I know this has been addressed in various details elsewhere, including as to partnerships, incorporation,
taxes, etc., but I'm looking for some more general
advice here to start with:
My wife and I have spent the last two summers as members in our local Sailtime franchise (my first time sailing since I was a teenager, and her first time ever), and have loved the sailing aspect of it, but found the
membership experience frustrating: a one-eighth share of a sailboat with (effectively) a four-month season means a very limited amount of time on the
water, and as we both have very time-consuming, unpredictable jobs, trying to match up the boat's schedule with our own was really difficult this last year in particular. It would probably have worked great if we were retired and could use the
boat during the week, but that's a good few decades away right now.
We want more, and naturally are thinking of
buying, but neither of us knows a thing about
boat maintenance beyond what we learned in our
ASA classes, and
ownership seems a bit terrifying. Hence, we're thinking of
buying a boat and either sticking it into Sailtime but keeping half the memberships for ourselves, or putting it into a
charter fleet for 6-8 weeks a summer and keeping it free the rest of the time.
Some pluses and minuses of the two approaches:
Sailtime:
+ We know and trust the base owner (he's a stickler for how the boats are kept, which is perfect from the perspective of an owner-member), and many of the members come from the
sailing school we learned at
+ Great locations, one close to
work and one close to home
+ The timeslot model means the boat is often available on weeknights for evening
sails, or the occasional weekend on short notice; if we purposefully undersold the boat, she'd be free pretty regularly
- Not a fan of Hunters or Beneteaus
- Hard to put together longer blocks of time for, say, a week-long
cruise
Charter program:
+ I much prefer the boats (Jeanneaus for the most part)
+ Easy to plan that week-long
cruise
+ For the half the season she's not chartered, she'd be completely available
+ We could keep her wherever we wanted between charters (i.e. on a
mooring at our local harbor rather than dockside in the city)
- We don't have any pre-existing relationship with the company we'd be entrusting our $200k asset to
- I worry more about the damage or neglect caused by
bareboat charterers
- They've been vague on number so far, though the ballpark estimates I've received make it sound like the all-in net cost will be close to the Sailtime program (allegedly, 7 weeks of chartering would cover ~70% of annual costs, including P&I)
- Boat would be completely unavailable for weeks at a time
And, of course, there are minuses applicable to both programs:
- Would have to buy a
new boat and take the depreciation hit; for the same
money I'd spent on a new
Jeanneau I could buy a used Saga 43,
Sabre, Tartan, etc. (which is what I'd really want if we could)
- A lot of
engine hours per year
- Tax implications are, shall we say, complicated
Basically, knowing that nothing in sailing is
cheap or easy, we're trying to make it at least a little bit cheaper and easier by letting someone else take care of the
maintenance and defray part of the costs. For comparison, two Sailtime shares a year (i.e. a quarter of the boat) projects to cost more than
buying a boat, keeping her in Sailtime for five years and keeping _half_ the boat for ourselves.
Any
advice would be appreciated. As you can surely tell, I'm not very far along in this process and have a lot of things swimming around in my
head.
Thanks!
--Chris