The economy of a boat

Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Wed 8 Oct 2014 19:37
A few days ago we had Lucas from Santapaz (www.santapaz.com) on board. His family sails a Hallberg Rassy 39 from 1992 if I recall it right.
He was talking about the economy of sailing around and has a picture I think tells the truth about a boat.
When you are sailing around like we are and use the boat 24/7/365 she will cost you 20% of her value/annualy.
This means of course that a more expensive boat will cost you more than a cheap. The saying among sailors is that when you buy a boat you will get the money back the day you sell her.
Well that might be true, but after five years you have bought a second boat in maintenance and repair. If you don't do that, the boat will obviously loose her value and you have to sell her cheaper.
Now this might help some of you to get the picture of why I have to put so many hours into our floating home. Our boat cost us around 300.000 USD dollars when fitted to leave and if we would put 20% back into her every year in cash the budget would be long over due. So the way to afford this is to actually make most of the job ourselves. Labour is expensive, if we would buy a service on our main engine it would cost us 7-800 dollars each time, and the recomendation is every 150 hours. By doing it myself we only pay for the oil, filters etc and that comes to 140 dollars instead.
Our budget needs to stay on 30.000 dollars annualy with maintenance and all our living expenses and that is possible only if you put in labour worth 50.000 dollars and that is a yearly sallary in many wealthy countries.
 
Suddenly it all makes sense, I have a job!