get boater education and to make friends with people with boats.
We have extended work trips to visit various sites on or near the loop: a river cruise in Chicago and the free wall in Joliet, Illinois during a Chicago trip, Tarpon Springs and the intracoastal waterway around Daytona, Florida after an Orlando trip, the Trent-Severn waterway and a boat tour of Parry Sound after a Detroit trip. We’re keeping the dream alive.
We bought a smallish boat for the Puget Sound and named it Prequel. The story before the story. Prequel has gone on to a new home so we can save more effectively for our Looper boat.
As we make our financial preparations and fine tune our plans, I want to study what others have done and collect their stories in one place. Enjoy!