Monday, September 14, 2015

A small thought about budgets and boats...

Making a very good point, on considering the price tag, and about how they're spending your tax dollars...

I've been researching a lot lately about the costs involved in buying a boat, setting it up for cruising, and actually cruising and, for the most part, what I've been looking at is pretty depressing reading.

If you go over to the Retirement Project (a very good blog by the way) you'll find a lot of links to various cruisers budgets and in the process going through them I noticed something that bothered me...

Hardly anyone writing about budgets has apparently made any mistakes.

Now, maybe it's just me, but lookng back at my spending habits where boats are concerned over the last forty-years is chock full of WTF was I thinking, I spent HOW MUCH for that, and Boy-Howdy-I'll-never-make-that-stupid-mistake-again moments.

Maybe I'm just the only guy who has made mistakes where budgets are concerned or, just maybe, other folks don't look at their budgets with the same critical eye or don't care to share their WTF moments with the public at large.

Of course, the downside of not being self-critical or not sharing your budgetary lapses of judgement when posting your budgets and thoughts on what boats, stuff, and cruising actually costs is you send the message that your budget is what boats, stuff and cruising should cost and folks reading your budgets will think that's the best they can do.

What we need is more talk about boat and cruising budgets with hindsight sans the rose-colored Ray Bans.

Just saying...

Listening to Hanna Rae

So it goes...