The cruising-budget framework I keep measuring our plan against
Beth Leonard sorts cruising budgets into three tiers, and re-sorting our worksheet into her columns made it obvious which one our short list of boats actually lives in.
This week I went back to Beth Leonard's The Voyager's Handbook, which I'd skimmed years ago and underlined badly. The chapter that stuck this time wasn't about rigging or watchkeeping. It was her budget framework — the idea that cruising costs don't fall on a smooth curve but cluster into roughly three tiers, and which tier you land in has more to do with the boat and your repair philosophy than with how many sundowners you buy.
She frames it as a simple, a moderate, and a high-cost way to cruise, with the gap between them driven less by indulgence than by systems. The simple boat has fewer things to break: hank-on sails, an outboard, a cooler instead of refrigeration. The high-cost boat has watermakers, gensets, electric winches, air conditioning — every one of which is a maintenance line item and a failure mode 200 miles offshore.
Her numbers are a couple of decades old now, so I don't take the dollar figures literally. What I do take literally is the shape of the curve, because that's the part that doesn't inflate away. When I rebuild it for a family of six on a 50-foot catamaran in today's money, I land somewhere around $3,000 a month if we run simple, call it $5,500 moderate, and north of $9,000 if we keep every system a charter boat came with running and insured. Insurance and moorage are doing a lot of the work at the top end; offshore family coverage alone can run $700 to $1,000 a month before the boat ever leaves the dock.
The uncomfortable part — and the reason I keep the book open on the desk — is that almost every "must-have" on our worksheet pushes us up a tier. The watermaker I was agonizing over. The second autopilot. The lithium bank. Each is defensible in isolation. Leonard's framework is just a reminder that they sum, and that the sum is a monthly number we'll live inside for five years, not a one-time line on the purchase spreadsheet.
What I appreciate as a planner is that she doesn't moralize about it. She doesn't say the simple boat is purer or the equipped boat is soft. She says: pick the tier honestly, fund it, and don't pretend you're a $3,000-a-month cruiser on a boat that costs $7,000 to keep floating. That last failure mode — under-budgeting your own choices and then grinding through the cruise broke and anxious — wrecks more plans than weather does.
So this week's exercise was re-sorting our worksheet into her three columns and being honest about which one our short list of boats actually lives in. The Saba 50s and Leopard 50s I keep pricing are not simple-tier boats. They're moderate-to-high by construction, and pretending otherwise is how you end up surprised in year two.
I don't have the budget locked. But I have a cleaner question now: not "what does cruising cost," which is unanswerable, but "which tier are we actually choosing, and have I funded that one — not the one I wish we'd picked."
