The "selling up" part of sailing away

Well, that certainly was a process.

Looks as if we are to be happily homeless. The house has sold and we have most of the summer to get rid of stuff that isn't coming aboard.

As many a cruiser knows, selling one's shoreside home is a big step and not one casually taken. But it is frequently done, as the idea of remote landlording in order to keep rent covering the costs of sail repairs and rum-based beverages is a sort of anathema to many for whom the more-or-less literal cutting of the docklines symbolizes freedom from dirt-based woes.

As I remember, this book was eccentric but insightful, and had a lot of interesting ideas that may have influenced me.

Originally, we had planned to "rent-farm" our house to maintain a base in our expensive home city. But the idea of paying others to mind the shack in our absence seemed...dodgy, as did the very expensive rents we would be obliged to charge. So we chose to sell up. Our method was a little different than most, however, and therein hangs the tale.

Toronto housing has become ridiculously expensive. As the house taxes are linked to the appraised value (as is the insurance), it costs about $12,000 a year to starve to death in place here. I am a freelancer and my wife works for a charity. When we parted with our last set of tenants, we parted with $21,000 a year in rental income, although to be honest, it would have been impossible to sell the house from a display point of view with the upper two floors occupied by twenty-somethings with an incontient chihuahua. 

I will pee, shiver, whine and then pee again.

But we don't necessarily plan to sell up. Well, not entirely. We think we need a base camp in a small Ontario town, close to water with enough depth to visit with the good ship Alchemy. We want to keep our stuff in the basement and garage (separate entrances) and rent out the top of whatever house we get (at a small fraction of whatever we would pay for the same thing in the city) and thereby maintain a presence as citizens, a mail-drop and a place to keep our stuff until we return. Assuming we do. And, modest income. Which will cover our taxes, etc. And, as the only principal residence, should we need a house in a hurry, we'd have one. In a small town, near to water.

Something like this, which we've all seen a thousand times, but cheaper.

We sold our house through an exclusive listing deal. It wasn't listed and we staged nothing and had no "showings", per se. This was quite deliberate. Most people in Toronto tart up their places on the cheap (the "lipstick on a pig" tactic) in an effort to appeal and to have the property potential buyers are paying too much for appear "modern". It's a load of bollocks, smoke and mirrors, of course: People who buy homes immediately redecorate if they don't start hacking away at the very walls in order to exercise their personal tastes and credit ratings. I noticed that in our immediate vicinity, in which 20 some houses have changed hands in the last few years, virtually all have been extensively remodelled, if not actually gutted and rebuilt. My alley way has been and remains a contractor's parking lot.

Our bathroom is slightly nicer. Photo (c) bluegnomeemporium.blogspot.ca

We did not wish to waste time, money (we didn't have) and materials to bring the place up to the expectations of the house-hungry masses. We didn't want to "redecorate" knowing that it would be binned the day after close. So we made the listing exclusive and had about 12 showings in nearly five months, with the for sale sign seen above taken down for four weeks in the usually market-snoring month of January.

Every potential buyer brought to the house was either a landlord, a renovator/house flipper or someone looking to develop the land beneath the house. Or a combo of all three. No one ever mentioned the price we were asking, which was a lot firmer than most because we had done our homework.

The homework consisted of me watching the 20 or so surrounding houses change hands like a hawk and, using a website called mongohouse.com, plus bluntly asking people what they got, I thought to make what discretion describes as "a certain price"...I'm willing to describe methodology, not the house's cut. Our agent levelled up to Certain Price plus $50K to give us a way to back off "as a gesture" and I did not waver from that number, convinced that it was what the market, at least the more selective market I was attempting to attract, would bear. We sold it for very close to Certain Price Plus, meaning we've made a little bit more than we'd hoped for and that money will cover our agent fees, which were less than those of a typical MLS listing, and the costs of moving to a condo until the boat itself is in liveaboard condition.

Because we have no car and need to dispose or dispense with a lot of our possessions, the house close is September 4th (the first day of Cabin Boy's Grade 12). We need that time to get this season's launch done and get the mast (with the new radar) in and several other boat-related jobs come before and after: I am obliged by our insurance company to have an insurance survey done for March 30 and it's headless chicken time.

The long close, which I was grateful to get, particularly given the workload of the next five weeks before launch, will allow us to view our possessions with extreme prejudice and Kijiji, Craigslist, curb or garage sale them out of our existence. Some things, mainly a few books, keepsakes and tools I want to keep for the next house, we will put in storage. Others, like my ridiculous cache of boat spares, I will flog to other boaters.

We both will still have to work our jobs until we actually close this deal in September, and the line of credit we've been paying down will likely go in the wrong direction for a few months due to the expenses of moving and related costs associated with this place, like having it cleaned up and renting a dumpster for those things not wanted on the voyage, etc. Obviously, once paid out, we will be debt-free the next day, although we will keep the line of credit at zero dollars should we need an emergency fund. We only had the line of credit in the first place, because we converted our relatively paltry remaining mortgage to it 15 months ago. We've paid off this house twice in 19 years, and mostly via tenant rents. Our bank loves us, pets us and calls us George. But the key to pulling this off on our comparatively miserable incomes has been to spend as little as possible. The reward is going sailing for a few years.

We will be renting a condo nearby until we are ready to move aboard Alchemy. We hope to head down the St. Lawrence in June, 2019 after Cabin Boy wraps high school. We will, at that point and assuming he graduates, call him Cabin Man. We are looking for something local so that we can have him continue to walk to school, as he has his entire school life, and which is the same distance or less to the boat. We will probably try to rent for July or August 1 to give us time to move in gradually. Because I have plenty to do as it is. But this is another major step in getting off the dock and achieving the cruising life.