Living on Cruise Ships: How a 53-Year-Old Woman Earns More Than She Spends

“This is my version of paradise”: 53-year-old woman decides to live on cruise ships and now earns more than she spends. Quit everything and gain freedom — why not?

Everyone has moments in life when they want to drop everything, reboot, and start life anew. An American woman named Lynnelle felt exactly that way in March 2024. She realized she had too much stress, it was severely affecting her health, and that meant it was urgently time for a change.

Lynnelle sold her house, quit her job, got a divorce, and spent the next three months “catching her breath” and recuperating, as she confessed in one of her videos. When her brain had settled a bit, the woman remembered that she had vacationed on cruise ships several times for a few days at a time; it wasn’t bad, and sometimes she even managed to recoup some of the expenses if she got lucky in one of the casinos on board. And so, traveling the seas became the theme of the woman’s vlog.

At first, one video “took off,” then another. Thanks to monetization, the sums in her account grew. With this money, Lynnelle booked herself a few more sea voyages, and it soon became clear that this was a very good business scheme. In the end, looking back on her 2024, the blogger realized she had spent 267 nights on cruises, 73 in hotels, and only 25 with family.

Lynnelle calculated her annual expenses for cruises, divided that number by 12, and found that she spends an average of $2,102 per month. This sum looks surprisingly modest compared to the expenses of US residents.

For comparison, the average US resident spends $2,924 per month on living expenses, according to data from the portal relocate.me.

Even more surprising is that only $1,283 of Lynnelle’s expenses go towards her stay on the cruise ships themselves. All other expenses (mostly flights and sometimes hotel stays between trips) add up to about a thousand dollars, writes the British Metro.

How does Lynnelle earn such sums? Through her own YouTube blog. That is, her stories about cruise life bring her money, which she uses to buy tickets for new cruises. It looks like a perpetual motion machine. At least, as long as the video service’s algorithms are favorable to her content and cruise companies don’t raise their prices.

However, even if something changes, the blogger will most likely have time to save for the future. Currently, Lynnelle earns about $60,000 a year from her videos but spends only $25,000. Perhaps it’s thanks to this schedule that she named her blog “Poverty to Paradise.”

The 53-year-old considers her current life truly free, noting that it’s not at all the kind of freedom we were taught about. And the “endless” cruises are her own “version of paradise,” and it exists even if no one believes in or supports you.

It’s also worth mentioning another nuance: cruise companies often offer Lynnelle discounts, or even completely free trips, so that she will advertise them in her now quite popular blog. Often, the woman only has to pay port fees and taxes, while on board she enjoys a free cabin, food, and other entertainment. This is how her main expenses become flights—for example, from Vietnam, where the previous cruise ended, to Barcelona, where the next one begins.

Moreover, if plane tickets are too expensive, like from New Orleans to Alaska, Lynnelle boldly declines the offer and hangs up, but they call her back and offer even more favorable terms. And she agrees, already figuring out in her head how she’ll save on the flight by using points from one of the airlines. No sense letting a discount go to waste. Or she can take a train from Atlanta to Los Angeles—that’s content too.