If you want to own a boat and have it rented out to help cover the costs of ownership and help pay it off, then ownership can be great.

We've had two goals -

1. Charter frequently (pretty much - until this year) we've taken all our vacation time chartering. Only reason we had a change this year is due to our son who is 7 months old now and us taking time off earlier this year after he was born. Still got one trip in though and are planning another in November.

2. We want to spend time living on a boat in the future. So we've got the boat and a good portion of it is being paid off by it being in charter.

We've used our boat once - for 2 reasons. Our boat is in St. Lucia and we enjoy sailing and diving in the BVI and we have made great use of our owner benefits and have upgraded to a Catamaran about 80% of the time we've chartered.

As George said, check out sailonline - lots of great info there.

StormJib is correct, its not a way to make money, but the same could be said of home ownership yet lots of people look very highly at home ownership. So figure out if it works for you and if it does, go for it.

The one thing I woudl have done differently is to have put a larger down payment on it and to have had the loan for fewer years. In our case the revenue is guaranteed, so we could have had it be a bit higher and just known we'd be contributing each month. This would give you a much lower balance at the end of the program.

Feel free to PM me with any specifics.