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Hi! My husband and I have been looking into the idea of taking a year to live on a canal boat with our children - obviously if we loved it we could do it for longer but at the moment the idea is a year. We have been on canal boats for shorter periods but nothing long term. I have been obsessively reading these forums and i think I need a good reality check from people who are doing this! So here it goes! Current situation is we have 5 children who are all homeschooled. Eldest 2 are teenagers and the youngest is 4. (No won’t wont be having any more!) My husband is an IT consultant working for himself and has an office in Liverpool He doesn’t need to go in every day he can work from home but obviously needs to keep some presence in the office. We rent a 2/3 bedroom house. We have 4 girls in one room and our one and only boy has an attic room. We don’t own a car we use public transport. We have considered renting a bigger house but it just seems like throwing more money away on something we don’t own - and we don’t stay still long enough to buy a house ! We prefer to be moving around! In terms of money at the moment we pay £750 a month for the house plus council tax and other bills all In all our basic bills come to around £1800 per month . So we would be hoping to keep our monthly bills at that or under on a boat (I have been trying to figure out how reasonable that is but figures seem to vary widely!) we would be looking to buy the boat boat either upfront (so no monthly payments) or with a smallish loan to top up if we went for a higher priced one) So the major issue obviously is the size of our family initially we had thought a wider/longer boat would be the only option until recently someone suggested we actually had two shorter boats and either split bedrooms between them or had one for eating/living/schooling and the other for sleeping. I honestly couldn't tell how serious a suggestion this was - so ideas would be appreciated! The idea would be that we continuously cruise around areas where my husband could travel to the office a couple of Times a week for the year then make a choice either we rent another house or carry on as we are. Any thoughts would be appreciated on this as we are driving ourselves mad thinking of all the risks or things we might hate ? thanks!