My first husband passed away at 26. My mom at 51. My father-in-law at 71. Those losses taught me that putting anything important off until “someday” is a risk I don’t want to take.
Several years after I was widowed, I married Steve, who had always dreamed of living on a sailboat. So when I said, “maybe we could live on a sailboat someday,” I caught myself — and we started researching our options.
At the time, I worked as a therapist with a 9-to-5 job in an office and writing was my side hustle. In 2013, I wrote an article that went viral and landed me a book deal with a major publisher. I kept my day job until about a year and a half later, when sales took off and my book started hitting the bestseller lists.
In July 2015, I quit my job as a psychotherapist at a community mental health center to write full-time, which meant I had the flexibility to work from anywhere. As I got to work on my second book, Steve and I started looking for a boat slip.
We searched online and put in an offer, sight unseen, on a slip at a yacht club in the Florida Keys. We purchased it for $106,500 using the money we’d saved from my book advances. We spent another $10,000, to the best of my memory, building a tiki hut on the small piece of land that came with it.
