Moving to paradise. From creating QuickPay for Quicken to living on a sailboat in the Caribbean - Part 1

My friends have always said I should write a book about my adventures. Well, I promise that I will keep my posts to the readers digest version.

If you read my introduction you will learn that I started out as a game designer on the Atari console and in 1981 at age 19 I was able to buy my first house. But then piracy killed the market in 1984. I was newly married and wasn't smart with my finances and we lost almost everything and had to move into an apartment.

It took awhile to recover, creating many other titles for the IBM compatibles but then in 1991 I created a hit with QuickPay for Quicken and licensed it to Intuit.

In 3 short years I created QuickInvoice, QuickPay II and QuickPay III. This time though I was a little smarter in handling my finances and we paid cash for everything including the house you see above.

Everything was going great and I remember to this day that I was sitting on the couch just relaxing and being all content and at that point I felt it was time to leave. I told my wife what I felt and she said she too felt the same. But where?

The Caribbean!

What! To the Caribbean and live on a sailboat! We were both thinking that was crazy. So we tested the water and said ok, let's take sailing lessons and see if we can get our captains license and if we would even like it.

We then made arrangements and took a trip to St. Maarten for one week of lessons. Our captain reminded us of the movie Captain Ron. Sure enough we passed and had a great time.

As we were docking a nice sailboat comes in with a French couple and they were selling their boat and we bought it.


(Me testing out the French couple's boat)

Miracle after Miracle


We come back home and now we need to get rid of all this stuff in 2 months. One Sunday morning I wake up with the leading to take the jet skis to a certain street corner. Here it was the end of the season and you sure wouldn't think this was the best time.

I tell my wife that I'm going to go sell the jet skis today. She was surprised and I hooked them up and went. Once parked I stood by them for 30 minutes and someone drove up and bought them :)

Then I had a new Ford Explorer and my friend also had one he was selling and so I told him once he sells his let me know if anyone else calls. Sure enough he sold mine too.

Then we went to the realtor and told them we were needing to list our house and he said he recently divorced and needed a new place. He came over and love it and everything in it. So he bought it as is and we just boxed up 6 boxes worth of stuff and stored them at the mother-in-laws.

Wow! So it seems this is really going to happen.

This is when the real adventure starts....

Would you like to hear some more? Please show me that you are interested by giving me an upvote and maybe a comment. It is fun to actually write and relive this fantastic journey. Thanks Steemit :)

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