The sticker price is the part everyone budgets for. The annual bill that follows it is the part that decides whether the boat stays.
Every boat conversation starts at the sticker. A 45-foot cruiser costs what it costs, you work out whether you can write that cheque, and the decision feels made. It is not. The purchase price is the one number in boat ownership you only pay once.
What follows it is an annual bill that arrives whether the boat leaves the berth or not, and for most owners of a mid-size cruiser it is that bill, not the purchase, which eventually decides whether the boat stays. Working it out before you buy rather than after your first summer is the most useful hour in the whole process.
The rule of thumb that circulates on every dock — budget around ten per cent of the purchase price a year to keep a boat — is rough in both directions. A well-sorted 40-footer in an affordable berth can beat it comfortably. A 60-footer with two gensets and a pen on Sydney Harbour will not. Use it to sanity-check a number you built yourself, never as the number.
So build the number. None of these lines can be quoted from a blog post, because a pen at Rushcutters Bay and a pen at Runaway Bay are different businesses in different markets. Get a real quote against each one before you commit; it is the list people forget, not the arithmetic.
None of the above tells you whether the boat is worth it. Divide by days used and it does.
Run any annual running cost twice. At eight days a year — roughly where a busy family with a boat 45 minutes away lands, once winter, weather, work and somebody's wedding have taken their turns — the cost per day on the water is brutal. At sixty days it is unremarkable, and cheaper than nearly every alternative. The boat did not change. The denominator did.
So the honest question is not whether you can afford the boat. It is how many days you will really use it, answered with a calendar rather than an intention. Count the weekends last season you were genuinely free. Take out the ones a southerly ruined. Take out the ones you spent at a school carnival. What is left is your denominator, and it is usually smaller than the one in your head.
If that count comes out high, buy the boat outright. This is worth saying plainly, because it is exactly where syndication stops being the right product, and none of the following are edge cases — they are how a great many people genuinely use boats.
A share changes two things. It splits the capital between four and eight owners of one specific vessel, and it replaces that whole list with a single annual levy covering the berth, insurance, servicing, cleaning, antifoul and management. Thirty-three professional maintenance days a year are blocked out on every boat before anyone's days are allocated, which is why the boat you step onto in April looks like the one you left in October.
What it does not change is that boats cost money and lose value. A share is a cheaper way to use a bigger boat; it is not a way to make boating free and it is not an investment. Across the BSA fleet, shares run from roughly $19,500 for ten per cent of a Garnet Offshore 270 up to around $625,000 for 12.5 per cent of a Longreef 90SX, with the Rivieras, Belizes, Sunseekers and Schaefers spread through the middle. Current vessels and pricing sit on the fleet listings.
If your honest day count lands somewhere between about fifteen and forty days a year, and you would rather use a boat than manage one, that is the band where the arithmetic starts favouring a share. Below it, charter. Above it, buy the whole thing and enjoy having nobody to consult.
There is no single figure — it turns on length, berth, engines and where you keep her. Price each line yourself: berth, insurance, servicing, antifoul, cleaning, consumables, registration and fuel. The berth is usually the largest for anything over about 40 feet.
Per year, yes: you carry a fraction of the capital and one levy instead of the whole running bill. Per day on the water it depends entirely on how many days you use. Heavy users are usually better off owning outright; occasional users are usually not.
The berth, and then the tender. A marina pen priced by length overall is the largest recurring line on most boats over 40 feet, and the tender and outboard are a second vessel with their own servicing, registration and antifoul schedule.