The last expense blog of the first year living our life financially free! A whole year without full-time jobs, without a steady income, and without living on our savings. Instead, we use our passive income to travel around the world on our Lagoon 42 catamaran.

In this blog, we share the expenses we had in the month of June 2021. We share our expenses to show you how much it costs to live this lifestyle. Our motto is ‘don’t call it a dream, call it a plan’ and we feel that if you are working to financial freedom as well, this information can be valuable for your plan to change your lifestyle.

 

About tracking our expenses

If you are interested in creating a better life for yourself when it comes to your finances, it is essential to know more about the way you spend your money. Financial freedom starts with saving money and in order to save money, you need to learn where you tend to spend your money on.

For us, tracking our expenses works as a finger on the pulse. It helps us to see where we spend our money on but it also works as a constant reminder not to overspend. Simply by tracking our spending, we are actively aware of our finances. It’s much easier to prevent overspending when you see how much you already ate out this month.

Another big reason for tracking our expenses since we left on our Lagoon 42 catamaran (and the sole reason we actually share our expenses in our blog) is to give insight into the costs of a full-time sailing/traveling lifestyle. We know there are a lot of people out there that dream of doing this one day or are already actively planning to take the plunge with a few years as well. We hope that by sharing this information, we can contribute to that.

If you want to read all the other monthly expense overviews we shared, you can find them all here: https://frompennytomany.com/category/monthly-expenses-all-blogs/

 

Where we traveled in June 2021

During the whole month of June, we were sailing the Balearics. We crossed from Ibiza to Mallorca on the 21^st of May together with our friends on Koru (oceanvibesproject.com/) and stayed there until mid-June 2021.

Ronald’s parents came out to Mallorca for a visit on the boat and after that, we sailed back to Ibiza to pick up friends from back home who would sail with us a few days and meet up again with our friends from Sailing Coco (youtube.com/c/SailingCoco).

June was a very busy and social month, sailing with boat friends and having family and friends from back home on board. This also reflects in our expenses over June. Next to that, sailing the Balearics is definitely more expensive than sailing the Atlantic coast of Europe, which we did last summer.

 

Our expenses in June 2021

In June 2021, we spend a total of 1,751.46 euros on our living expenses.

This includes all the expenses we have living our lifestyle except our health insurance (which we pay yearly) and our phone plans (which are part of our business expenses).

The amount we spend in June 2021 is almost exactly the level of our average monthly expenses, which are 1,755.95 euros when you take the average over the last 12 months.

This may sound like we are doing well with our spending in June 2021. And although it isn’t too bad, you do have to realize that while we are sailing and staying at anchor, we don’t have any costs for a marina.

The fact that we still spend our monthly average while not in a marina, is a sign that we’re actually overspending in other categories. To compare, when we were sailing the Atlantic coast of Europe in 2020, we spent an average of 1,567.99 euros per month. In August 2020, we spend only a little bit over 1,200 euros.

 

Category break down of the expenses in June 2021

So, let’s dive into the expense categories to see where the money went:

Eating out 927.94 euros

Groceries 440 euros

Insurance 185 euros

Activities 85.60 euros

Fuel 66.77 euros

Other 1.15 euros

Marina 0 euros

Maintenance 0 euros

The expense category breakdown definitely speaks volumes: we’ve been spending a LOT of money on eating out this month, while the other categories actually aren’t very different or surprising.

We will discuss the costs in each category in more detail below.

 

More details per category of the expenses in June 2021

 

Eating out 927.94 euros

Maybe without any surprise, but eating out was by far our biggest expense in June 2021. This category does not only covers going out for dinner but also drinks on a terrace, a cup of coffee in a coffee bar, and ice cream. Our average costs for eating out are around 400 euros a month, so in June 2021 we doubled our average costs.

There are three important reasons for this:

The first is that we simply ate out more. We were having a lot of fun with a lot of people and lunch; dinner and drinks comes automatically into play.

The second reason is (especially) Ibiza is very expensive when it comes to going out for dinner and/or drinks. A cocktail in a nice bar will set you back 18 euros! With these amounts, spending money goes very fast.

This brings us to the third reason: we started going to some of the fancier places in the Balearics to go out. Because, well: while in Rome, do as the Romans do!

To be fair, somewhere in June we started making excuses for our spending on dinners and cocktails by saying things like “we’re only in Ibiza once” and “we better enjoy it while we can”. I think this just shows how easily we justifying our spending. But that being said. We sure loved every minute of it 😉

 

Groceries 440 euros

Our grocery costs average around 515 euros each month, so June 2021 was a little bit of a cheaper month when it comes to groceries. The fact that we ate out so much, probably has something to do with that 😉

In Mallorca, we had quite easy access to a nice supermarket. In Ibiza, getting groceries is a bit more challenging. Near the anchorage, there are often no bigger supermarkets, only smaller touristy ones. These small ones are more expensive.

Together with our boat friends from sailing Coco we, therefore, ordered groceries online via a supermarket that delivers on the beach. This was a great way to get a lot of groceries to the boat without a hassle. And we could share the delivery costs.

 

Insurance 185 euros

Our Lagoon 42 catamaran is insured at Pantaenius. We pay 185 euros each month for the insurance. We did choose to have a higher deductible than standard to keep the insurance costs a bit lower.

 

Activities 85.60 euros

All the costs in the category of Activities are costs for transport. They include bus tickets, taxi costs, and parking fees that we made while exploring the islands.

In Mallorca, a bus ride from Santa Ponca to Palma town would cost us 5,20 for two persons (one way).

A taxi ride in Formentera to get to the sushi restaurant was 11.80 euros (one way) and a 20-minute taxi ride on Ibiza to get from Talamanca (Ibiza town) to Santa Eularia cost us a bit over 20 euros.

All in all, public transport isn’t overly expensive in the Balearics.

 

Fuel 66.77 euros

While in Mallorca we rented a car for a few days to explore more of the island while the boat was safe at anchor in Santa Ponca. Before returning the car back to the rental company (we used Recordgo), we had to fill up the fuel tank again. This cost us 66.77 euros.

 

Other 1.15 euros

We didn’t add a note in the 1Money app (which we use to track our expenses), so it’s unclear what we spend 1.15 euro on this month. Must have been something small though 🙂

 

Marina 0 euros

In June 2021 we stayed at anchor full-time. We didn’t use any marina facilities so therefore this remains zero.

Maintenance 0 euros

Again, the costs for maintenance are zero in June 2021, this is a bit surprising maybe because we left the marina in mid-April and you might expect some small issues starting to occur after 2+ months on the boat sailing. We’re definitely very pleased that our Lagoon 42 catamaran holds up so well.

 

To conclude

This is the 12^th month of expense overview during a whole year of keeping track of our expenses while sailing in Europe on our Lagoon 42 catamaran. Hopefully, these overviews are of value to you.

We will write another blog in which we analyze the total costs of a year of life at sea and show you what we think is a realistic budget for a lifestyle like this. We will also publish a YouTube video about it, so make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel if you didn’t do so already.

See you next time!