What am I missing? Hall outs, maint, ect.
We are looking at 45-50ft in size About $175k budget
Thanks for the help in advance
I have three pieces of "advice" which were beneficial to us when we started thinking about buying a cruising boat of our own.
1. Don't start out shopping for a boat. Start out by defining what you want to do with a boat. Where do you want to go, how many people do you want to take with you, what kind of environment do you want to boat in, will you have a pet on board, and so on. Once you have defined what you want your boating experience to be, this will go a long way toward narrowing your choices of the type and make of boat that will suit you. Think of it as buying a computer. You don't just go out and buy a computer. You figure out what you want to do with a computer, what applications you want to run, and then find the computer best suited to doing running those applications.
2. A piece of advice I read in a Boy's Life magazine story as a kid back in the 1960s has always stuck with me, and we've applied it to our own boat purchases. "Buy the smallest boat you can afford." This does not mean buy a boat that is too small for your intended purpose. But for x-amount of money, the smaller the boat you buy, the newer it will be or the better shape it will be in, which often amounts to the same thing. Conversely, the larger boat you buy for x-amount of money,, the worse shape it will be in and the more work it will require, and the greater the potential it will have for costing you a lot more than you want to-- or can-- spend.
3. Don't underestimate ownership costs. The purchase cost of a boat is just the price of admission. Ownership costs are everything the boat will cost you--- moorage, insurance, dock electricity, fuel, taxes/registration, maintenance, repairs, and upgrades--- every year that you own the boat. For some reason, finance payments if you finance the boat are typically not included in the definition of ownership cost, maybe because they stop when the boat's paid off.
When we bought our current boat in 1998, the average figure that was being used by brokers, surveyors, and others to describe ownership cost was 10% of the purchase price of the boat per year. Bear in mind that nobody was saying that this is a hard and fast number. It is a very rough average, and it has only one value to a potential buyer. And that is that it's an "in the ballpark" figure that can be used to make sure one is allowing for ownership costs when figuring out if one can truly afford a particular boat or not.
Obviously, the ownership cost will have a ton of variables. Where you boat, the labor rate where you boat, the condition of your boat, the make of boat, how much of your own work you are willing or able to do, even the climate in your area, all have an effect on the ownership cost. In fact, there are so many variables it becomes an almost impossible task to predict what the ownership cost of a particular boat will be. But that cost is precisely what a potential buyer, particularly one new to boating, needs to know to avoid biting off more than he or she can chew with regards to the affordability of becoming a boat owner.
Hence the average figure of 10% of the purchase price per year. Some years will be more, some less. We have not kept a close watch on what our boat costs us every year. It costs what it costs. But keeping in mind that 10% figure before we bought the boat helped make sure we went into the deal with our eyes open, knowing that the boat was going to cost a fair amount of money year after year after year. And doing very rough guessculations, I would say that over the last 16 years that 10% number has been at least enough in the ballpark to be a useful number to have had at the outset.
That was in 1998. Today, I would be more inclined to use a figure of 15% a year to account for higher labor rates and the increasing cost of everything from haulouts to paint brushes.
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