One Brit cut her bills in half and saved hundreds every month by switching her rented property for a 100-year-old narrowboat.
Elizabeth Earles moved out of a more traditional house and onto the antique ship named ‘Maggie’ around a year ago.
Since then she’s saved £7,500 through not having to pay rent and cutting down on other bills.
On the old narrowboat, Elizabeth lives a more old-school lifestyle, including taking just two showers a week.
The 34-year-old also pointed out that as Maggie is a 1920s boat, there isn’t much new technology to run up bills like an average homeowner would.
Moving to the nomadic lifestyle, as she now sails from place to place, cut her monthly out goings from £1,200 to around £575.
The boat is centrally heated by a coal fire, and a bag of coal, costing £16, lasts Elizabeth around two weeks.
Maggie is also powered by a diesel engine that costs around £60 a month to run.
While her water supply is free, Elizabeth buys about £25 worth of gas bottles a month to heat water for warm showers as well.
She only has to pay out £130 a month for her Canal and River Trust License fee and a tenner a month for insurance.
Alongside all of that, her only major expense is paying back the loan on the boat itself as she bought Maggie for £30,000 from a close friend who is letting her pay them back in instalments.
Elizabeth told The Sun : "I’d always loved the idea of living on a boat since I was a child, travelling to different places, meeting new people, and taking your home with you."
However, like most Brits, as the cost of living crisis worsens she has had to make some sacrifices to keep costs down.
She said: "I don’t want to keep the fire running over night, I go to bed with a hot water bottle to try to combat the cold being in a long metal tin in winter tends to bring.”
Elizabeth has also started limiting her showers to save on gas as prices just keep rising.
She added: "It really feels as though, by living on this 1920s boat, in the midst of a global recession and right after a pandemic, that I’m visiting the 1920s myself!"
Even though her old-school life is tough sometimes she said she loves it and is ‘free and happy’.
She even publishes a YouTube series explaining life on the water and wants to tour the UK in the new year to research the history of women in narrowboats.
