Are any of the discomforts of being a liveaboard that much worse than just being kind of poor?
My partner and I are getting ready to buy a 36' boat and move out of our apartment in a few months and I want to reality-check myself on if it's really all that bad. I don't actually see the issues with most of the "cons" people list in blogs and threads, but maybe I'm underestimating how hard it really is.
No laundry, iffy hot water supply, difficult to get groceries, tight spaces with limited storage, tiny kitchen/bathroom, etc., are all things that I've dealt with just by living in low income housing in an expensive city. The only thing that I don't have experience with is maintenance, but fortunately for me my partner works on old boats for a living and even though her job is with much larger vessels, she's the best darn manual-memorizer this side of the Mississippi lol. We also aren't planning on sailing around all the time, we both work in physical locations and would only take trips when we can afford the fuel, and we know that it's not going to be some miraculously cheaper lifestyle - it's gonna save us a few hundred a month but we're still living in an expensive city at the end of the day.
Being poor sucks, and I'm very grateful to be like "lower middle class" now, but the part I hated the most was the fact that I had no other choice. I was paying some shitty faceless company $985 a month to live in a 250sqft concrete box with a fly-infested kitchen, a shower that never worked, and an elevator that broke down for weeks at a time. I didn't mind the weird storage solutions or having to go to the corner store for overpriced toilet paper or lugging my slightly damp laundry up 12 flights of stairs because I came out of that with killer calves, yknow? Edit: this is a former living situation from when I was younger, poorer, and completely on my own financially, not my current situation.
I definitely understand that not everyone is going to be into the liveaboard lifestyle, and there's a non-zero chance that I get onto the boat and go "fuck this", but when I read about all of the issues people have I can't help but think that I've been through all of it before to some degree. The thing that stresses me out is that I never see anyone say they love the lifestyle that isn't full-time sailing and unemployed or that didn't have tons of money to drop on a big boat with all the amenities. Am I completely off-base in how I'm looking at this? Is it really that bad or is it pretty comparable to the discomforts of just being generally poor?