It doesn't cost, it pays! See my erudite comments interspersed within your
text below.


"Tim Shavinsky" wrote in message
...
Cruising is driving me to the poor house.

I typically put on 250 hours a years at 4 gph which puts fuel at about
$6,000.

If you owned a well-found, blue water sailboat with small four-stroke
outboard engine, fuel, even at today's confiscatory prices, for a year's
cruising might cost all of 50 bucks.

The dockspace is costing me $5,000 a year.

Anybody who keeps their boat at a dock paying absurd by-the-foot prices is
an imbecile. Find a place where your can moor your boat and put down your
own mooring. You suddenly have eliminated a major expense and you will not
be storing your yacht among the floating trailer park trash crowd that
snoops and steals anything not welded down.

Maintenance, insurance is $3,000 a year.

Forget the insurance. It is not needed and is a bet against yourself. Think
of it this way. If the insurance company is willing to bet that you will not
have claims exceeding what you have paid them then shouldn't you be willing
to have the same faith in your abilities to avoid claims? Maintenance is
another story. There will always be maintenance but you should be handy
enough to do all the labor yourself so you will only be paying for parts and
materials. This shouldn't amount to a great deal of money and, done right
with quality, will increase the value of your yacht.

Depreciation of the trawler is $8,000 a year.

Stupid to buy any boat that depreciates. The worst thing you can do is
purchase a new boat because you take a huge hit the first five years or so.
Buy used and buy quality. Maintain your boat to Bristol standards and it
will appreciate. Forget about trawlers. They are just slow stinkpots. Get a
sailboat instead.

Opportunity cost(@ 5%) is $10,000 a year.

What the hell is opportunity cost? Are you talking about loan interest. If
so you are again stupid. NEVER buy something unless you can pay cash for it.
Never pay more than you can afford to take a hit on re the interest
investment hit you might take on your assets. Your very first priority
should always be staying financially solvent and having people paying YOU
interest on your investments. Neither a lender nor borrower be . . .

The thing is costing me $32,000 a year!

You and a lot of other stupid, brainwashed Americans are in the same boat.
You never learned how to manage your money. You have fallen prey to the
consume at all cost liberal mindset. You have made yourself a willing slave
to institutions. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

If you were like me you would have bought a quality blue water sailing yacht
like I did way back in 1985. You would have paid cash for it. You would
never have spent one thin dime on dockage, mooring, insurance, yard labor,
etc. Do it right and your boat MAKES you a ton of money. Let's round off the
years I've owned my yacht to an even 20. Then consider the fact that I've
lived aboard for the whole of that period of time and cruised thousands of
miles under sail using almost no fuel. I've bought a couple sets of sails to
replace worn out ones but that cost is negligible - less than two grand.
Then there's bottom paint, etc but that can also be done on the cheap by
careening in an area that has sufficient tides.

So take 20 years times 10,000 for that is the cost in dollars per year it
takes to rent or buy a house and you come up with 200,000. So my fine yacht
has allowed me to invest 200,000 dollars over the years besides being the
ultimate freedom machine. Also, don't buy an automobile, you won't need one
cruising anyway that will save you 100,000 dollars over 20 years. That's
300,000 dollars. Dockage fees save = 100,000. Total of 400,000 Invest that
sum intelligently and over a 20 year period you will be worth over 1.5
million dollars. Simple rules, simple goals and you will be simply rich. Do
a couple cocaine runs to Colombia and some Cuban cigar smuggling and some
Cuban immigrant smuggling and add another million. Suddenly you're worth
about three million dollars. And you're free of any debts and obligations
and taxes and undue government interference.

If I just took the money I paid for it and invested I could getting
checks for $10,000 a year rather than being 30K+ in the hole each
year. In 3 years I could have 30K in cash by foregoing the boat or be
100K in the hole.

You have an inkling of what it takes to be financially responsible. Now,
you've got to act to start the money rolling in instead of going out. But,
you can't be some little wimp who has to have air conditioning, washer
dryers, refrigerator/freezers, cable TV and all that other crap that just
makes you a slave to what you own and keeps you stuck in one place working
for the man and paying taxes out your rear end. Stop being a brainwashed
liberal and stop supporting a liberal government that brainwashes you into
living to pay for a giant bureaucracy. Grow some gonads and simplify and
live the good life. Independent, uncomplicated, healthy, stress free and
pollution free. Lose the diesel mentality because the fumes alone will
slowly kill you even if the cost of it doesn't.


On the horizon I only see higher fuel costs and everything else going
up in cost, the boat plummeting in value and no increased return on my
retirement egg. I love the boat but this is really draining me, I am
seriously considering pulling the plug before things get worse. Does
anyone here have any creative solutions or are we all in the same
mess? I figure I need 25 years of retirement funds and won't make it
with the trawler. Is there an American friendly country with cheap
fuel, good health care and low expenses? Thanks everyone.

Nope. The only real solution is get rid of large fuel hog motors. They will
drive you into the poor house as fuel will be 10-15 dollars a gallon within
the next three or four years. Plan on living like a slave paying 60-70
percent of your wages on big government Democrat welfare plans such as
socialized medicine and increased welfare and all this carbon credit tax
nonsense. Vote for Barack Obama and really become a slave. You think you
have financial problems now just wait until Obama drives the economy into
the crapper so the Great Depression looks like a cake walk. But, if you're
like me it won't bother you one bit. As a matter of fact I have placed
myself in a position to sail away to some place where I can spend all my
millions that are secure in offshore banks without one dime going to big
government give-away programs. You should think about doing the same.


Wilbur Hubbard