I Retired Early and Live Full-Time on Cruise Ships—Here's How

For most people, the ideal retirement plan involves a house with a yard, a settled routine, and finally staying put. But a growing movement of digital nomads and early retirees are completely flipping the status quo, trading mortgages and utility bills for a life entirely spent on the open ocean.

Meet Libby Rome, a 52-year-old former corporate IT consultant who officially retired in April 2026 after a 30-year career. While many people dream of taking a single cruise a year, Rome and her husband have been living full-time on cruise ships for the past three years. By leaning into financial independence strategies and capitalizing on specific cruise loyalty systems, she manages a life of continuous global travel on an annual budget of less than $40,000.

Here, in her own words, is exactly how she walked away from traditional housing, navigates healthcare at sea, handles the unique lifestyle constraints of a cabin, and maintains her low-cost voyage around the world.

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1. Trading Hotel Life for the Open Ocean

Long before she ever set foot on a cruise ship as a permanent resident, Rome was already well-practiced in the art of extreme minimalism. Her transition to full-time travel began out of sheer operational necessity when international corporate relocations forced her to reevaluate her relationship with physical possessions.

“I’ve been a nomad actually for 16 years,” Rome says. “16 years ago, because I had a house and a car and everything, I sold it all and I went down to two suitcases because I had a job in London. So I went so minimalist and so nomadic and then started loving it and loved the freedom of it to where I never wanted to go back to having a house and chores and errands.”

For over a decade, that nomadic freedom meant splitting her time between traditional vacation rentals and various hotels. However, as accommodation costs began to climb steadily across the globe, she noticed the value proposition shifting. Moving constantly also required booking frequent regional flights, which added logistics and stress to her everyday routine. It was during a 2019 vacation that she and her husband realized a better alternative was floating right in front of them.

“It started becoming kind of obvious that cruising might be a good path for us…” Rome explains. “One of the things about hotel life is that it also required some flights… and a lot of times the cheaper hotels are near the airport or some highway or it just wasn’t as nice. And cruising, I found, could give me that at about the same price as hotel life, without the car and the mortgage and the insurance… [and] give me a chance to get rid of the flights and have a lot of fun and free entertainment.”

Today, the couple avoids the frantic pace of changing ships every week, opting instead to book consecutive voyages on the exact same vessel. This summer, they have settled into a highly comfortable rhythm aboard Princess Cruises’Sky Princess, a strategy that lets them unpack just once while waking up in a completely new destination every morning.

“I prefer to just take it easy and have a stress-free life, so we pick like this ship I’m on now, the Sky Princess, run through,” Rome says. “One of the reasons we like it is that it’s not just a loop around the same places over and over again—the itinerary actually rarely repeats. It’s not a world cruise, which would be lovely, but those are very expensive.”

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2. The Financial Strategy and the Casino Loophole

Living full-time on a premier cruise liner sounds like an extravagance reserved exclusively for multi-millionaires, but Rome managed to finance the lifestyle through aggressive saving and a deep understanding of cruise line loyalty programs. By mapping out her early retirement using the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) method, she was able to build a bridge to cover the gap years between leaving her corporate desk and finally accessing her long-term retirement accounts.

“I was able to get the cost so low with the cruising that I was able to save half my salary over the last four and a half years,” Rome notes. “I’ve been saving for retirement my whole life, so 30-year career? I have a nice retirement fund to rely on, but I’m still too early for that at age 52. But I want it to be done sooner rather than later. So that’s why I did the FIRE method. Keeping those costs low allowed me to have enough in my account to last me during that gap time until my retirement funds set in. I officially saved enough to do the math to show I have enough to last until I’m 59 and a half at this point, using a 4% interest. I can take 4% out and live on that.”

The absolute secret weapon to keeping her ongoing travel expenses under $40,000 a year, however, comes down to how she leverages cruise line casino tracking programs. While most casual vacationers view the ship’s casino as a quick place to lose twenty dollars, Rome recognized that the algorithms managing guest offers could be optimized for long-term housing. After making a strict, calculated initial bankroll investment of $2,000, she unlocked an ongoing loop of complimentary cruise offers that she has been riding ever since.

“I use their casino program,” Rome reveals. “A lot of people will go and gamble and then they’ll win one free cruise, but the way Princess works… is you can use this basic loophole—and so myself and a few other people I know out there… are basically living on cruise ships for free because of this program. My overall annual budget’s less than 40,000.”

Once you trigger for their offers, then you go online on the princess.com website and you log in and all of the cruises are free. Now by free, I mean, you have to pay port fees and taxes and a two hundred dollar per person deposit, which comes back to you as on board credit, which then can be gambled with if you want. We do gamble a couple of times a year, but we gamble only with on board credit, not our own cash anymore. So we made an initial investment to gamble, but ever since then we’ve been doing it completely using the credit that we already have on board. It was about a $2,000 bankroll.”

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3. Managing Diet, Discipline, and Type 1 Diabetes

While a week-long cruise vacation is usually celebrated as an all-you-can-eat hall pass, living on a ship full-time requires an intense level of daily structure. Without strict boundaries, the endless availability of soft-serve ice cream, 24-hour room service, and poolside bars can quickly become a detriment to both physical well-being and personal finance.

“Discipline is definitely required on a cruise ship for both of those reasons: the activity and also gambling, also drinking, also food,” Rome admits. “If you have an addictive personality, you could totally get swept up into any of those. The food was definitely a challenge for me and gained some weight at the beginning, but I have a system now and I’m very disciplined and I feel good about that. I have my regular diet: I go and get my salad every day for lunch and I go and get my steamed vegetables. I always have my little system, my little routine.”

That strict routine isn’t just about weight management—it’s a critical component of how she stays healthy while managing Type 1 diabetes on the high seas. To ensure she always has access to life-saving medical supplies, Rome treats the ship’s home port as her temporary medical headquarters, building her cruise calendar around 90-day maintenance blocks.

“Actually, I have type one diabetes,” Rome shares. “And so that adds some complications. I need my medical supplies regularly, so at first I was definitely challenged a lot, but it’s one of the things that kind of made me cruise around one general port. For the last couple years I’ve mostly been around Fort Lauderdale—that’s where my doctor was. On cruise turnaround days, I have my medical appointments, my dentist appointments, everything on those days. There was a CVS right there that was walkable from the cruise ship, so I would go and pick up my medical supplies every 90 days as well.”

While the ships carry highly capable medical teams to handle standard issues, Rome has managed to successfully navigate her three years at sea without ever needing to check into the onboard infirmary for an emergency.

“Fortunately, in these last three years of full-time cruising, I’ve not had any medical emergencies, and I’ve never gone to the medical center except for once when I asked them to hold my insulin because I had too much to carry,” she says. “In general, I store my insulin in my little refrigerator in the room and I have my medical supplies always. It adds weight to my backpack that I carry now, but it’s worth it to live.”

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4. Navigating Community, Tiny Spaces, and Life at Sea

Choosing a nomadic life means walking away from geographic communities like local neighborhood groups, bowling leagues, and routine neighborhood block parties. While some critics assume that full-time cruising must be an incredibly isolating experience, Rome notes that her social circle hasn’t vanished—it has simply adapted to a global framework.

“I would say that my community is just different now,” Rome says. “One of my communities, for example, is called Go With Less—it’s a Facebook group that I belong to that is, they get together regularly all over the world. So this group, you know, and I’ve met a number of them already. One of the events that Princess has every cruise is called the ‘most traveled guest event’ where they invite the most traveled guests on the ship and to all have dinner, and it seems that basically you’re seeing the same people over and over again. So you get to know the other people who are like almost living on cruise ships, you know, and just traveling so extensively.”

Of course, the transient nature of a cruise means that many friendships are naturally short-lived. Passengers board, connect over dinner for seven days, and then disappear at the next turnaround port. To thrive in this environment, Rome relies heavily on her strongest personal connection, while using modern tech to stay intimately involved with family back on land.

“I don’t have my bowling league anymore. And I don’t have my scrapbooking retreats anymore,” Rome notes. “If you wanted to be really social, I guess it would be kind of sad that people are so fleeting… I’ve met people and connected, but then I’ll probably never see them again… It’s pros and cons. I’m not lonely because I’m with my husband, who is my best friend, and he’s like, if I got to do anything in the whole world, what I’d want to do is spend time with him.”

There are physical constraints to consider, too. To maintain her lean budget, Rome and her husband purposely opt for interior staterooms rather than sprawling balcony suites. Living in a compact room without a window means managing limited square footage, dealing with notoriously sluggish satellite Wi-Fi, and relying entirely on the ship’s infrastructure for basic chores. Fortunately, hitting top-tier elite status with the cruise line unlocks complimentary perks that make tiny-living feel like a luxury hotel stay.

“We’re mostly in inside cabins, and we don’t mind, but it would be nicer of course to have a balcony or… a bigger suite—a separate room with a living room,” Rome says. “The space is kind of small, but it’s still worth it. The Wi-Fi is so slow… that’s very frustrating… One of the lovely benefits of Princess also is that once you become Elite, you get free laundry service. So I put it in a bag whenever my clothes get dirty and then it comes back all clean and hung or in a bag and all folded… And then my husband jokes all the time that his favorite way to do dishes is to order room service and then just kind of put it aside for the person to pick up.”

As she looks ahead to future chapters, Rome has no immediate plans to drop anchor or return to a standard suburban life. For her, the massive collection of worldly experiences easily outweighs the comforts of a traditional retirement.

“Wherever I am at the end, if I lose my mobility or whatever’s happening, all I will do is say, ‘Well, what a great life I’ve led,'” Rome says. “I can’t possibly imagine having regrets because my life has been so full and so rich.”  

To follow along with her cruise ship adventures, find Libby Rome on YouTube
and Instagram @LibbyRome, or catch her on TikTok @Libby.Rome.

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