Sailing into an Early Retirement | Complete Wealth Management Podcast E13

Ever pondered what it'd be like to trade the 9-5 grind for an early retirement? How about a life of sailing and adventure instead of sitting in front of the computer screen? 

That's precisely what our wealth management client's, Jayne and James, did!

In this special client experience episode, I sit down with James and Jayne, who became clients of Alison Wealth Management in 2021. They sought assistance in designing and optimizing their distinctive retirement plan. We delve into their decision to exit the full-time workforce at the early age of 50 to concentrate on their passion for travel and sailing.

As we sail along with them in our conversation, you'll hear their journey - James, a former Meta (Facebook) Engineering Director and Jayne, who was in marketing at Stanford University shed light on:

👉 Early retirement decisions

👉The qualitative & quantitative aspects of their decision-making process

👉 Leaving the workforce during peak income-earning stage of life.

If you are considering an If you are considering an early retirement, or just looking for inspiration on pursing your passion, check this episode out! retirement, check this episode out!

For more episodes of our podcast, visit:
https://www.alisonwealth.com/podcast or find us on your favorite podcast player here: https://completewealthmanagement.buzzsprout.com/share

To learn more about Alison Wealth Management, please visit our website at: https://alisonwealth.com

The information provided in this presentation is not intended to be individual investment advice or legal advice.  The information provided is for informational and training purposes only.

Investment advisory services are provided through Prosperity Capital Advisors LLC (“PCA”) an investment advisor registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). For a detailed discussion of PCA and its investment advisory fees, see the firm’s Form ADV and Form CRS on file with the SEC at www.adviserinfo.sec.gov. The views expressed herein represent the opinions of PCA and are not intended to predict or depict performance of any particular investment.

Advisory services are provided through Prosperity Capital Advisors LLC (“PCA”) an investment advisor registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Views expressed herein represent the opinions of PCA and are not intended to predict or depict performance of any particular investment.

All data provided, including any reference to specific securities or sectors, is provided for informational purposes and should not be construed as investment advice. It does not constitute an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to purchase any security. Consider your investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses before investing. These views are as of the date of this publication and are subject to change. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.

Transcript

Dave Alison: 0:08

Hello everyone and welcome to the Complete Wealth Management podcast. I'm Dave Allison and in today's episode I've got two very special guests actually a client experience spotlight. Today I have Jane and James Pierce joining us, and actually joining us from quite a unique location. The title of this episode I thought I was quite clever with this one Sailing Into an Early Retirement with James and Jane. The reason we call it Sailing Into is they have left the Bay Area, left the workforce and are now officially retired and living on a sailboat and broadcasting this podcast from the sailboat. So, james and Jane, welcome and thank you so much for joining us today.

Jayne Pearce: 0:52

Thanks for having us. Thank you, yes.

Dave Alison: 0:55

So where in the world are you right now? I know you're in the sailboat, you're inside, but whereabouts in the world are you?

James Pearce: 1:03

So we're actually in Trinidad and Tobago, specifically Tobago, and on the eastern coast. There's a nice little anchorage there, some great scuba diving and snorkeling, so that's where we've been hanging out on our sailboat scout for a few days and, yeah, so we've had a long journey to get down here and I don't know whether you want to say a little bit more about that.

Jayne Pearce: 1:26

I could do. You want to know all the places we've been.

James Pearce: 1:28

No, it's a long story.

Jayne Pearce: 1:30

We'll summarise it. Yeah, we started off in Boston about a year and a little bit ago, so we both left the Bay Area basically at the end of May start of June 2022. Moved straight on board the boat in Boston and spent the summer up in the Pibcod and sort of main area, which is a pretty great way to get to know the boat and learn all its little foibles. And then we came down the east coast of the US, passed through New York, passed the Statue of Liberty, down to the Delaware and Chesapeake bays and, once the hurricane season was officially over, we headed down. Actually, we came by Charleston at one point.

Dave Alison: 2:15

I got to actually get on Scout and a little tour of some dinner in Charleston.

Jayne Pearce: 2:20

Yeah, we thought we'd come and say hi. And then, yeah, headed over to the Bahamas in December, and since then we've just been hopping our way down island by island, through the Bahamas, turks and Caicos, dominican Republic, puerto Rico and then lots of Caribbean or Caribbean islands, all the way down to Grenada through the start of the hurricane season, because it's generally just south of where the hurricanes hit and so, for insurance reasons, it's good to be out of trouble. And then, yeah, after a few months in Grenada, we've sailed south again, and so, yeah, trinidad and Tobago was the next spot. Here we are, yeah, that is awesome.

Dave Alison: 2:57

That is awesome and we'll definitely talk a little bit more about that through the episode. But obviously, being in the financial services being kind of a wealth management type of podcast, one of the reasons that I was really really excited for the two of you to join and kind of be the first client spotlight that we did on this podcast is I'm such a big believer that we work really hard, we earn a living and money at the end of the day is just kind of a means to the true fulfillment that we have in life. And I think you two are just such a great example of that where the traditional I guess call it US retirement age might be 65 or 67, or even in some cases, all the way up to age 70, and people spend a long time in the workforce and then they say, oh, one day I'll be able to go retire and one day I'll be able to see the world and one day I'll be able to do all these things. But in many cases they end up working a really long time and they retire and maybe by the time they're 65 or 70 or even later, they don't have the health or the energy or the resources to go do all the things that they said. One day we wish we could be able to. And I remember we met for the first time.

Dave Alison: 4:13

I'd have to pinpoint, I think, james, you and I had a conversation it must have been like 2018, 2019, I want to say and you guys were living in Palo Alto and kind of looking for an advisor, and it's time we didn't start working together. And then it was a couple years later, I think you reached back out and said hey, we're thinking about retiring, we need some help or some guidance, and that was initially how our relationship kicked off. And I want to talk kind of a little bit about that shortly. But really, kind of the purpose of why I thought you could bring a lot of value to some of the listeners here is, I'm sure you two had not just the kind of quantitative decisions of like do we have enough money to be able to retire, how do we generate a sustainable retirement income stream, all the stuff that kind of we work on with you, but also like those qualitative factors of leaving the workforce and being able to pursue things that you are truly passionate about, and I think that can really help some other listeners.

Dave Alison: 5:17

But before we kind of dive into all that in the sailing and the journey that you guys have experienced over the last 12 months or so, can you just talk a little bit about the pierces? Obviously that is not a native Palo Alto accent that I hear there, so I'd love to just hear both of your kind of backstories because I remember you sharing a little bit and it seems like you've had somewhat of an adventurous pass as well. It's not just picking up and moving on a sailboat but it's been kind of in your DNA for a while. But if you wouldn't mind, just kind of sharing how you ended up in Palo Alto and then we can kind of transition into the type of work that both of you were in prior to the decision to leave the workforce and go pursue life on a sailboat.

James Pearce: 6:03

So we originate from the UK and we have two children and, back in the UK, we decided to leave the UK when they were quite young, so this was probably about 15 or 16 years ago and we moved to Dublin for about two or three years and that was a fun chapter of our lives. James was he'd been working in tech before then and he went to work for a startup there and I was there looking after the kids preschool and that was fun. That was a really good chapter for both our lives then. But already you know, we were interested in travel and we wanted to seek out more of a challenging environment now that the kids were beyond, you know, wearing diapers and so on. And so we moved to India for a year and we lived, I worked on a vineyard my background is marketing and so I worked on a vineyard in India.

James Pearce: 7:04

I know that's a little spanned, a little unusual, but it is. It's a quite a big thing in India and James continued doing some freelance programming as well. So that was fun and the kids got to have a really good environment. They learned, they spoke Hindi and Barati Marati rather, and then we went traveling around Asia. We went backpacking around Asia. That was fun for several months and then after that, we landed the pierces, landed in Belize for a year and we, the kids, went to a local school there. That was that was really good fun on an island called Ambergrease Key, and I did some volunteering. I worked at the school and James continued with some more programming. He actually wrote a book on the mobile internet and then that was our exit to the Bay Area. So, and then, in 2011, was it? We moved to the Bay Area and James he got a job, initially a startup, but then transferred to Facebook and I ultimately then went on to work at Stanford in marketing. So I think that's kind of it in that shell, quite exciting.

Dave Alison: 8:18

I was going to say. As I recall, in Belize, james wasn't the only author, though. You published a book too, didn't you?

James Pearce: 8:22

Oh, yeah, I actually wrote a children's book as well, you're right. Well, we're in Belize. That was fun, yeah, so that was a great opportunity for me to learn about the, about the country, the eyes of the child yeah, and also provide some for my kids. Yeah, so that's pretty much it. Did I miss any countries out, james?

Jayne Pearce: 8:42

Yeah, okay, but to preempt, I think to preempt one of your next questions, it's important to stress that. You know we try to do this sort of herabritatic lifestyle relatively responsibly. So we figured that once the kids were going to end up in middle school or senior school, they were probably going to want to be in one place for a decent period of time. But whilst they were two to seven kind of age there was going to be a lot more flexibility for them to be able to move schools without too much disruption. And so we figured that, like if there was going to be a time when we traveled and expose them to different cultures and different countries, that was going to be the period of time when it was best to do that. And so Ireland, india, belize these are all I hope you know very formative experiences for them. They got to go to different schools, make those different friends, but then, once they got to the US, they were able to settle down and, you know, obviously school started to become a little bit more academic.

Jayne Pearce: 9:45

And the reason I say that's preempting your next question, I would say is obviously the step we've just taken to leave the bay area altogether and move on a boat is also partly predicated by our dreams, but it's also about being just the right timing. There's this window where we're able to do it. The kids have just left the high school, so they've both gone off to college. You know, our parents are still in good health mostly, and so it really was this window where, okay, that's the opportunity for us to do this. We think as much about that as we do about, oh, do we have enough money in the bank to better do it?

James Pearce: 10:20

Yeah, timing has been very important.

Jayne Pearce: 10:21

Timing is the thing You've got to have the dream, obviously. But you can't, like you say, keep kicking the idea or the can down the road every year, because eventually those windows close.

James Pearce: 10:31

Yeah, and certainly our life. Our chapter in Palo Alto was really a really good opportunity for the kids to grow in themselves in a safe environment and I think they really appreciated that, having that chance to take root for a while. But at the same time they were very happy with our lives predating that when we were living in India and Belize. They had that semi-nomadic lifestyle to them, but at the same time I think they were happy to also make friends and know that there was still going to be there in a year's time, for example.

Dave Alison: 11:05

Well, I love what you said about the timing because, like again hearing perspective from other clients, you saw this as an opportunistic time, saying, hey, both the kids are now finished with high school and going off to college, but financially I hear a lot of people make an excuse why that might not be the time. They might be like, well, I can't think about not working now. I have two kids going off to college and to pay for. So I love the mindset and the attitude that you actually brought to, that of, hey, this is actually the most opportune time. Our health is here, our parents' health is here, our kids are out of the house and we put them through a stable time period in high school, but now they're gone and they're off at university and so now's our time to get out and do this.

James Pearce: 11:51

I would say, actually, maybe we should see how old we are as well, right, because we're talking about timing and age and so on. So yeah, we are in our early 50s, just for the record.

Jayne Pearce: 12:03

There is this period between 50 and 65 where you've got this empty nest syndrome potentially and I don't know, maybe this is just my personal take that seems like a very long time to just have to spin the wheels, waiting for retirement, when you're still healthy, you've still got dreams, your kids are independent. We would have just been going back and forwards from the house to work and back again, but that's actually probably the time we want to be out doing something like this. The other thing I'll say is that sailing and this kind of life is quite physical, right. Sailing a boat is hard work and we encounter a lot of people who waited until they're 65 or 70 to do this sort of thing. And it's hard because maybe their health isn't what it used to be, or they're not as fit as they used to be and they have to take things a lot easier and they end up staying much closer to home.

James Pearce: 13:06

I felt like we've probably still got another five, ten years of decent health where we can actually rise to the challenge of sailing boats across oceans, which is what we want to do yes, and also not only that, but as far as timing is concerned, as few know, there may be grandchildren in the future, and we hear this a lot from other people who have retired at age 65 and they're on their boat, but they end up leaving it all behind because a grandchild arrives, and so that puts an end to their sailing vision. But for us I don't know. I'm hoping there weren't any grandchildren too soon in the future.

Jayne Pearce: 13:49

Pids, if you're watching this just hang in there. Get through university first and you can travel you could do.

James Pearce: 13:59

Yeah, so again, another window of opportunity. Really, of course, this is all hypothetical as well. Right, tomorrow our health could deteriorate, or our parents, or whatever. So we take this window when we can. And not only that, we've been planning this for a few years. So, prior to the kids leaving home and going off to college, we saw this as a potential window of opportunity because we had to plan the boat and so on, but we always knew that there were going to be things that could be thrown into the mix, like COVID, for example, or so few.

James Pearce: 14:38

Yeah, so it hasn't hindered our plans. Yeah, you've got to keep pushing ahead.

Dave Alison: 14:43

Yeah, exactly, so it sounds like a lot of personal motivations, like you shared a lot of great examples that were quite well thought out and to your point. It's not like you woke up one day and said, hey, honey, you want to go live on a sailboat and get out of here. It sounds like a lot of preparation and a lot of planning. I think, Jane I think you might have shared this with me at one time you started on. You guys built Scout, so it's not like you just founded it, a dealer, and bought the sailboat.

James Pearce: 15:11

Scout yeah, two or more years in the making, yeah.

Dave Alison: 15:14

Two or more years in the making, plenty of kind of runway, and then, obviously, the components of thinking about leaving work. I know a lot of the qualitative factors you just shared passion for travel, passion for seeing the world when you can and when you have the health to do so, passion for sailing and being in the physical health to actually run a sailboat. And the parents and the children. You're kind of in what I would call in financial planning, that sandwich generation where you got the parents to think about as well as children to think about, and you're kind of the sandwich in the middle. So thinking about quantitative and qualitative factors going on in their life.

Dave Alison: 15:55

But talk to me a little bit about kind of the quantitative considerations because, without sharing any details, the reality of most people as they reach their mid-40s, their early 50s, their late 50s, they tend to also be in some of their kind of key earning years and walk us through kind of just some thoughts that went through the conversation of hey, is this actually the right thing to do? Should we walk away from the workforce right now? And, james, obviously at Facebook there was stock and every tech company has besting schedules and thought of walking away from company stock and unvested stock, which tend to be kind of some of the golden handcuffs that keep people from doing this. But what did any of that kind of look like for you, just conversationally?

Jayne Pearce: 16:50

Well, you alluded to this. I think a little bit. You always feel like, oh, if we would just wait another six months, I'll get that promo or I'll get another bonus or there'll be another stock vest. And that's a rat race. I mean, you never get off that treadmill until you legally need to stop At some point. You've just got to call it.

Jayne Pearce: 17:12

And I'd like to think that if I had stayed at Facebook or Metta, I would have had a healthy career from where I was and great, I would have got 65 and I would have a little bit more in the bank account. And I've missed out on 15 years worth of adventuring around the world with my wife. So at some point you've got to say what's really important. And just chasing after that next job title or chasing after that next lump of money in your bank account, that can be a little fatal in the sense that it's not the end of the world if you do, but it's for us, not in the trade-off we were prepared to make. And obviously it was a lucky decade or a lucky necessarily but it was a good decade for Facebook and for the tech industry in general. So we had done relatively well. We'd had the chance to invest in real estate. So we had a house in Palo Alto which we had to sell to be able to do this. And yeah, at the end of the day, you just weigh up all those quantitative things and in our case, the quality of life won pretty easily.

Jayne Pearce: 18:16

And I will say, just to go back and maybe provide a little addendum to your intro where you said we are officially retired I mean, it's official, right, we haven't signed some document, but it says we'll never go back and do some work if we need to. So I think we're both lucky both with my online skills and James design and marketing skills Like we very easily can keep ourselves busy, both just to keep our brains ticking over or to make a little bit of extra money if we ever needed to. And fortunately and I don't see that as a one-way street time's a really tough and there's like some four-year-long recession and our financial advisor doesn't get us through it properly Then we can always go back to the workhouse and do a bit of work to top up the coffers. So yeah, that's been another thing. I think that helped us make this decision, knowing that it's not an irreversible decision and our skills are going to be pretty transferable if we ever needed to go back and do a little bit more.

Dave Alison: 19:15

Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute. And so, again, I think the word retirement is the wrong word. I think a lot of our clients they get to a work optional place in their life where they can go pursue other passions that they have In your case, traveling, sailing, doing the things that you want to do. I know, james, just in working with other Facebook clients like when you're at Facebook or you're working at a company like that you're surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world and I would imagine it can be a pretty competitive and challenging environment to be in, especially like you were there for what? Well, over 10 years, right.

Dave Alison: 19:53

Yeah yeah, I mean, there's also not a lot of people, from what I've heard, that have been at a company like Facebook for more than a 10-year time period, so you had some longevity at the company when you decided to leave, right yeah?

Jayne Pearce: 20:08

Yeah, I mean that was actually arguably a harder part of the decision than the financial one was just the friends and relationships and what we were doing.

Jayne Pearce: 20:19

Walking away from all that, I still felt there were lots of things that needed to be done.

Jayne Pearce: 20:24

I believed in the company's mission, a lot of what it was trying to achieve and, yeah, giving up on that and that sort of large element of purpose in my life, and so that worried me a little bit actually, that I was going to suddenly be at the loose end and not know what to do and not have that kind of creative purpose to keep me moving forward.

Jayne Pearce: 20:44

Of course, I didn't need to worry at all because the minute I stopped working I jumped up something else to do, and so I've had plenty of things to do in my spare time which may not be as financially successful as Facebook, but which keep my brain working, which keep me interacting with people online. You know I'm basically writing open source software, so I'm still getting to interact with the same kinds of smart people that I did in the professional realm. Even though I'm in the middle of nowhere, I can still get to have those relationships and that fills that kind of big purpose checkbox that I need to fill and James is saying she's got a whole bunch of things where you can talk about yourself. But you know a lot of things that we use to keep our brains going.

James Pearce: 21:23

And yeah, I think it's really important. Actually, you know a lot of people they say, well, what do you do, you know, with your time, assuming they think that we've retired. And it's true, you know, there is a lot of time that, where we have which we have to ourselves, when we're not sailing, and not only that, but we, you know, it's an opportunity for me. I see it as an opportunity to do all those things now that I wasn't able to do. I didn't have the time to do while we were busy working and, obviously, taking care of the kids with them growing up. So now, you know, I can learn a language, I can read all those books, I can do that art or whatever. It's great. So it's like, all those things that I just wasn't able to do, I put off, I'm able to do now.

Dave Alison: 22:05

Yeah, and I think that's the biggest difference, especially in the pattern of early retirement. I mean, I've seen so many times through you know the opportunities that I have in helping people retire that if they wait a long time and then they retire, it's almost like when they leave the workforce they lose their purpose in life or their identity a little bit, because they spent so much time helping build the company that they've built and it's just like they kind of flounder and they get lost. But it sounds like you guys have done a great job at you know filling that void of keeping yourself like I mean, james, in your case I would imagine it's a lot of technical, you know capabilities to stay on top of what's happening in tech and in your field, the things that you're doing right now to keep you on top of your game.

Jayne Pearce: 22:52

Yeah, but all I need is a cell signal, right, and then I got it, so I don't need to be physically located in Silicon Valley anymore. Arguably more enjoyable, right, because I get to do it entirely on my terms and I get to learn whatever technology I want to learn. I get to build whatever it is I want to build, and if it's successful, great. If it isn't, well. I guess I learned some stuff, so it's actually a pretty sweet outcome.

Dave Alison: 23:15

What's been, any unexpected challenges or aspects of this whole leaving I can't say retirement anymore because I can't say you're retired, right, but leaving the full-time workforce at Stanford and at Facebook or Meta to kind of the adjustment that you have right now. What is it If you were to look back over the last 18 months and say I wasn't anticipating this happening? Or maybe if somebody else preparing to do something similar to this, maybe not live on a sailboat but go pursue something different in their life? Anything that kind of stands out to you, Other than, of course, the year you decide to do it. We have a big stock market correction on top of it, but we've weathered that storm. We had a plan in place. We had the soon bucket funded up, the bucket plan that got us there, but any kind of big unexpected challenges.

Jayne Pearce: 24:07

I don't think we're any Boats are very expensive.

James Pearce: 24:10

And we knew they were very expensive, but they're still very expensive.

Jayne Pearce: 24:14

However much money you think you're going to spend on a boat, you're wrong. As people say, a sailing boat is the most expensive way to travel for free. And I would say, before we set out on this whole journey, obviously we sat down with you and we had what we thought our annual expenditures were going to be both kind of capex and opex. The first year of a boat it was way more, I think, capex than we were expecting. Oh, we've got to buy a life raft.

Dave Alison: 24:39

Oh, we've got to buy a kite.

James Pearce: 24:40

Oh, we've got to buy a wingfoil. You know what I mean? You need to buy a wingfoil. I mean, we have to get by a wingfoil.

Jayne Pearce: 24:48

And so, yeah, I think that first year it's not and I think we have to just accept it's not a steady state and it would be easy to get freaked out by that. It would be easy to look at all this capex and kind of confuse it for ongoing opex and then start to worry that you're going to be able to make it. But I think after, yeah, probably almost literally a year, our expenditures kind of settled down a bit. The boat, we kind of know what's what, got a better sense of what things cost. Obviously we're also in a relatively cheap part of the world. It doesn't cost a lot to anchor for free in the Caribbean and most of the time we are just anchoring.

Jayne Pearce: 25:24

And we're not having to stay in expensive marinas and so forth. And so, yeah, I think, just understanding that there are going to be these kind of very lumpy expenditure periods which I guess is true of anyone that's retiring and actually planning to do something, right Because those somethings are going to be irregular and they're going to come up with different costs and so doing an annual budget was just kind of a tricky thing to start off with. But I think we've refined that now. I mean, speaking for myself, it wasn't something that was keeping me awake at night, but it was just something that I think we have. We probably knew we could never have prepared for that, and I think that's so right To your point and you made a good comment.

Dave Alison: 26:04

Maybe you're not going to go live on a sailboat for other people that are listening to this and might not have the exact same challenges, but typically when I see your first year retirement, I mean it's just a lot of unknowns.

Dave Alison: 26:15

You know, when you retire, every day is like a Saturday and if you think about Monday through Sunday, you typically spend the most amount of money on a Saturday because you're out and about and doing things and going out to dinner or whatnot, and obviously you guys are a little more confined, especially if you're not at port or anchored and you're out sailing. It's not like you're ordering on Amazon every day or going out to dinner every night. So you might have some of those different budgetary concerns your first year in retirement, but it makes a lot of people very nervous that that first year of just trying to figure out how these expenses are going to settle in and what does it look like, and that's why we always think about when you start to think about retirement income. It's like bumper bowling, that you try to put up two bumpers on either side from really throwing a gutter ball, but you're going to bounce around quite a bit for that first year to two years as you settle into things.

Jayne Pearce: 27:08

Yeah, and, like I said, it was also a year when the markets were pretty confused, and so I could imagine, if you project oh, as the next 20 years going to be like this year, then, yeah, you're going to have a sleepless night, but I think able, with your help, to look at the bigger picture. Think about these larger cycles, and there are these anomalous years or periods of financial turmoil, but they never last that long, and so just realize that the nature of average is that there'll be other years which seem very boring and where the growth is more healthy, and so forth, and you just have to wait for those to come to and not get spooked by the anomalous.

Dave Alison: 27:48

Yeah, exactly. Well, as we land the plane, you have two quick, two kind of final wrap ups for you. So what was your favorite destination along the East Coast as you were traveling down and then, flip side, what's been your favorite destination in the Caribbean so far?

Jayne Pearce: 28:03

Well, I don't know.

Jayne Pearce: 28:06

We're going to have to run through mentally all the places we've been to. Yeah, actually, maine, I like Maine a lot. It was a really beautiful Bar-la-World I think. There's like maybe one or two months a year when it's just like absolutely phenomenal. So we were up there in June into July and, yeah, I really, really loved that. There was a place called Bar Harbor we got to it's pretty much the furthest north we got and, yeah, beautiful mountains, lots of hiking, the kayaking and not too much fog, and so that was really spectacular. That was like nowhere else would ever been in the US, I think. So, yeah, I enjoyed that. But then again we were also in New York. We sailed past Manhattan.

James Pearce: 28:48

That was my favorite. It was being able to take our own boat down through Manhattan. Did we anchor? We did we anchored just down from the top, yeah.

Dave Alison: 28:57

James, somewhere along the way you anchored up and actually spoke at a tech conference, didn't you?

James Pearce: 29:02

Oh yeah, that was the place.

Jayne Pearce: 29:03

Yeah Well, yeah, when we were in New York, there happened to be a job street conference going on, so I hopped off the boat and scammed across and gave a tour. We got back on again, but yeah, no, that was great. And then, well, obviously, we enjoyed Charleston. That was another part of the world we'd never been to, and as we came further south, as for the Caribbean, I actually really liked the southern part of the Bahamas, which I guess isn't technically the Caribbean, but it's a little bit harder to get to.

Jayne Pearce: 29:30

There are islands that are a little bit off the beaten track, pretty remote, beautiful blue waters, nice shallow bays and lots of lobsters and fish to go.

James Pearce: 29:41

He likes catching lobsters. I went yesterday.

Jayne Pearce: 29:43

But, yeah, I really loved the Bahamas but, yeah, the whole of the Caribbean is obviously awesome.

James Pearce: 29:48

I really liked Guadalupe. That was my favorite, just maybe because of the French connection and the food. Yeah, it was really nice.

Jayne Pearce: 29:55

But yeah, this is the start of our next season, so, having headed out from Grenada, we're obviously here in Tobago. We are looking for a lucky weather window to see whether we can get the wind to take us down to South America for a little bit. We'd love to go and explore places like Guiana and Suriname, but that's very dependent on the wind and so if that doesn't happen, we'll probably just hang out here for a bit. But yeah, we're hoping to, over the course of the next six to seven months, move westwards across the Caribbean, so we'll get to go to places like Cuba and Jamaica and Baleas, the ABC Islands yeah, maybe end up getting down towards Panama, and by then we're thinking about what to do after Panama. We're nice.

James Pearce: 30:40

That's another season.

Dave Alison: 30:41

Sounds like it and now the compost.

Dave Alison: 30:43

That all sounds absolutely amazing. If anyone wants to follow the Journey Scout sailing on Facebook, right, they can go, and I know you guys are always posting pictures of the Journey along the way. It looks absolutely amazing. And we'll just wrap up with one additional thing. I mean, if somebody is listening and they have the financial wherewithal, what's your advice, kind of looking back again over the last two years, is it just do it? What do you think in terms of any peace of mind or additional insight you could give somebody on something like this?

James Pearce: 31:15

Well, for me, if you've got the passion and you really want to do something, then go ahead and do it, regardless of the financial situation, right?

Dave Alison: 31:25

I legally can't say that I'm licensed. I'm a financial advisor. Go blow all your money on a worldwide trip, but I'm just joking.

James Pearce: 31:33

Yeah.

Jayne Pearce: 31:34

No, I don't think we just said let's go do it Like. I mean, we thought about the considerations, made sure we were doing responsibly, but we were very self-aware about not having that. Oh, let's just put it off a little bit, kind of thing. So I think that would be my advice Think about what it is you want to do and plan around that, rather than looking in your bank account, waiting for that to get to a certain number and then deciding what to do. So make sure that you have been confused the means with the end. Focus on the end and the means will take care of themselves.

Dave Alison: 32:03

That's great. That's fantastic Proper planning like anything else, and James and Jayna, thank you so much. I see the boat rocking in the background. I think I might have just saw a peak of a mountain or something behind you there as we went one way, so we will let you run. Hopefully we have a good break in the weather and you could get on with your journey. And this was fantastic. Thank you so much for the time and for being such a great client at Allison Wealth.

Jayne Pearce: 32:29

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you for all you're supposed to have for and, yeah, hope this was helpful for someone.

Dave Alison: 32:33

Sounds good, Thanks everyone.

Speaker 4: 32:35

Financial planning and advisory services are offered through Prosperity Capital Advisor, pca, an SEC registered investment advisor with its principal place of business in the state of Ohio. Allison Wealth Management and PCA are separate, non-affiliated entities. Pca does not provide tax or legal advice. Insurance and tax services offered through Allison Wealth Management are not affiliated with PCA. Information received from this video should not be viewed as individual investment advice. Content may have been created by a third party and was not written or created by a PCA affiliated advisor and does not represent the views and opinions of PCA or its subsidiary. For information pertaining to the registration status of PCA, please contact the firm or refer to the Investment Advisor public disclosure website. For additional information about PCA, including fees and services, send for our disclosure statement as set forth on Form ABB from PCA using the contact information here. Please read the disclosure statement carefully before you invest or send money.