Yearly Cost of Family Cruising

[Mike Banks]

It costs about $20 k a year just to own and maintain a boat of any size. Berthing is expensive--even a mooring will cost you from $60 to $100 per week depending where and what time of year. Most of us with multis anchor out or ride to a mooring--coming in to marinas only occasionally to fuel up, go shopping in a town for provisions and to replenish water if there has been no rain to top up the tanks. I often moor to a Bahamian set for a week or more. Sometimes we load up the dinghy with plastic diesel containers and take fuel aboard that way--making several trips ashore for water etc.

It is not possible to live aboard really cheaply as it was once. There are simply far more yachts these days filling up the once free mooring spaces. To moor in the Brisbane River right in the city opposite the Botanic Gardens was once $20 per month--now they want $50 per week.

However--one can still live as cheaply as if paying rent--so if one is not used to expensive living one can get by on a small pension if one can rent one's home out to cover other expenses. To "other expenses" one should add the interest one would have recieved on a couple of hundred thousand dollars had one not squandered it on a home afloat--because unlike a home ashore a boat is a depreciating asset.

Enough with the gloom already--there is nothing like the stars at night over an open sea, the walks on remote islands and the fresh unpolluted (relatively speaking) breeze on ones nekkid skin and the taste of one's own freshly caught or collected nourishing food.

One should set aside some weight allowance for school books. They are very heavy--and will need proper racks. Desks can be foldable. School of the air still operates in Australia I think--but I did most of my advanced schooling by snail mail correspondence. It would have been so much easier with wireless broadband--and lets hope the coverage increases. There are only major ports where it works so far, and internet cafes are too expensive.

[Randyonr3]

Boy oh boy, after reading that post, I'm thinking of moving back on shore...20k a year to maintain a boat.... My wife and I spent just over 8k last year for everything and I'm wondering how to trim that down...

[Mike Banks]

Must be a heap cheaper in the US than here then. Boats are about half the price, and here a marina berth will set you back a hundred and fifty thousand for a 40 foot berth. It is cheaper if you keep on the move though--but still not cheap. A marina berth can cost up to two fifty a week to rent--more for a multihull.

[rebel heart]

It's really comparable to every other economic system out there. You can do it cheap, or expensive. Most of the time it's harder to do it cheap, because you need to start sooner, and work harder at it.

It's easy to find the expensive stuff, but it's a lot harder to get in where the good deals are, because a lot of other people are already doing the same. In San Diego, the marina with the highest prices and most obnoxious staff (Sun Road) is always available, but the places everyone wants to be (Sun Harbor, Shelter Island Mooring, Kohler, etc) are all on big wait lists.

So if you put your mind to it, you can keep costs low. We've saved a lot of money since moving onto the boat.

One other helpful piece of advice I can give is to hold off on some improvements until you need them. With boats, you're normally talking about several thousand every time you want to do something. Saving up that several thousand helps in a few ways:

1) $2000, at 15% interest, is $300 in a year. Don't blow your savings when your savings can work for you.
2) More often than not, if you wait a bit to do something, you'll find a cheaper way to do it. Maybe something on sale, a neighbor who knows how to do it. Often, you'll find you don't need it anyway.

I put off replacing my dodger for two years now. One of the windows is ripped up, but that's $2500 to replace. By saving that money for two years, I've made another $1200 on interest on it. And not only that, but if I had replaced it two years ago, I'd have a two year old dodger right now!

Don't cheap out on things that make the boat float and keep the rig up, but plenty of doo-dads can be picked up later or never.

[seafox]

I put off replacing my dodger for two years now. One of the windows is ripped up, but that's $2500 to replace. By saving that money for two years, I've made another $1200 on interest on it.

Where can you get $1200 interest after tax for 24months on $2500? That's 24% net of tax pa.

I find that hard to believe. We lead the high interest rates for the world in NZ and we can only get 8.75% before tax.

I think you might be stretching a truth a tad.

[migot1]

it cost us 16,000 dollars

7 months in the MED , not including Medical care, and not including the Insurance price.

[Conch Cruzer]

It is easy to think long and hard about food, fuel, school supplies, slip fees, and insurance and completely underestimate the cost of maintaining your yacht.

Motoryachts, like big sportfishing yachts, have a maintenance cost that is about 10% of the yacht's value per year. Sailboats tend to be somewhat less expensive, but not all that much less. That figure seems staggering to me and I still tend to not believe it. However, peruse the websites like yachtworld where boats are listed and you'll see plenty of boats that aren't all that old and the owner has just spent "$50,000 in upgrades (or refit)." If you start out with a new suit of sails, a solid engine (or engines), a new watermaker, new electronics, etc., then your first 5-10 years your maintenance cost may only be 3-5% of the yacht's value. When you factor in that eventual refit and average it out over the years of use, then where are you?

My wife and I cruise and live aboard full time in the Caribbean. For our newish 40' monohull, I've budgeted $6500/year for maintenance, $3500/year for insurance (yacht ins., not medical), and about $20,000 a year for everything else (food, fuel, entertainment, travel, diving expenses, fishing tackle, etc.). This gives us an operating budget (or "allowance) of about $400/week. We enjoy occasional meals ashore, some light inland travel, etc. and are neither extremely frugal or lavish with our spending.

Your mileage may vary.

Cheers,
ConchCruzer

[henryk]

We finally found the homeschooling program for our kids . It is here in British Columbia trough the public school , is excellent , flexible , fun to do and it's free . The school will provide us with all the books ,note books , educational materials. On top each child they will outfit with lap top computer and downloaded programs that they will need . Also the will pay for our internet connection ($200 a year) plus each kid will have $600 allowance a year for educational purposes like tickets to museums, shows , courses ETC .I have one more advice for people that are going homeschool their children : don't listen to folks that never done it , listen to people that did it, or are doing it .My wife simply went to the library , brought home a pile of books on home schooling and after reading some of it she can't wait to the end of the school year to start it .Another thing, socializing for the kids . read this board and think , people that are writing on those forums ,will be the people you and your children will hang out with . We, sailors , we are a different breed , with different values and out look on life . Would you rather have your kids playing with some dope smoking punks , or us ?
And there is lots of cruising families out there . 298 more days to departure day and counting

[Mike Banks]

There are limits to what can be studied at home or on board because of laboratory requirements for some subjects--but the much vaunted "Socialising with peers" is just so much crap used to justify a system which is in damage control a lot of the time because classes are too large, kids do not all respond to the same lessons, and there are not enough teachers and those that are still in their pitching need better pay.

There is no good cheap education system although every government has tried to find ways of getting one. Good is not cheap--cheap is not good. The unspoken theory is--the people who really matter will attend private schools--a sort of elitism which needs to be slapped out of some politicians before they do real social and societal damage, although it is too late in some places already.

The main problem faced is way too large classes, because of insufficient teachers and not enough buildings available. This problem is solved in home schooling.

My kids all got to university and passed their initial degrees not because of the education system but in spite of it. When the Ed-speak aplogists and eulogists go on about how well kids from state institutions do at University, it is true. Not because of the "excellence" of the state system though. Although there are few of them who make it there--7% of State school students in the Land of Oz as opposed to 30% from private schools, the reason the State kids do so well at uni is because anyone who matriculates from a state institution has pretty well done most of it by themselves in the face of disruptive fellow students and in some cases inadequate facilities. No wonder they do better than some once they get to a place where they can blossom without hindrance.

The sad thing is that is never mentioned is that the kids who did not get there, given a better funded and staffed state system, so many of those who could not educate themselves under duress may well have had successful professional careers but the system disallowed it by defeating them at the outset.

I am not blaming the teachers--they bust their asses trying to do their best for the kids--or most of the ones I knew certainly did.


I think the underfunded and understaffed system sucks big time.

The money saved in not educating kids to successful and adequately remunerated interesting employment is spent tenfold later in policing, crime, the court sytems and staffing prisons--but the compartmentallised thinking of politicians and suck-up politically appointed bureaucrats fails to notice (or deliberately ignores) this simple consequence so plainly evident if one cared to look.

Nah--home schooling is WAY better for most kids than a cut-price understaffed state system in a major city area--at least in the Land of Oz. The fact that any schools achieve any good results at all is a credit to those staffing them, given the constraints of the past.

I am very interested in the funding arrangements for a school that provides kids with laptops and digital teaching aids free of charge--that has to be pretty revolutionary I would think. Unheard of here--

"Innovation" here is just a buzz word which translates to re-hashing failed American ideas of thirty or more years ago--just anything to keep costs of educating our kids in state schools as low as possible. Born again stupid penny pinching short-sighted elitist and living a subsuidised lifestyle. I do not see any change with the new crowd but we will have to give them a chance. There was little or no hope with the last lot.

Your kids will thrive on home schooling--as would most kids if the parents could spare the time from scratching a living. Thats it--off the soap box--now--

[rebel heart]

Originally Posted by seafox

Where can you get $1200 interest after tax for 24months on $2500? That's 24% net of tax pa.

I find that hard to believe. We lead the high interest rates for the world in NZ and we can only get 8.75% before tax.

I think you might be stretching a truth a tad.

Year to date, 23.53%, and this has been a crap year.

https://ww4.janus.com/Janus/Retail/F...ance?fundID=89

I don't lie about money :-)

[rebel heart]

In regards to the "after tax" question, that's totally across the board. You'll obvisouly be looking at capital gains on that, but on a cruising budget, your income is zilch, so that's going to be a lot different than capital gains at a 90K/year salary.

I'm also a fan of playing with the Roth IRA. You can take out your contributions, tax/penalty free, after five years. The $1200 of interest you would have made (according to this example), stays in there, and keeps compounding until retirement age. At which time you can take that out again tax/penalty free.

So while the $1200 interest on your $2400 might not be usable for your cruising budget, it is still your money, and there's numerous ways to use it, including capital gains tax free. And income tax free, in the case of a Roth.

[seafox]

Originally Posted by rebel heart

Year to date, 23.53%, and this has been a crap year.

https://ww4.janus.com/Janus/Retail/F...ance?fundID=89

I don't lie about money :-)

What a load of bull.
Their average return on this fund since 2000 is only 11.88% This has been an above average year for them. How long did it take on google to find this? The rates you are quoting are not easily obtainable without huge risk. If they were the everyone would be doubling their money every 3 years.

[rebel heart]

You're suprised at a 24% return rate introduces some risk?

- It hasn't been an above average year, it's been a below average year.
- 1 year returns, 3 year returns, and 5 year returns are all above 24%.
- It's got a 5 star rating from Morningstar.
- Fees are below 1%.

I didn't find it on google; the Janus Contrarian fund is a staple of mine and I've been very happy with its performance. You asked where you can a return rate of 24%, and I gave you the one that I saw those returns on for the last five years. If you're upset about it, that's fine, but I'd be suprised if you could show me how I *didn't* make 24% on my money in this fund, going back to 2002.

[quartersplash]

I am also starting to cruise with a child on a multihull and have been reserching these things. I did cruise on a monohull between 98 and 2002, and we actually lived on around $500 per month and lived very well, although without kids.... We were in the water every day and caught a lot of seafood, hiked, biked, learned from other cultures and ended up with lifelong friends in many places, and this is the best part of cruising....
Here is a great website with hundreds of pages of info from a family that has done it with kids and are still out there doing it. They have pages with costs, including home school, insurance, food, travel and everything else you may not think of....
http://HackingFamily.com

[seafox]

Originally Posted by rebel heart

You're suprised at a 24% return rate introduces some risk?

- It hasn't been an above average year, it's been a below average year.
- 1 year returns, 3 year returns, and 5 year returns are all above 24%.
- It's got a 5 star rating from Morningstar.
- Fees are below 1%.

I didn't find it on google; the Janus Contrarian fund is a staple of mine and I've been very happy with its performance. You asked where you can a return rate of 24%, and I gave you the one that I saw those returns on for the last five years. If you're upset about it, that's fine, but I'd be suprised if you could show me how I *didn't* make 24% on my money in this fund, going back to 2002.

What ever. Not surprised or upset? Take a bit more than a statement from you. You obviously can't read very well. The average return A V E R A G E since 2000 is 11.88.

That means that 24% is above average Mr Buffett.