Don’t Live on the Edge…Live on the Margin

When I saw an email in my in mailbox from “Patrick Schulte” my stomach dropped.  “Uh oh” I thought, “He’s going to unleash on me his irreverent wit and I will be left in a pulpy, tongue-tied mess”.  After all, we had broken several of his cardinal rules for successful boat blogging and I was pretty certain he hated us.

For those of you who have been living under a rock and do not know Patrick Schulte, he is the (hilariously and sometimes bitingly contemptuous) voice of Bumfuzzle which is, without a doubt, the most successful “sailing blog” on the internet today.  Pat and Ali are just a couple years older than we are, and yet they have lived approximately four lives: one in which they sailed around the world with pretty much zero sailing experience, another in which they drove across the parts of the world they missed on their sailing adventure in a VW bus, another in which they raced across country in a vintage Porsche and yet another when they had a couple of (adorable) babies, bought another boat (a monohull! Egad!) and moved to Mexico.  When they started blogging there were probably no more than three other sailing blogs and Pat has no one but himself to blame for the fact that there are exactly one million, eight hundred and twenty-two thousand more today.  Bumfuzzle opened the floodgates.

Anyway, I opened the email and it was not the verbal tongue lashing I expected, but a friendly response to a post I wrote about common questions we get in which one shrew super-charged on bitterness and (pregnancy?) hormones wrote me a comment peppered with words like “spoiled” “holier than thou” “nothing more than a stay at home mom” who "relies on her husband for income" among other things (after a little chuckle I hit "delete").  Never one to shy from controversy (actually I think they are fueled by their haters) Pat wrote that perhaps next time people inquire about how to finance a dream like this, we turn them on to his new book Live on the Margin.

Which is, no joke, exactly what I do now.  (He’s so smart, that Pat).

The book is not a travel narrative or a pithy account of a life at sea, but rather a how-to book aimed at showing people that it is truly possible to think outside the box and live your dream life (be it living out of a camper van in Baja, a surf shack in Costa Rica, or a thatch hut in Bali) by adjusting your spending habits, evaluating risk, and taking that exhilarating leap into the unknown while playing the stock market with realistic sums of money to pay your way.

Making that dream happen—stepping into an unknowable future for a life of adventure takes courage, decisiveness, an unwavering belief in yourself, and the willingness to take 100% responsibility for the outcome. Those happen to be the very same traits that define the successful trader. The skills you learn in pursuing the dream might just remove money from the list of reasons you can’t go. -From the LOTM Facebook Page.

Pat co-wrote the book with Nick O'Kelly, a fellow intrepid traveler and on-the-margin-liver and, despite the fact that I am famously terrible with numbers and math, the book is written in laymen's terms with real-life examples and the signature Schulte wit peppered throughout.  While it's still a book about online trading (not exactly a gripping page-turner) - it is not the total yawn fest that most other books in it's genre offer up.  It's could also have been named: Trading for Dummies, but that book probably already exists.

Anywho... if you are sitting there in your cubicle dreaming of backpacking across Southeast Asia, living on a sailboat in the Caribbean or volunteering on an eco-farm in South America - Live on the Margin might just open your eyes and show you that yes, there is a way.

Patrick Shulte is also the author of Bumfuzzle - Just Out Looking For Pirates which is a refreshingly hilarious account of their travels around the world by sailboat. At 2.99 for the Kindle addition, I promise you it'll be worth every penny.

Full disclosure:  I received a free copy of Live on the Margin.