March 2, 2013
We considered changing boats in New Zealand – maybe even to a power boat (see Sailing Sucks). We looked a bit but decided that once we started spending more money on Legacy, we’d be committed to her for at least one more season.
We spent a bunch of money on the boat before we left – about $60,000. Hopefully, we front-loaded a lot of the maintenance for the next several years by replacing just about everything on the boat. We joked that we saved our favorite cushion and replaced everything else. Sadly, it’s not that far from true. We’d changed our engine a few years earlier so it stayed but we replaced almost all of our electronics, re-rigged, stripped and painted the mast. We added a roller furling main boom and all new sails.
When talking about buying the $10,000 roller furling boom, someone suggested to us that we’d never get our investment out of the boat. What a silly notion. A boat as an investment! Ha ha ha! Now, here in New Zealand, we’ve added another almost $10,000 with new sail instruments and an electric sheet winch. Talk about sunk costs!
Just to get our recent costs out of the boat, we’d have to sell her at a price that would net us $70K. (We paid about $70,000 for Legacy about 14 years ago but my memory’s not that long, so I wouldn’t feel as compelled to recoup that “investment.”) The market wouldn’t bear that. I think at best, we might walk away with $60K or so. That led me to come up with this bit of wisdom about selling a used sailboat:
Use it until it’s worthless and then sell it for what it’s worth.
That’s what we now intend to do. We’ll sail around this area of the South Pacific for the next x years (see The Plan). Enjoy all our new, expensive gear, probably until most of it no longer works, then sell our boat for what it’s worth (see above). -Rich
