How much does Boat Life REALLY Cost? CRUISING on a Bluewater SAILBOAT [2 years to 2020]

hi everyone so if you've clicked on this video you're obviously wondering how much does it cost to go cruising and after two long years we have finally crunched the numbers and we are here to answer that question once and for all almost two years ago we left it all behind for a chance of the sailing adventure of a lifetime it has not been smooth sailing since then but together we are learning and laughing our way through I hope is that if we laugh long enough we can make our merry way around the world at this this is a Millennium Falcon so we've been holding off making this video for some time two years in fact and in those two years we have visited 19 Islands and Nations sailed for almost 6,000 miles and with the exception of a few brief trips home have lived aboard almost the entire time we're the first to admit that we've not gone half as far as we would have hoped but we have enjoyed every minute of our adventure so far and don't plan on stopping anytime soon we knew that when we did provide figures we wanted them to be an accurate representation of our past experiences something that you can plan with these are figures that this is the money this money's gone this money's been spent it's really what it cost us to do what we've done so far and we haven't hidden anything from you and we're doing that because we want you to be able to use these figures to plan your journey with some degree of accuracy in confidence so in the interest of brevity we haven't included all figures and to be honest I don't really think you care about how much I spent on sunscreen and broken sunglasses over the last year's so Adam and I both sat down and we wrote down a list of all the things that we want to know when we were planning our sailing adventure so in the interest of brevity and keeping things simple for your own planning that's all we've included now if you do have any questions and put them below and we can endeavor to address them in another episode or later on so we got to the figures through crunching two years worth of bank statements there was a lot of figures to go through we kind of did this periodically so we didn't forget what each of the fees before but this is based on real numbers so what we did was that we went through line by line each of the transactions and categorize them into four different categories so they are cost of acquisition refit upgrade and repair cost of cruising and the cost of living there without further ado let's look at the numbers so before you buy a bow you have to find the boat and for us that meant packing our bags getting on a plane halfway around the world and driving around for a month in the u.s. we spent during that time about two thousand exactly two thousand nine hundred and eighty seven dollars and what that was consumed by was renting cars staying in Airbnb s and eating a ton of roadside food while we hunted for our boat so after a month of searching we finally found the boat this boat the Millennium Falcon she's a 1981 payout of 42 and we spent 47 thousand US dollars buying once you find the boat and you make an offer in the office accepted the spending is not done unfortunately you then have to get a survey done you have to pay brokerage fees you have to pay registration administration fees and money transfer fees all of those feeds put together for us was two thousand and twenty dollars so we bought the boat we've spent all the money transferring it into our name we registered in our name in our country we're now boat renters however we're also half a world away from anything we know with only the clothes on our back and a one big backpack each so unfortunately we had to spend 1051 dollars on boat furnishings now that includes cutlery pots and pans tools have a haberdashery got the right word haberdashery bedding pretty much all the little bells and whistles that you would most likely take from your house if you were buying locally now when you buy a boat unless you negotiate otherwise you're more than likely up for the expenses of storing it from that point and it's probably in a cradle you're also up for the costs of hauling and splashing it for a sea trial and survey for us that expense represented one thousand three hundred and eighty eight dollars so our total cost for acquisition is fifty three thousand three hundred and ninety-eight dollars cost upgrade upkeep and refit now it's important to note that our circumstance is up by no means than norm we bought our boat half a world away in Florida where we are in the US where we only had three months of visa time so we had to find the boat get in find the boat fix the boat fix the boat and get out in three months so that prevented us from doing any kind of reasonable refit we just did the bare minimum to get moving most people who buy a boat locally very likely this will be your circumstances you'll do a reasonable refit a very thorough refit for maybe a year maybe two maybe five before you depart so that expense will already be incurred when you leave and therefore should not be rolled into the cost of upkeep whilst cruising so when we first decided to go sailing we obviously put together a budget on how much it would cost I put 100% boat upgrades into my budget meanwhile Adam did 100% boat repairs in his budget turns out boats need both of those things so we've split our expenses up into upgrades refit and then maintenance and upkeep so if we go to our spreadsheet so the first column here our boat upgrades and this includes the top ten most expensive things that we've purchased for our boat to improve it to make it better than what it was [Music] next on the spreadsheet are a refit costs now if you were back at home you would probably spend a couple of years year a good few months at home perhaps while you're working doing your boat refit so these are the kind of top 10 most expensive refit purchases that we had to buy lastly we do have to acknowledge the use of subcontractors or contractors we couldn't have gotten some stuff done without them for instance for us they included sandblasting our hull initially when there was 10 20 years of paint from the previous owner on that we just couldn't have sanded that away things like the fridge when we initially bought the boat as well and also the diesel mechanic who helped us realign our engine we couldn't have done those things without them and we always hope that we can learn something from them when we do get a contractor out if we are to summarize if we take the all the money we've spent on the boat to date if we take away everything we consider to be an upgrade and we take away everything we consider to be done as part of a reasonable refit we also remove the cost of some subcontractors what we're left with should be the cost of fair wear and tear maintenance and upkeep on a well refitted normal sailboat examples of what you might use is things like belts filters replacement tools hoses tap fittings all those fair wear and tear things that they just wear out they have a short shelf life so the magic number what we have spent on fair wear and tear maintenance over the last two years per month is six hundred and fifty-six dollars [Music] so our next category is cost-of-living and in this one we have our food and drink which we do eat quite modestly we definitely don't go out of our way to get expensive dishes and kind of more often than not we do end up eating more beans rice and noodles especially during the first few months that we first bought our boat we were very much living frugally and almost using food as a means for saving so for instance we would go out for the day and we wouldn't have lunch because we didn't want to buy it when we were out also with our food and drink the price varies a lot per island like an 11 pouty and aggro thinking everything's super expensive like this was three dollars so three dollars it's three EC which is one ACS point fly on Australian dollars it's about a dollar fifty you're just perfectly reasonably cheap when we first started cruising we went to Turks and Caicos and saw a bottle of SunnyD orange juice you have got to be kidding me $11 Tropicana little quite shocked thinking oh god we're never gonna have enough money meanwhile few months later we went down to some of the French nations like Guadeloupe and you can get like a reel of brie cheese for one year or fifty thankfully we felt a bit better than the cost of food really really does vary a lot generally to try to stock up in the cheaper places that if we go to more expensive places we'll have food already in our cupboards so the cost of our food and drink per month is 398 dollars it's also in our cost of living is the fuel for our dinghy for our boat engine and for our propane so for our propane we do probably you top-up a new tank every three months or so and it costs us about 30 US dollars so in the grand scheme of things that's kind of negligible with our outboard fuel we do use our outboard pretty much all the time going to shore we probably should roam or and they're asked if you would like to save a little more money you probably can row to the dingy docks to shore a little more often than we do but we do anchor further out in order to have more swing rooms so that's our choice we also use our engine as well there have been a few times when we've had to use our engine to get out of a bit of a dicey situation during hurricane season you decide to motor a little bit we also need to kind of rush there as well as Adams mentioned there is a bit of a fad where the ban coming towards us which means that we have about three and a half days to actually get to carrier Kubb for any bad weather kind of hits us so we have had to use our engine a few times there however we mostly try to not use it when we're sailing and I think that we are pretty good with not using it we do have 260 gallon tanks and they last us a very very long time and Ramon we need to top them up ranges between 6 to 12 months it's very very infrequent that we top up our diesel tanks but the cost for our fuel is $59 per month so our total cost of loan for a month is 457 dollars [Music] and the last one of our categories are cruising costs so we split this up into two sections first one is marinas yards and mooring balls we actually don't spend that long on mooring balls to where I come by her count on two hands how many times we've been to Warangal and usually it's because it's a national park we literally have not been out to anchor anywhere so after two failed attempts to get the anchor set we decided to bite the bullet and pay the 60 easy a night to vie for a mooring for we did put the boat in the marina when we were going back for Adams sister's wedding when we were going back to Australia we have spent two times in yards as well one of them was for a fairly long time where we took our party decks and repair the hole in our keel and the second time was only recently where it was quite quick for us we spent 136 dollars per month on average throughout two years and lastly we also have official fees and when you check into a country the costs associated with that when you go to customs so we've just checked in twenty US dollars easy-peasy fee this varies greatly between places for instance in the French nations will pay two euros to check in but then on the flip side you when we went to sink it's a nervous we paid on a couple of hundred bucks just as seven days of staying at so this varies greatly it is worth noting as well that you have a lot of control over how much you spend when you go we are fairly slow kind of travelers we tend to go to less places in a month and therefore it costs us less but we do them all very thoroughly however we have paid over the course of two years per month we paid $51 that brings our total cost of cruising for a months to one hundred and eighty seven dollars so let's review our totals total cost of acquisition fifty two thousand three hundred and ninety-eight total refit seven thousand seven hundred and nine total upgrades eight thousand nine hundred and eighty for monthly up to six hundred and fifty six dollars monthly living costs four hundred and fifty seven dollars monthly cruising costs one hundred and eighty seven dollars total monthly costs one thousand three hundred so what do we think about that total am i unhappy with it no not really I mean I'm sure many of you have considered all of the literature out there dealing with this subject and to be frank the left and right of Arc is pretty broad so I dive back into some of the books that I considered and and just just dug out of a few extreme cases so the highest one I found so far is Beth Leonard's book the voyagers handbook and in that book she says for boats 37 42 and 45 feet the cost of acquisition and refit is a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars and the cost of living or pretty much everything else after that point is between two thousand six hundred and three thousand three hundred dollars per month that's pretty massive and that's circa 1995 so then on the extreme other end of the scale you've got any Hills book voyaging on a small income and in that book she says that for boats between 25 and 32 feet the cost of acquisition and refit can be between twenty thousand and fifty thousand dollars and for everything else they're after on a monthly basis you're looking at 300 to 800 dollars per month and again if I'm not mistaken this is circa 1995 so our price in 2018 2020 money is pretty good even compared to circa 1995 left and right of Arc like we're pretty well bang in the middle if not towards the lower end which I'm pretty happy about and then if you scale those numbers up for you know to today's money our position improves even more so um so you know we could always do better and I think we will look at ways to improve our expenditure over time and we will revisit this subject perhaps yearly perhaps in from parts of the world I don't know but as it stands now I think we've done pretty well so everyone if you've managed to get to the end of that then well done and I really hope that we've provided some valuable information for you there to be fair I think yeah okay thank you so much for watching and if you do have any further questions then feel free to write them below you can send us an email as well or even yourself on Instagram and Facebook obviously the usuals like subscribe share do all those things and we hope to catch you on the next episode see you next week bye

Channel: Sailing Millennial Falcon

Views: 333,762

Rating: 4.9605575 out of 5

Keywords: sailing millennial falcon, sailing, sail boat, best sailing blogs youtube, best sailing video, best sailing video youtube, boatlife, youtube sailing yachts, living on a yacht, How much does it cost to go cruising, how much sailing, how much does it cost to go sailing, how much liveaboard, how much boatlife, how much does it cost, how much does it cost to own a yacht, cost of a bluewater sailboat, cost to buy a sailboat, how much does a sailboat cost, cost to sail caribbean

Id: sbt3VpPWLVU

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020