I can’t lie - I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t miss my boat, but when I think about all the time and effort and money my friend and I spent on that thing, the day I signed my half over to him I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It is simultaneously such a rush and a joy to own a boat, and yet also such a burden. It’s weird.
Boat story. Helped a friend go get a new boat. He’s something of a boat junkie, rolling from one right to the next one, selling the old one, etc.
So we take a pretty serious trailer to go pick up a new 30’ he had just purchased. The trailer had dual axles, necessary for that boat. BUT, the boat was heavier than he had thought. Two miles down the road after getting it, he blew a trailer tire. No problem. We remove it, go get a new one, come back. Twenty more miles down the road, about half way home, he blows TWO more tires. It becomes time to call in a favor, someone to bring him two more trailer rims/tires. So we wait on the side of the road. It was sweltering. And we wait, and we wait some more. Four hours we waited. FINALLY a buddy arrives with tires we get on the trailer. We finally take off. we get 1 mile from the destination, another tire blows. My buddy, the calmest person on earth, loses it. He goes on a twenty minute tantrum kicking the trailer and whatnot. Fortunately, he calms down and we go get that tire fixed and he gets it to a landing and into the water.
The moral of the story: NEVER undersize your boat trailer, and always expect trailer issues.
I’m moving to get away from a downright awful supervisor. Thought about expatriating, but I don’t want to lose my gov retirement.
Oof, sorry to hear that, Hal. Here’s hoping the move puts you in a better place, not just for work.
Kind of funny, but we never took the boat out of the water. A couple times we took the motor off and had it cleaned out, since salt would accumulate inside it. When we needed the bottom scraped or painted, we just motored it over to the guy who could do this, and he’d lift the boat out and take care of it. It was kind of fun to watch, there would just be buckets of barnacles by the time he was done. We also moved to different moorage a couple of times, from Olympia up to Tacoma and then finally Des Moines (yep, there’s one in Washington too) and each time we just motored up the sound. I don’t even know how we’d go about getting a boat onto a trailer.
That’s the way to do it, to he honest. Not dealing with boat transport saves a ton of headaches.
You guys are talking about the B uoyancy O perated A quatic T ransport right?
It’s like a car you can drive on the water.
Old joke I saw on a pub wall in a lake town: “The two greatest days in a boat owner’s life. The day he buys his boat and the day he sells it.”
Thanks. I’m going to a newer facility, building-wise, and getting a very slight pay raise, so it’s not that bad. Might take my save-pay in a couple of years and go live in the Caribbean. :)
If only we could all do that. I’ll be happy to just have a shack in Idaho at the price of the housing market these days. We are SOOOOO in a bubble in Charlotte. And from what I understand, it’s just as bad or worse elsewhere around the U.S. I don’t think we learned any lessons from the last crash.
Are people buying with the intent to flip quickly again?
If you buy and plan on living in the place for a good length of time, you are probably ok if the housing market declines. Well, as long as you don’t lose your job too.
We are probably selling in 18 months so I hope it lasts that long. Right now we’ve seen a big jump in the estimated Zillow price for our home.
Some are, some are just accepting the huge price increases, or trying to sell and move. I’m working in Atlanta this week. My coworker just showed me a home that looks to be run down as heck, enough to be demolished, but because there are other nearby high price homes, it is listed at 500K. Not that long ago, the home prices in that area were MUCH less than that. He said overall in Atlanta the home prices are up so much over a two year point that it is causing stuff like this. Here’s a little more info:
But apparently it isn’t just Atlanta. Every major metro seems to be going through this.
Yeah, prices are up and supply way down around here. As I found out when I tried to buy. Be a while before I bother trying that again!
Just bought our new house in Troy NY in July. We had a hard time finding something both acceptable and affordable, even in a relatively bad market like Troy. Realtors told us they had less than a four-month supply, when they prefer to be much higher. In fact, apparently there is enough competition among realtors for the low volume that both our buyer agent and the seller agent dropped their % by half a point to get our business.
The bubble never popped around the Seattle area, just took a brief pause so the gods of realty could take a deep breath and start blowing again. My property valuation had gone up drastically since I bought nearly four years ago. I get postcards dropped in my mailbox that say hey, if you are considering selling, I’m in the market for a house! It’s just nuts.
In the St. Louis area, in the nice neighborhoods, houses are often selling above asking price on the first day they are listed. My son and his wife just sold their house and got more than they asked for and actually had several overbids. Of course they turned around and bought a house and overbid to get it.
If the market holds we will do well, since we are selling and will not buy. We will rent somewhere – possibly St. Louis depending on a few different things, or else we may start our life as gypsies and move around and live short-term in places we are interested in.
I live in Texas and work frequently in SoCal. My wife brings our 3 boys and 3 dogs out in our RV to visit a few weeks while I’m working. They were coming out this week until…
This location is 1/3rd of the cost of any other RV park in SoCal. Means I won’t be seeing my family for an extra month.
Dude, as someone working in Portland whose family is in Chicago? You have all my sympathies. That sucks. An extra month is not fun.
My youngest son just had his Senior night at High School last night for soccer. He is as old as Qt3.
Whelp I went to the physicians office today to see if I had cancer. I didn’t want to put this in the other topic because, he says I don’t have cancer. I was actually referred, so I was not the only one who thought I might and it took months to get in. I’ve been worrying about this for almost 4 months.
Pretty much everything he said is yeah this comes with age, this is heredity, oh yeah that can sometimes happen and… comes with age. He might as well as just said you’re getting old. And to top it off, it’s the first in my life a doctor walks through the door and my first thought it, he’s totally younger than I am. I guess that was bound to happen. hah.
But yes, I am happy! Getting older does just keep getting “better.”