Cost to Cruise: January, 2018

Boilerplate disclaimer: this is not what it will cost you to go cruising.

People’s constant advice, discussing cruising finances, always seems to be: It’ll cost what you have. We did not find this helpful in our planning, however true it may be. What we’re trying to show is the cost to us, more or less, for one month to go cruising. We’re going for monthly expenses, because they’re easier for us to track; so you won’t see the boat insurance amortized, you’ll just see that expense when we pay it. It won’t be what you’ll spend, but it was the kind of information that helped us out when we were trying to wrap our heads around that magical number for our cruising kitty.

Living in high resort style this month. Fortunately, we have extremely generous family who treated us like kings.

Numbers for January:

Marinas: $695.14

Grocery: $538.90

Restaurant: $448.54

Supplies: $198.36

Booze: $92.39

Laundry: $57.90

Communications: $176.90

Fuel: $62.05, diesel; $28.75, propane for the grill

Ice Cream: $24.56

Transportation: $101.98

Water: $14.89

Boat Parts: $92.57

Grand Total: $2532.73

This is not nearly enough to account for the massive amounts of restaurant food, ice cream, and booze spent on our tribe by our awesome family. Still, we did some damage. Let’s take a look:

• New record for restaurant meals! We ate out a shocking number of times. Remember all of those months in remote Panama and the Bahamas, when we were only eating out a couple of times a month? Me, neither. You’d think that would make me happy to spend more time in my own kitchen, now that it’s just our family again, but you’d be wrong. I miss people bringing me things.
• It’s possible that the numbers for booze are…less than accurate. We may have lost track. Ahem. Moving on.
• We’re paying for water again. Some marinas in Mexico have potable water, but they’re the exception. We filled our tanks for free at Paradise Village, but from here on out, I think we’ll be buying water more often. Many people cruising Mexico have water makers to get around this problem; others fill their tanks with non-potable water, and carry bottled water for drinking. We hope to keep our tanks topped off with the good stuff, and will happily pay for the privilege.
• “Communications” was up, due to our continued love of the sat phone and a disagreement with Telcel. I’m just gonna’ say it: the Telcel app is garbage. For the first time, we are finding the local phone company to be really inconvenient. If you’re headed this way from the US, we recommend buying a Verizon plan, instead of using an unlocked phone and the local SIM card. On the plus side, we’re getting what we call the “NAFTA special”—unlimited free calls and texts to the US (and to all our friends in Canada). Unfortunately, after a year and a half of traveling and being pretty out of touch, we’ve forgotten how to use a phone for calling people.