London Times on Affordability

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The Sunday Times of London covered the Odyssey again, this time from the angle of affordability.

An older man and woman sit smiling at an outdoor restaurant table with drinks, palm trees, and a cruise ship in the background. The headline reads It’s cheaper than London’: meet the people who live on a cruise ship.
Randolph was kind enough to send me this screenshot from his phone. “It popped up in my Apple News feed,” he wrote. “I said to my spouse, ‘That’s my friend on the cruise ship!’”

This is True reader Randolph in Canada must’ve received quite the shock when he went to skim through the news and was confronted with a large photo of me and Kit looking back at him. While the story went to print in the Sunday Times (on 11 January), it came out online a few days before that.

It was written by the paper’s very pleasant Senior Money Reporter, Megan Harwood-Baynes, so I knew how to give her the quotes she needed for her beat, such as “‘I’m not coming off this ship alive,’ said Randy Cassingham.” She continued that “Several digital nomads work on the ship, including Randy, who runs a news commentary website that helps to cover the couple’s monthly costs. He has a pension, but has not needed to spend it yet.”

It’s a bit eye-rolling that the Times, unlike most large newspapers in this day and age, Just Won’t Link out to a source’s web site so interested readers can find them. At least one Times reader was intrigued enough that he searched and found the True site and subscribed. How many more would have checked it out if there was a link? Lots. And that’s after I helped her find several other Residents to interview.

The quotes continued, wrapped around a second photo of us:

Randy and Kit smile for a selfie at a busy dock with a large cruise ship and a sightseeing bus in the background. Other people are gathered around, and the sky is partly cloudy.
The other photo used in the story, taken in Ketchikan, Alaska, where the ship “parked” right alongside the main street in town. Oddly, the Times credited it to Kit. (Randy Cassingham)

“Living here is not truly a huge expense. It almost certainly costs less to live here than a flat in London,” he said. “We don’t have a car to pay for. We don’t have a mortgage, property taxes, maintenance, or insurance. We don’t have to shop for groceries. No bills for utilities or internet. We have a predictable monthly expense to be here, another for health insurance, and toiletries and my phone. A little bit if we choose to go on side trips in the countries we go to. So many other expenses are simply gone.”

Links

A joyful elderly woman hugs a young girl in a red dress. Behind them, two smiling adults watch, one wearing glasses and a sunhat. The scene appears to be on a bus or tram with outdoor light in the background.
I provided this to the Times too, but they didn’t use it: “On the tender into port in Levuka, Fiji, the youngest person on the ship, Azalia Cooksley of New Zealand, 16 months, who was visiting her grandmother onboard with her mum, decided she HAD to be held by the oldest Resident on the ship, Proletta Schatz, who will turn 100 in July.” (Benjamin Schatz, sharpened by A.I., not for publication without prior permission.)

I’m more generous than the Times’ editor: to read their story, please try first at their site, so it gets clicks to show interest: London Times. If you’re paywalled out, I found it is also available through a free archive.

I’ll also be more generous than U.K.’s LADbible, where the self-proclaimed “NCTJ Gold Standard journalist” James Moorhouse rewrote the Times’ story to feature only Kit and me (no crime there), yet not only also didn’t link to True (rude), but took the time to find this site to steal a copyrighted photo to illustrate it, which is a crime under U.K. law, according to my contact at the Times. The LADs should know better, as well as (as an online publishing site) providing links, as they would want one back.

What could be worse? This: They clipped a tiny bit of a photo of us on CBS News (also grabbed from this site), and labeled that as the credited “featured image” rather than the giant photo of us they put at the top of the page. Despite those egregious ethical lapses, I know some of you want to see it anyway, and the right thing to do is provide the link: Couple sold all possessions to live on cruise full time because ‘it’s cheaper than London’.

And that’s how it’s done, LADjerks! 🙂

Related: A list of all known media coverage of Kit/me/this site is on the Media Coverage page.

Originally Published January 12, 2026 — Last Updated January 13, 2026

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3 thoughts on “London Times on Affordability”

  2. I think you’ve covered this somewhere, but since you mentioned packages come out of FL, is that now considered your state of residence?
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    Absolutely not: it’s merely the company’s address, where there’s a dedicated (in more ways than one) staffer who collects the packages, combines them to make reshipment more efficient (Amazon, for instance, is famous for wasting shipping space and, hence, boxes), and finding a place to send it all to in a shipping container to meet us somewhere, which requires a LOT of compliance paperwork. None of that has anything to do with our legal residence, and certainly even non-Americans onboard can use U.S. Amazon (or other vendors) to send packages to Florida to receive them onboard. We also want to be able to vote in our home state’s local/regional/national elections to make our voices heard as citizens. And we want our taxes to be spent there, so certainly we need a voice there. -rc

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  3. Maybe this is a good question for Ask Randy.

    Does everyone pay a flat fee for food? Some people probably have more expensive tastes than others (or bigger appetites). Is there a gradient for this?
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    All basic services, from laundry to Internet to meals, are included in the monthly fees. Those who want more individualized (or “expensive”, as you put it) experiences generally seek out fun or high-end dining options ashore at our various stops. -rc

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