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16.05.2021 23:58:42
Store Your Boat at Home more
See full version: Affordable Boating: Myths; Tips for Buying a Boat
Store Your Boat at Home more
Maintenance and upkeep is too expensive. [links]
Save for your boat and pay in cash, thereby keeping loan interest costs away.
Attend a Boat Show
This is not just another fiberglass boat. It's a great boat that may seem expensive given its initial cost but has unmatched curricula vitae. This is a worthy sailboat that means that you'll be joining a cult of the few. more
In addition to working within a budget, the most important thing is to ensure that your boat is securely moored or stored, especially against pilings, banging, spillage, or breaking free. Without this, you could end up having to deal with avoidable repair costs.
Just like any automobile, owning a boat comes with monthly and yearly maintenance costs. The costs may, however, vary depending on the type of the boat, its size, the rate of use, and your geographical region (such as saltwater and freshwater).
In most cases, buying a used boat is a lot cheaper than buying a brand new boat. Keep in mind that buying a brand new boat is almost comparable to buying a brand new car. You'll not only pay a huge premium but its value will depreciate immediately after you buy it. More importantly, you should first consider the types of activities you want to use the boat for and how often you'll be hitting the waters.
If you’re buying a used boat over 15 years old, you might actually get in the ballpark using the “10% rule”, or as I calculated it, “a bit less than 14%”. For everyone else, any of these formulas will give you food for thought, but your actual expenses are likely to be quite different. There is a lot of variation in maintenance costs that none of these rules can fully estimate. [links]
One of the most promising aspects of the survey that ended up going nowhere was asking the respondents to rate the condition of their boat. I was expecting better condition to correspond with higher maintenance costs. You can see for yourself in the graphs above that there is no pattern in the condition. I was very surprised by this, and if I run the survey again, I’m going to try to find a more objective measure of condition than self-rating to see if it falls in line.
The heart of the 10% rule is a straightforward comparison of the maintenance costs vs the purchase price. If the rule is true, we should see a nice flat line with a slope of 10% (0.10). more
The calculated regression line has a slope of 7% plus a small constant. The constant is a nice sanity check: it is telling us that even a free boat will require some maintenance, which is obviously true. If you compare the regression line with the 10% line, you’ll see that one or two boats are on opposite sides, so neither is clearly better. The regression line has an r2 of only 0.34. more
We can directly look at how well the survey results fit the “2% of new price” rule. If it holds true, we’ll see a flat line with a slope of 2% (0.02). here
The calculated regression line is 1%, but with a pretty significant positive offset of about $3,000. Just as before, this indicates that even a cheap boat will have some maintenance. The constant puts this line within spitting distance of the 2% rule of thumb for much of the range the average buyer is going to be concerned with (say, up to $1 million), so this rule of thumb can’t be counted out yet. But with an r2 of only 0.29, it’s not looking good. here
How much does it cost to live on a boat? This was my biggest question when we were planning and saving to cruise. I was clueless when it came to creating a budget for our future life aboard. I was looking for someone to tell me exactly how much it would cost ME to live on a sailboat full-time.
Here is a breakdown of our cost of living on a boat while cruising the US east coast.
Do your research. Get quotes based on where you'll be cruising and based in hurricane season.