I was almost a house boat guy.

This story on the ABC website about older women increasingly living on boats caught my attention because I almost lived on a boat once.

If you asked Virginia Frost four years ago where she'd be spending her retirement, living on a houseboat on the Gold Coast would not have been top of the list.

But with a huge credit card debt, a mortgage and no family to lean on, the 73-year-old said she had no other option but to sell her Surfers Paradise unit in 2021.

With the leftover funds she decided to buy a 13-metre floating home because she could not afford to rent a house.

Today she lives at a marina at Hope Island, paying $930 a month to berth her boat.

"That is cheaper than any place I could possibly rent on land … and it includes power and water," Ms Frost said.

"I get rent assistance with my pension as well, so in the end it's costing me a lot less.

It took me back to the early 90s when I was first living in Sydney, not far from Rushcutters Bay, down the hill from the Cross. I was in a sharehouse, of course, and I’d sort of ended up there as a virtual flatmate because I was going out with one of the girls who lived there.

I still had a place in Brisbane I was paying rent on, but it was coming apart, the way they do, and I thought I might have to find some digs in Sydney - which was way more expensive.

I was, however, starting to make more money from magazine freelancing simply because all the mags I worked for were in Sydney, so I could more easily pester them for work, being down there so much.

This was when I learned there was a four-bedroom houseboat for sale in the bay. Eighty grand, as I recall. Still many multiples of my yearly income, but that’s the deal in our grossly exploitative late-stage capitalist economy, innit.

Man, I was so fucking close to buying that thing.

I could only imagine how cool it would be, being the magazine writer guy who lived on a houseboat on fucking Sydney harbour. I would be beating the chicks off with whatever sailors call a stick (because they have different names for everything, you know).

It’s possible, I conjectured, that I might even extend myself to fighting crime or solving the occasional murder on a strictly amateur basis.

I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to get to and from my houseboat, which was somewhat inconveniently parked (moored? or anchored?) all the way out there, in the actual water, rather than up here, on the nice dry grass of Rushcutter’s Bay, where I stood coveting it.

But if I could solve murders and run a string over ever-changing hot boat ladies through my floating pleasure palace, I’m sure I could work out something as simple as walking on water.

Anyway, I never did buy that thing. I stayed in the Darlinghurst sharehouse for another six years.