How Much Money Do You Need to Live on a Sailboat?

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This is the question people love asking full time liveaboards. It’s a fair question. Unfortunately, the honest answer sits somewhere between:

• Less than you think.
• More than we hoped.

After almost seven years of living aboard Mutiny, we currently have around €30,000 in savings. Depending on who you are, that number sounds either pretty solid or absolutely terrifying. We genuinely don’t know which anymore, and we’ve stopped trying to guess.

We don’t own a house. We don’t own a car. We don’t have a pension quietly compounding somewhere in the background like a responsible adult. What we do have is a 45-year-old sailboat floating in salt water, which, if you know boats, is less an asset and more a very charming money incinerator with a nice view.

€30,000 Is a Strange Amount of Money

For someone with a salary, a house, insurance and a pension, €30,000 is a healthy emergency fund. For us, it’s simultaneously our:

• Emergency fund
• Unemployment fund
• Boat repair fund
• Retirement fund
• “Something has gone horribly wrong” fund
• And our runway to figure out what on earth comes next

Basically, we’ve turned one bank account into an entire government welfare system, except we’re both the taxpayer and the only citizen. No house quietly rising in value. No car to sell in a pinch. No employer building a pension while we sleep. Just us, Mutiny, and a spreadsheet that I (Lotte) check slightly more often than is emotionally healthy.

If something seriously goes wrong, that €30,000 is what stands between us and a very different life. Which is a fun thought to have while sipping a sundowner.

The Good News: We Can Live Surprisingly Cheap

Now that we’ve learned where to shop in the Caribbean, and which imported products apparently require a second mortgage, we can live on roughly €1,000 a month, including normal small repairs.

That €1,000 didn’t happen overnight. When we first arrived from Europe, we kept buying the same things we were used to, only to discover that on some smaller Caribbean islands, imported products can easily cost three to five times as much.

Over time, we adapted. We shop differently, eat differently, ferment half the contents of our galley, and still eat surprisingly well. There’s something we actually like about having fewer choices. You stop taking things for granted.

The problem is that boats have never once heard of a monthly budget and have no intention of respecting one now. One month everything’s fine. The next month something essential quietly decides its work here is done, and suddenly we’re not talking hundreds, we’re talking thousands. We know this from experience. Expensive, character-building, “let’s-not-talk-about-it-tonight” experience.

If you’re wondering what actually makes owning a sailboat so expensive, we’ve broken down the real costs – from maintenance and refits to monthly expenses and the surprises nobody budgets for – in our guide: The real cost of owning a sailboat.

The Problem Isn’t the Cost of Living on a Sailboat. It’s Never Knowing What’s Next.

For almost 10 years, we’ve lived without knowing what we’ll earn next month, whether a client will pay, whether a job will still exist next week, or whether the next boat repair will cost €200 or €8,000.

I can already hear some of you thinking, “but you chose this life.” Correct. We absolutely did. We chose the uncertainty, the adventure, the version of life that can be rewritten by a weather forecast. What we didn’t sign up for is wanting our grocery budget to have the same plot twists as our sailing route. That part, we’re done gambling with.

Financial uncertainty has a way of tagging along everywhere, even on the good days. It’s one of those sides of liveaboard sailing nobody really talks about. Lately, it’s more of a permanent travel companion than an occasional guest. It’s basically adopted us at this point.

We Worked Our Arses Off. Financially, We Went Absolutely Nowhere. 

In 2024, we both started working in recruitment. The salary looked very promising, until the owner of the company stopped paying us. He still owes us €17,000, but because the money wasn’t in the company’s account (the owner spend it all), the business went bankrupt. Just like that, the money we’d worked extremely hard for was gone.

In 2025, we joined another recruitment company, founded by someone who had also been left unpaid by the same former employer. We worked incredibly hard. Ten-hour days became the norm, weekends practically disappeared, and by the end of the year we’d earned around €20,000 between the two of us. So that is 800 euro a month each.

At first glance, that might sound decent. Until you realize that’s the combined income of two adults working like caffeinated maniacs, for an amount that a single person with a regular full-time job in Europe could earn.

We were new to the Caribbean, still learning the true cost of “just one grocery run,” and Mutiny, predictably, kept being Mutiny. By December, we were about €500 short. So: a full year of ten-hour days, and financially we’d essentially run really hard on a treadmill. Impressive cardio. Terrible investment strategy.

Where We Are in 2026

So far this year, we’re roughly €5,000 in the red. But we’re trying very hard to turn the tide around. Possibly too many things at once, as usual. After rebuilding our life from scratch in Saint-Martin, apparently our next brilliant idea was to try building several new ones at the same time.

Ramon is building Mutiny Maritime Recruitment here in the Caribbean, connecting maritime companies with riggers, marine electricians, welders, diesel mechanics and boatbuilders. We already have our first client. Other companies are moving more slowly, the kind of slowly that makes continental drift look like it’s rushing. He’s also running our Facebook page – with the goal of getting it monetised so it could eventually cover our monthly expenses – and still eyeing opportunities as an AI trainer. Ideally with a company that actually pays this time. Turns out that’s a surprisingly high bar.

I’m still working in recruitment for Belgium for Keen Solution. It It’s commission-based recruitment in a tight job market with a lot of competition, where it can feel more like luck than effort that determines whether you land a placement. It’s a frustrating position to be in, especially when your income completely depends on it.

Besides recruitment, I am building our website, writing our stories, and putting together resources for people at the start of their own sailing journey. We’ve watched too many people buy the wrong boat, underestimate the real costs, or fall hopelessly in love with a listing without knowing what they’re actually signing up for. We made plenty of those exact mistakes ourselves repeatedly, and at great expense. If sharing them saves someone else a little pain, ours starts to feel slightly less pointless.

We’ve also applied for seasonal jobs here in Saint-Martin. Of course in the marine industry! Once you go boat, you never go land because the boat took all your money. After three years behind laptops, physical work suddenly sounds almost suspiciously appealing.

Oh, and I almost forgot: we’re also trying to sail around the world…

Do We Want Too Much?

We don’t need to become millionaires. Although, for the record, we remain fully open to it, should the universe be feeling outrageously generous. What we actually want is simpler: enough reliable monthly income that we can stop bracing for everything to collapse again.

Ramon and I made a deal. We’re giving this year absolutely everything we’ve got and more. Again. We’ll build, apply, recruit, write, create, experiment, and almost certainly make a few more questionable decisions along the way.

But if, after all that, we still can’t build a sustainable life out of it, we’ll have to make some drastic life decisions. Maybe we start over completely, somewhere, somehow, with Styx – our extremely opinionated black cat – supervising the whole thing with visible disapproval. Nothing new there… 

We’ve Given Ourselves This Year

We have no idea what that would look like. Fortunately, we’re not there yet. We still have €30,000, we still have Mutiny and each other, and we still have more ideas than is probably wise. And whatever happens next, this 45-year-old boat has already taken us across an ocean and given us a life we could never have planned.

And trust us, you get remarkably inventive when you’re slowly living off your own emergency fund. We’ve got five months to find out whether all the seeds we’ve been planting decide to grow at the same time, for once… 

Are we close to a breakthrough, or are we simply hanging on too long? Only hindsight will tell.

So, Realistically: What Would You Actually Need?

Forget us for a second. If you stripped away rent, a mortgage and car payments the way we have – but kept a real safety net instead of a boat pretending to be one – what monthly income would actually let you sleep at night?

We’re genuinely curious what that figure looks like for other people living this kind of life. Investments? A pension quietly ticking away back home? Property you still own? Seasonal work? Or is everyone just improvising with a spreadsheet and a sense of humour, same as us?

Some evenings we look at people on land with houses, careers and retirement accounts, and wonder if we’ve made questionable choices. Then again, conventional life was probably never where we were heading when we went from backpacks to sailboats. Then we look outside, the sun’s setting over the Caribbean, our home is floating beneath our feet, and somehow, despite the spreadsheet, we feel unreasonably rich.

We have five months. Let’s see what happens!

Knowing us, it probably won’t be boring. And if experience has taught us anything, whatever happens next will probably come from a direction we never saw coming.

This is the strange space between despair and hope, where uncertainty is at its highest and yet, somehow, the solution often feels closer than ever. You know something has to change. You just don’t know what will change, where the answer will come from, or when it will finally arrive.

And that’s exactly where the magic happens.

To be continued… 
Fair winds,

The Mutiny Crew

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Thinking About Buying a Sailboat?

If you’re dreaming about life aboard and wondering where to start, explore our practical guides on choosing the right boat, avoiding first-time buyer mistakes, and understanding the real costs of sailboat ownership.