155: Blown Away's FIRST YEAR BOAT & LIVING EXPENSES; 2015 Leopard 44 Catamaran

Our boat transformed from a Leopard 44 to an ancient Egyptian Nile barge. He didn't take his meds today. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. You are using a big bag of Doritos as a pillow. I feel like we've been talking about money ad nauseum. Here, drink from this fire hose. Hey everybody. Hello again. This is our fourth video in the four video series. It was actually supposed to be a three video series but it turned out to be four because we just had too much information and it probably could have been five. So we're sorry about last video and how much information was in there. Next time we'll put it in more chompable bits so it's a little bit easier to digest. Here, drink from this fire hose. So just as a review, the first video was a review of our first year. The second video was answering the question, would we buy a charter boat again? And the third video, the one that came out last week, looked at the cost of upgrades and of equipping the boat. This video is a continuation of our financials but we're going to focus on boat expenses and living expenses. You need to know what you're getting into if you're thinking about buying a boat or doing upgrades. Because there's a lot to it. We knew that this was going to be the most expensive year of our lives, equipping our boat and preparing to be able to live off the grid. We also want to encourage all of you who are watching, remember you can do this on any budget. You make adjustments based upon what you can do. So don't feel like this is out of reach because of what we did. It's just a different story. You know, I think of all the things we get, I like the comments the best. Oh, we love the comments. And also show us the love and hit that subscribe button. Hit the like button. Share it with other people that you think may benefit from this information. We just love our viewers and also our Patreon members. You'll see them at the very end of the video where we honor them. We have a link down below that'll link you to our Patreon site if you'd like to consider joining that. Yeah, we do love our Patreons. Thank you so much. And we love the encouraging comments that you make. It does take a lot of time to make these videos but when we get comments from you that it really made a difference in your life or in your planning then that makes it all worthwhile for us. So thank you so much for that encouragement. Hi babe, what do we have first? So we're going to talk about boat expenses first. And we have five categories actually for both living and boat expenses. But the five categories for boat expenses are boat insurance, repairs and maintenance, government fees, dockage, and fuel. We're going to talk about boat insurance first. And we are just so happy to have boat insurance. We had heard nightmare stories of people not being able to get insurance, not being able to find companies that would actually consider a first year cruiser. Can you believe that they didn't insure us? Our boat insurance was not super expensive. We actually adhered to go north of the 36 parallel by June 15. And that saved us a lot of money. If we didn't adhere to that and decided to stay in the Caribbean that probably would have cost us at least double what our insurance was. So at $5,500 we felt like we got a really good insurance. Although the deductibles are very high. And that's the one thing that definitely hurts us if we have an issue. They say that boat insurance costs approximately one and a half to two percent of your boat value. And so far we found that to be true. We don't know what next year is going to hold. We don't know possibly if we cross over to the Pacific, which we're thinking about. That will increase our fees. But we'll just take one step at a time. Part of the cost this year that's a one-time fee that we're not going to have to pay again is we needed to hire a captain to be eligible for insurance. And we hired Captain Ben, who was amazing. And we highly recommend him if you're in St. Lucia and need a captain. He cost about $4,500 for two weeks of lessons. And it was well worth it. Boy, how far we've come in such a short amount of time. Moving on from boat insurance then to repairs and maintenance. Repairs and maintenance, I'm telling you right now, that's probably the biggest challenge that you're going to have. If you are kind of an engineering type mind and you love fixing things, boating is for you. For us, we're not do-it-yourselfers. And it's been a really big challenge. But, you know, we do what we can. And then we pay other people to do what we can't. And then we watch them while they do it and take close notes and oftentimes help them. So next time we can do it. So don't be afraid if you're not a total do-it-yourselfer. You do what you can. The cost of repair and maintenance is really going to depend upon whether you do the work or someone else does it. So the more you can do yourself, the less this particular category is going to cost you. And what a great sense of accomplishment once you finish something. And man, you got to earn that sundowner. And I'm telling you, the best thing is having fixed something and another boater has the same issue. And you can just go right in and help them out and even give them some spare parts and pay it forward. The reason this category was so high this year was we were struck by lightning. An indirect strike. But that repair and new instruments cost us close to $5,000. And then we had some gremlins in our air conditioning and our generator that have just plagued us for a while. And we're trying to get those fixed. Hopefully we will. But that's why our repair and maintenance was $7,000 this year. Moving on to the next category, government fees. I love government fees. I love paying the government. Don't you, sweetie? Oh, yeah. But it's a necessary evil. The government fees is really any fee that we have to pay to a government official. And what are some of those fees? For example... Bribes, baby. No, hadn't had any of those yet. For example, this year our passports were going to expire. So we had to renew them. We had to get our registration through the U.S. Coast Guard. And we also paid for our CBP Roam, which is an online app that allows us to check into any U.S. territory or the United States via the phone, which is amazing. It's amazing. It really is. You figured that out. Good job. Well, I got a lot of help from other cruisers. So that was really great. The other fees that we pay are for foreign lands. For example, we are now in the Bahamas. And the Bahamas charges you a customs and immigration fee, a cruising permit fee. How much does that six months charge, babe? 600. And that also includes a fishing permit. We also had to pay a COVID fee. And that has increased the costs just wherever we go. And the last one in some countries, like in Luperon in the Dominican Republic, we had to pay a trash and environmental fee. So all of these fees add up. And that is what this category is all about. The fourth category we're going to talk about today is dockage. So a dockage fee would be basically staying in a marina. That's one form of it. And then also a mooring ball. We prefer to stay on the hook. But if we have to stay on a mooring ball, there are several reasons. The reasons are there's no choice. So for example, we go into Hopetown Harbor and you don't have a choice to put an anchor down. You have to take a mooring ball. Sure. And part of that is because the holding in that particular area is not good. And they want to also be able to have more boats fit in there. So they put the mooring balls in. There are situations where they put mooring balls in so that the coral isn't destroyed. Or it could be that we want to be in a protected area because we have really bad weather coming. And those areas, like hurricane holes and that type of thing, pretty much carve out the real estate. You got to pay to play if you're going to stay in those areas. And dinghy fees. Most places that we stop with our dinghy are usually pretty good about allowing us to leave our dinghy or there's a public dinghy dock like in Annapolis. Every street that ended at the water had a public dinghy dock. It was amazing. But there are places that don't have any dinghy docks for free parking like our time in New York City. That was the most expensive dinghy dock that we've ever had, but it was totally worth it. What was the name of that place? North Cove. So we were anchored at Ellis Island. It took about 15 minutes to cross the Hudson River and then we were right there in the middle of the financial district. The fees at North Cove were $1 per hour per foot, so it cost us $12 an hour for our dinghy. And really, that's not bad when you think about the cost of parking in New York City and the access that we had. If we didn't pay that fee, there was no other place that we could drop our dinghy. So it would have prohibited us to get onto the island unless we stayed at another anchorage. Oh my goodness, and you compare that to what some of those super yachts that were anchored there were paying per night to stay there. $18 a foot. Oh yeah. Okay, the last category that we're going to talk about is fuel. We use gasoline in our dinghy and then we also have, and we use that very, that's, we call that our sea bourbon, our dinghy. We hardly spend anything on gasoline. And then diesel is our main thing. Blown Away has 185 gallon reserve, mainly because it's a charter boat to fuel the generator. But we used a ton of it there coming back from St. Lucia because we had to keep up the pace in order to get to North Carolina and above Cape Hatteras in time for the insurance companies. That was mid-June. And so we were kind of on a schedule. So when the wind was not there, we had to motor. But that's a whole lot cheaper than buying double or triple. And we very rarely had the wind. Even through the summer, we motored. Yeah, up in Long Island and that area. On passages, especially like this one that we had with the Salty Dogs to get to the Bahamas from Deltaville, we had to motor the entire time because we were given a four-day window. So we motored to keep up the pace. Yeah, we have a 6K Northern Lights generator that came with the boat, and we rarely use that. We just cycle it once a week just to keep the juices flowing. So we hardly use any diesel there. With our electrical system, and make sure you check out some of our past videos, and the next one that's coming out, our solar system that we have, enable us that money that we spent up front to use virtually no fuel. So we've really positioned our boat being off-grid so that we use very little fuel. Yeah. Digging it. Digging it too. Those are all the categories for our boat expenses. So we're going to move on to our living expenses. Like I said, there are five categories also for living expenses. Provisioning, land travel, communications, miscellaneous, and healthcare. And we're going to talk about those now. Provisioning includes... Okay, you know what this is. All the good stuff. So this is food and drinks. The good thing is, is we pretty much eat on the boat or somebody else's boat 99% of the time. Another thing is we have a catamaran. And it's not a catamaran that's built for speed. So it can handle the extra weight. And what we've done is we have stocked up off of Amazon and Costco. We're riding right on our waterline. I am so glad that we did that. Because here in the Bahamas, at a big grocery store that's price conscious, things are twice as expensive. You go to these outer line islands. If you can find things, it's three and four times as expensive. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Listen, if you're coming from the States to the Bahamas as crew on our boat, you are using a big bag of Doritos as a pillow. A couple of other categories that are included in provisioning are spices and condiments. And as you know, it takes a lot to build up that kind of an inventory, especially with someone who's a big cook. They like to have a lot of variety. I like spice. And kitchen supplies like paper towels and napkins, anything like that is also included in this price. So it's probably going to be our most expensive category because that'll be the biggest expense for us living on board. Okay, moving on to land travel. We sometimes have to go off the boat and travel on land, whether it's to provision at a grocery store or it's to visit family and friends. We sometimes have to rent cars. So we have to pay rental car fees and tolls. Which are not cheap now. And gas. No, they're not. We drove up to Annapolis because our boat was on the hard. So we had those fees. We stayed in a hotel when we were up in Annapolis. We've taken Ubers and taxis to be able to get to and from our COVID tests or to and from the grocery store in Cape May, which is at least a mile, mile and a half away from the harbor. As well as flights. We have that for both us and Brown's kids. With our bikes, our best purchase ever. Yeah. We have also found that we don't need to rent a car or take a taxi when we get to a port because we now have the ability to transport ourselves to get to a grocery store. So that's really helpful. Those are Dahon Mariner 8s, I believe. Incredible bike. We'll put the link down below. All right, let's move on to communications. It's so important for us to be in touch in a number of ways. And that could be with family and friends, but it could also be for remaining safe and being able to communicate with the Coast Guard. Some of the things we spend it on are our web page, Epidemic Sound to add music to our videos. And then we have apps like PredictWind, annual subscription so you can use the offshore feature. PredictWind tells us what the weather's doing, where the wind's going, how much, the direction. And what it'll do is it'll forecast out for a week at a time. Weather is everything we could not do without PredictWind. Now there's some other sources like Windy and all that, and they're all good too. PredictWind, the reason why we subscribe to that is because we can link it up to our Iridium GO and we can download weather packets while we're offshore. Plus we can communicate via satellite phone, instant message, send short emails. And these are just compressed files. You can't really surf the web with this. But that's a huge deal when you're offshore. And we also have a Garmin inReach Mini as a plan B. These both have subscriptions where you can pause them so you don't have to continue to pay. You can use these judiciously and not just have it be like the cable bill. We also buy Navionics chips for our electronic maps and those are not cheap, but they're great to have and we rely on them. We have a redundant system for that to ensure if something doesn't work that we have backup. It's part of the ticket to ride. When we get somewhere, we buy a phone card or we activate our Skyroam, which is a hotspot that we use on the boat. So we are connected. In the Bahamas, it's very cheap. Sometimes data is very expensive elsewhere. It's all about redundancy and layers of safety. We think this will hopefully decrease this year as some of these were one-off purchases and now we're not going to have those repeated expenses like the Navionics chips and the Garmin inReach. So hopefully that'll be better. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the miscellaneous category. The cost of this was very high this year because we had a lot of purchases that were expensive. One-offs. And guys, we moved from China and we lived in China for four years and then before that in Dubai. So literally, we came back from China with like six suitcases. So we didn't have hardly anything. And we had exchanged all of our appliances when we moved overseas for $220. So we had to get rid of everything that we bought. And then we had to buy everything back. I had to buy it all again. Yeah, right. Anyway, some other things that are part of this one-off purchase are foldable bikes, which we've already talked about. Not best purchase yet. You got to get the exercise and be able to get places cheaply and that's what that's all about. Our outdoor chairs, which we love. We sit on the top of the boat to watch the sunset. Sporta seats and they're just multifunctional. We've bought technology like the drone to give a new dimension to our videos. Hard drives to store all of the footage that we're taking. iPad, computer. So all of that technology is included. A lot of appliances this year. We've got an Instapot and a toaster oven. If you don't have an Instapot, you need to get one. They're pretty incredible. And bought a grill, which has been fantastic. We love being able to grill fish or anything outside. And I forgot the frilly bed system. We invested in that. That's on the 12 hacks video, right? Yes. And the last one is our tiki torches. This was not a big ticket item, but it was a fun one. These things have solar chips on the top and they charge all day. And then at night they come on and they're beautiful. And here's the best thing about it. When these things come on, right when the sun goes down, our boat transforms from a leopard 44 to an ancient Egyptian Nile barge. And she goes from being the Admiral to Cleopatra. And I'm King Nefru. So all things change. These torches do that. I don't know whether they tell you on Amazon, but that's what they do. It's amazing. It's life transformational. And we highly recommend those. He didn't take his meds today. Meds, who wants those? And moving on to our last category, healthcare. Healthcare is always the debated one. How much coverage do you need? What do you do internationally? What do you do when you go back to the United States? We have found a solution that works for us. It's a MediShare program. It's almost $500 a month for both of us. And it includes the United States and international locations with a $300 deductible for each visit. So if you have something catastrophic happen, you pay $300. Everything else is covered, which is wonderful. We used to have Cigna International, which cost us about the same amount. It was catastrophic. It was a $10,000 deductible for any visit. Plus it was capped at, I think, a million dollars. So we're in a much better position with this insurance. We're really pleased with it. And as we age, hopefully we stay healthy. But if not, we feel like we've got a good solution in this healthcare. Another thing, when you're on the boat, you have to be real careful because you're in remote areas. And so I think we try to really take care of our health a whole lot more than we did on land. Yeah. We also, this year, beefed up our medical supplies. Huge thanks to Paul and Linda, again, for that incredible med kit that they gave us. But we also, before they gave us that, had increased the number of supplies, medicines, prescriptions on board. And then also COVID tests. We have had to take a lot of COVID tests to go in and out of countries. And that expense has really been increasing. And I'm telling you, don't panic at having very little medical insurance when you go. I mean, you're thinking about your prescriptions and that type of thing. The U.S. charges more. Our system is way more expensive than other countries. And you can buy good medical care anywhere in the world. So that's the end of our living expenses. And you can see the totals there. All right, babe, let's wrap some of this stuff up because I know our viewers have other things to do. I feel like we've been talking about money ad nauseum. So now we have all of the... And if you're watching now, we really commend you. Hopefully this opens your eyes to the costs that are out there for a particular budget like ours. I think we're looking at monthly expenses that are going to be a lot cheaper than what we've had this year because we have had so many one-off purchases. But next year at this time, we'll come back to you with a new video that says, hey, here's where our monthly expenses are now that things have settled out. We also don't have any expenses back in the States. We have sold everything we own. And this is it. We're all in on the boat. Man, I like it that way. Yeah, they're all different ways of doing this. And that's just the way we've chosen to do it. We really appreciate you watching this video. We go through a lot of effort to produce these, but it's totally worth it because videos have helped us in the past. And people, we want to pay it forward. If you're not out there on the water, we hope that these help you get out there. We hope they inform you so that you go into it eyes wide open. We just really appreciate you guys. Many thanks to all of you and especially to our patrons. We appreciate you and we'll see you next week. Next week's video is on the solar panels that we have installed and that process. So hopefully that'll be helpful. This could be more of a technical video, and I think you're going to find it really useful. All right, until next week then. Thanks, guys. Love you.