What It Has Cost Us To Cruise - Last 4 Yrs

[chuckr]

kahgan -- if we were to go back to someplace it would probably be the san blas and cartagena -- we loved them both --

chuck patty and svsoulmates
still hanging out in trinidad
(and spending too much money on a marina)

[zboss]

I confused... in 2010 you spent $1300 (3% of $41292) on cruising guides but only spent twice that on food?

You also did not list restaurants, booze, entertainment.

[chuckr]

zboss -- yea we spent about over $1,000 on cruising guides -- there were some in the early part of the year and then when we came to usa for christmas bought a complete set of cruising guides for the med - they were expensive - we are doing some serious planning for going to the med - they sure are pretty and they sure were heavy getting back to panama from the usa and they sure were expensive -

just our opinion
chuck patty and svsoulmates
still in trinidad
(and spending to much money)

[sweetsailing]

Nice post! It validates our assumptions as we are currently building our cruising kitty. We are budgeting $3,500 per month for at least 5 years of cruising. We are about 1/3 of the way there to having the cruising kitty topped off. Gotta keep saving....

[zboss]

wow... that's a lot of cash for cruising guides! I'm buying all mine on ebay and amazon deeply used. Scan them to PDF (makes them searchable via OCR!) and trash them.

Thanks for posting that info. Its very valuable and has given me some ideas on how to optimize/watch costs.

[chuckr]

zboss -- we did look around a bit but were only in the usa for 10 days or so and then back to panama - we actually looked around for some for the azores, atlantic spain and portg, all the med and back - turned out to be 9 of them at about $80 give or take a bit each and all were hard bound - not to our liking at all - when we need them we like to keep them at the cockpit and these don't work well for that -
we also got a couple in the bvis as we were headed southbound to trini -

we generally don't sell our old ones as they are marked up with notes and such and who knows where we will go next -

just what we do
chuck patty and svsoulmates
in trinidad still
(and spending too much money)

[svHannabel]

I love cruising cost threads. They're always packed with useful information, even if the only thing we can all agree on is that the costs of cruising are highly variable. I'm partial to saying that cruising costs whatever you have. Or at least that's how we're planning. When we're ready to cruise, we'll make it happen with whatever kitty and boat we've got.

FYI - I recently blogged about the costs of cruising and included the perspectives/wisdom of some other well-known and experienced cruiser/bloggers. Check it out here if you're interested: What does it Cost to go Cruising?