In Part 1, we talked about how to go hunting for your first cruising yacht , using a real world example—my wife and me—to think through the trade-offs and to zero in on a class of boats that we think are ideal starter cruisers. Is it possible, we asked, to have a safe and seaworthy entry-level cruising boat for no more than the average middle-class family would spend on an average middle-class car?
This is not just an academic exercise, though. AAC has no stake in the project. We spent the better part of eight months poking through YachtWorld, boats. This is tremendously useful information to have. This told us that if we were comfortable shopping around in mid-winter with the boats on the hard and looking awful under their worn-out tarps, we should be able to score a good deal on a good boat without too much time pressure.
We also learned that pretty, shiny boats sell much faster and at higher prices than those with cosmetic issues, even if the functional parts are in similar condition, which told us that we should be able to get more boat for our dollar, and more flexibility in negotiations and scheduling, if we learn to separate cosmetic flaws from those that run deeper. Login to continue reading scroll down.
Fun to travel along with you. Matt- really enjoying reading about this new journey. Would you share what other boats you considered in your purchase decision? Matt — just idle curiosity, the federal and provincial taxes you mention, are these due to the yacht being imported from USA or do these apply every time a boat is sold in Canada?
Looking forward to reading the next instalment. A couple of times a year, Revenue Canada takes a database snapshot of all changes made to vessel registrations and licences. An update on the taxes: The Canadian government offices responsible for this are a little more disorganized now than they were ten or twenty years ago. You definitely owe sales taxes, collected provincially not federally , and can get in big trouble if you dodge them.
