Boat Purchase – Second Accepted Offer

We’re currently on our way down to the Fort Lauderdale area, for our second attempt to close on a boat purchase via personal inspection, survey and sea-trial.

On our first try, we travelled to The BVI, and immediately after getting on board, we started to loose our enthusiasm. As we indicated in a previous post, in the end, the owner was not willing to budge on the price we agreed to prior to the inspection and survey, so we walked. A difficult decision, but the right one for us.

I can’t recall all the titles, but within many of the books we read that discuss “how to buy a boat,”  most authors urge a potential buyer to not become emotionally invested in a prospective boat before buying it. Some suggest that you should walk away from your first potential boat purchase as a rule. One suggested a good way to achieve this mindset is to decide that you SHALL walk away from the boat, even before you see it. Only then can the condition of the vessel be such that you are forced to change your mindset.

Deb and TJ Akey in their book, How NOT to Buy a Cruising Boat, spend the better part of 4 pages going through a list of things with the boat, and people associated (think owner, previous owners, broker, surveyor, etc) that should cause you to walk if you encounter them. Only if you don’t encounter any these potential hurdles should you then celebrate doing the best that you could, and therefore getting the best boat possible.

The boat we’re going to look at this time is 2 years newer than the last one, and has only one owner. Our broker has done a video chat walk-through for us and it looks to be in very good condition.

We are cautiously optimistic this is the one…

Tropical Weather
We Bought A Boat!

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