Friday, March 6, 2009

A little bit of this, some of that...

Since my fishing excursion my life has become a little routine once again. These past few months have been difficult on me. Day in and day out I try to find another way to save money in my normal routine in order to reach my magical goal: no more credit card debt. I have had to sacrifice many nights out, slowed down my hobbies such as beer brewing, driven less, been a little cheap on gifts (and suffered the regret of it), and all sorts of other things. Finally the moment is upon me where I can finally stop paying someone else and I can begin to pay myself. With today's paycheck, I think I will be in the position to pay off the remaining balance on my 0% interest card carrying the remainder of my bad debt. I still have to deposit some rent checks, pay bills, and have everything clear before I can press the "Submit Payment" button. Once the numbers clear, I hope to see something that will allow me to pay it off with enough savings to get me by till next paycheck (plus emergency fundage). I had a 1 year (0% interest for 1 year) goal to pay off this balance, and the end of this month marks that year. WOOHHOO!

So everything after that is padding the coffers for Erick's Boat! Whatever the name of it will be. I have yet to decide if I will name the boat something, or keep its original name. It is said to be bad luck to change a boats name, but most agree that it can be done with the proper ceremonies. Either way, I think that will be decided once I find the right boat.


Speaking of which, I have not been too sedentary in the dream chasing (well, sacrificing a lot of my previous lifestyle to save isn't being too sedentary, but it isn't the same). I have been actively perusing the world wide interwebs for sailboats that fit my criteria. I have been keeping up with
Yacht World boat search for the most part because it seems to return the results of all the other big search sites, plus many more. When searching Yacht World or any of the other sites, I put in search critera as follows:

Boat type - Cruiser (try to weed out the racing boats)

Length - 30 to 40 feet
Price - $15,000 to $25,000
Location - Southeat Region (Seeing whats available in the region, but I pay more attention to Florida boats)


All of the ads are different and not all of them will show up with refined searches, so I have to keep it general. I use the list I had made in
this previous post to go by. There are many brands that are very popular models, but most are coastal cruisers that do not fit the off-shore criteria I am seeking. These brands include Hunter, Catalina, O'Day, C&C, Morgan Out Island, Columbia and so on. Many of those brands have larger boats that are perfectly fine for off-shore cruising, but not within my price range. When I search yacht world under the criteria above I get 194 results. So there are a lot of boats out there in my range, however, there are only about 10 of those that really fit the characteristics I need. I'll start posting those in the next post.

2 comments:

Clark Island Boat Works said...

when you hit the lotto i could build you a pretty sick boat, but for what your looking to spend used is the way to go. just get some investors through the blogging and then tell them that after you have the $300,000 then you will blog about your adventures.

i'm in maine and i'll keep my eyes open for boats, if you want to check out some of the boats that we have built.....

www.clarkislandboatworks.com

Anonymous said...

Perhaps an older Sabre 34 mkI deep keel? may be a bit out of your price range though....