Minimum budget

[Guest]

Assume your boat is paid for and in good working order. What's a realistic minimum budget for long term cruising

Food

Maintenance

Bureaucracy

Charts

Ins?

health care?

Entertainment

Off the boat stuff (travelling ashore)?

Clothing

Communications

 

 

Feel free to add, but how low can you go?

[Guest]

Probably lots more than you think it will be - taxes, permits, GST,bribes and all sorts of extra costs that governments think "rich" yachties will pay

[Guest]

That would be the third item on the list

 

I guess I should stipulate two people , you choose the boat.

[smithy09 50]

This should be interesting! (Thinking retirement years...)

[Guest]

Well if you are talking minimum,you can cross off insurance,health care and entertainment.

[wheels 543]

Fuel

[Guest]

I would like to see more discussion on cheapest possible charting.Many electronic charts are available free and I hope almost all will be available soon.But electronics and sofware are not cheap,or the energy they use.Probably not a good bet to rely on your laptop to display the charts due to the unknown reliability of your average laptop in the marine environment.

[Guest]

If you have a good boat,paid for,then you probably also have all the clothing you need.

[Guest]

I think we are at a time now when a lot of older chart plotters are going to get replaced by the latest and greatest.If there was only some way to hack them so you didnt need to buy a chip...............

[Fusion 0]

How long is the expected offshore cruise. More than a few years and the Maintenance start to creep in.

 

I think the Chart plotter / Laptop with multiple communication options is a new cost but more accessible and affordable with tethering.

HF is still the cheapest way to receive weather information and free fax. Use other communication at your destination.

[Guest]

I've always hoped I could do it for free

 

Shall we assume that we are excellent fishermen?

 

Here's an interesting question.

How does a man rent a house on the minimum wage and bring up kids?

I'm absolutely dumbfounded that this is possible.

Perhaps we should be asking him how he gets by and apply some of that to our cruising.

 

Also, how many are able to completely leave all their shore based expenses behind. Insurances, rates, phones.

[Guest]

Fusion, assume enough to never come back. Thus enough to cover maintenance or necessary up grades over time.

 

Since no one else wants to jump in

 

Food - she says $750 / month

Eating out/movie once a month $100

Bureaucrats $100/ month

Maintenance/replacement sails $500

 

No Insurance, no phone.

 

Let's round that up to $1500/month.

 

On top of that I would put aside $1000/month to cover one off items (say a family member died and you had to rush home), this would be in a separate account that would build over time - call it being self insured.

 

 

So I'm at $2,500/month - now start tearing me apart.

 

 

I'm not uip to date with what is abvailable at what cost with regard to electronic charts, but I survived for years on very little by trading/photocopying/tracing.

[Guest]

I forgot fuel, but in the past it has been so little that I barely noticed it (eg 20 galls from Florida to NZ),

[wheels 543]

No Insurance,

I have always wondered about that delema. If you don't claim, it feels like wasted money. But if you lose the rig, or Rudder or Engine, that would be a killer for any of us.

 

Some countries food is cheap as chips. Like much of Indonesia for instance. $5/day for two of you would cover it nicely. Other places it is astronomical.

One big issue for a lot of the world, is getting clean water. A way to ensure you have clean drinking water is to Desalinate it. So can someone tell me, is a regularly used Desalinator expensive to upkeep??

[Guest]

I think so, in particular producing the energy to run it. I want to keep battery charging down to no more than 2 hrs a week. And if they d spit the dummy very expensive to repair.

 

In the past I've had no trouble jugging water from ashore and only very occasionally had to pay and not much - that was in the Mexican desert. Has this changed lately?

 

 

Of course - if we accept this figure????? the next question is how to produce an income of $2,500 per month($30k pa) without having to work.

[smithy09 50]

 

Of course - if we accept this figure????? the next question is how to produce an income of $2,500 per month($30k pa) without having to work.

 

Write software that does the equivilent of Trade Me in another field, then sell it for $700 million. Easy.

[wheels 543]

Write software that does the equivilent of Trade Me in another field, then sell it for $700 million.

We send spam Emails to.....I dunno....Uganda......saying "congratulaions you have just inherited blah blah, please send us your ban account details"

[smithy09 50]

Write software that does the equivilent of Trade Me in another field, then sell it for $700 million.

We send spam Emails to.....I dunno....Uganda......saying "congratulaions you have just inherited blah blah, please send us your ban account details"

 

Works for them! Just have to find a new angle...

[Guest]

Since I work in Real Estate, one or two houses unencumbered rented for a total of say $750 per week (extra above the required $600 for cruising to cover rated ins maintenance and vacancies).

[Bad Kitty 252]

 

One big issue for a lot of the world, is getting clean water. A way to ensure you have clean drinking water is to Desalinate it. So can someone tell me, is a regularly used Desalinator expensive to upkeep??

 

 

Nope, cheap as chips. A couple of 10' filters now & then is all we've ever done to the watermaker. We have to run the genset for 2 hours to make 400 litres of H2O.