A Sail of Two Idiots Read Online Free PDF Page A

proceeds to put a down payment on the boat (20 percent is standard) and then obtain a no-qualify loan to cover the rest. The remaining home profit would go into a money market fund, which we figured could have us sailing for up to four years.
    The numbers looked like this: Sell the house for $340,000. After the commission and loan payoff, we’d have $199,000. If we put 20 percent down on, say, a $125,000 boat, we’d have about $174,000 for our money market fund. That money would cover our cost of living (boat payments, insurance, food, fun, and boat repairs—that last one should have been listed first). If we figured on spending $50,000 annually on these items, we could expect to be on the sea for three to four years, which seemed reasonable enough. We figured that when we sold the boat at theend of that time, the proceeds would cover our boat loan, and everything would even out. You have to admit it was a good
plan
(a four-letter word), and it sort of happened like that. Sort of.
    LESSON 1: OWN UP Was this plan a good idea? With hindsight, I can now say that I wish we had paid for the boat outright, which would have prevented our obsessing about keeping up its resale value (and obsess we did). Living free of rent/mortgage/debt would have been much more liberating. Had we bought the boat for cash, we could have lived on it while working another year or two to come up with some spending and maintenance money. We also might have worked out the kinks and maybe even learned how to sail while we accumulated more cash. Of course, then I wouldn’t have had a book to write.
The Process
    In what seemed like kismet, we got an offer on our house
and
at the same time found one catamaran on the Internet in our desired price range. The boat was in Florida, so we enlisted a broker we had met during a boat show and asked him to check it out for us.
    Here’s how it all works. You find a boat that’s calling out to you. If you like what’s above the water, then it’s time to see what’s below it (not only do
you
care, but your future boat insurance company will too). In order to do this, you must first make an offer on the boat. Yep, that’s right. You will be required to submit an offer, contingent on the upcoming survey, that will allow you to peek under the boat’s petticoats (so to speak). That offer will require you to put down 10 percent. Aack!
    Once that’s done, you set up a time to haul the boat out of the water and have an accredited surveyor give the boat a serious going-over. Some surveyors include rigging, electrical, and engine once-overs as well, but that usually costs extra (do it anyway!). If all goes well, you own a boat. If there’s anything in the survey you don’t like, you revise the offer accordingly or cancel it and move on. This all comes out of your pocket. We got good at this because we did it three times.
    The deposit, made out to the broker’s escrow account, keeps getting transferred as you change boats. You are never obligated to buy the boat. You can back out of a deal (even three times!), losing only the cost of the survey and the haulout (and maybe airfare). That isn’t cheap or necessarily desirable, but neither is buying a bad boat.
    Okay, so we asked our broker in Florida to look at the boat for us. We assumed he had.
    LESSON 2: DON’T EVER ASSUME ANYTHING
Ever
.
    We also reviewed 99 photos given to us by the selling broker and thought the catamaran looked good. Since we couldn’t afford to keep going back and forth from Arizona to Florida, we decided to run with what we knew. This meant putting in an offer (cancelable depending on the upcoming survey results), getting it accepted, and then putting down a 10 percent deposit. (Our broker was nice enough not to cash the check.) All this on a boat we hadn’t seen in person and weren’t sure we wanted. Gulp.
    What happened next resulted in an e-mail I wrote that was circulated all