Quote:
Originally Posted by HawkOperator
Hello everyone! New here and to boating, well outside of a cruise and ski boats. A little about myself: 35 year old male with awesome wife and 2 young home schooled kids! Prior military 10 years in Aviation and currently instructing in the United Arab Emirates! We as a family love to travel and enjoy life. We have now decided to use our housing allotment from my company to hopefully buy a live aboard catamaran. Why? Well I pay $5k per month just for rent on top of $1k for utilities! So here is the plan; Find a sailing cat that is at least 40 ft with water maker, really good a/c, 3 berths, solar, for under $280k get it to UAE, and learn EVERYTHING while living on it. Gain knowledge, training for the whole family and do small trips over the next 4 years working up to sailing it back home to the USA. Any constructive advise and direction pointing is most welcome! We are used to ridicules obstacles to over come and being uncomfortable so we welcome the challenge.
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Go for it, love the idea!! If the rent is that outrageous, what are slip
fees like? Sometimes there are limitations and surcharges for
living aboard, so check that out as well.
You should be able to find something nice in your
budget.
The big question for you is, do you want a
project? That is, what is your time worth to you and do you want to do lots of
repairs on the
used boat yourself?
While it's a good
learning exercise to get to know your
boat, the
money you save by
buying a "bargain"
boat will easily go into getting it back into shape. What you really want is someone else who maintained the hell out of it, and upgraded everything, then barely used it or changed plans. You'll pay a premium for that boat, but that premium is usually cheaper than what it will cost you if you did all that. Of course that requires that you figure out how to tell really well maintained systems from not - that's your homework for many months. Don't rely on the
broker or inspector (surveyor), you won't always get a straight story.
The other tradeoff you'll have to make is whether to get a newer mass production boat or an older one that is supposedly higher quality.
Good luck, the search function on these
forums is your friends, lots of folks have been done this road.