Yacht shopping is a good time — but just the start of the expense

Forgive us if we’re a little sour today — it’s just that we have to wait a whole ‘nother year for the next Palm Beach International Boat Show.

What a treat to (virtually) gallivant across a Florida marina, brandish gobs of (make-believe) money, and (mentally) shop for freshly debuted luxury vessels.

• Per South Florida Business Journal, the just-wrapped festival o’ ferries assembled watercraft worth $1.2B.

Fortunately, we’ve got a weekend full of memories for the scrapbook…

In case you have a few million sitting around

These were our favorites on parade in Palm Beach:

• Feadship Arrow is the kind of Cinderella story one can’t help but root for. The floor plan includes a gym, bar, and massage room. The trade-in still carried a confident, like-new asking price of ~$150m.
• Benetti Alfa brought 229 feet of life-of-the-party energy — the hydropalace has an infinity pool that converts into a dance floor.
• That’s fitting: Anyone who drops a mere $70.5m to land the 2021 winner of the “World Superyacht Award for Displacement Motor Yachts Between 1,000 and 1,599GT” will be quick to cut a rug.

Piercing the fantasy…

…is the exorbitant price that must be paid after the mega-sum purchase. (There’s also the whole “superyachts produce 1.5k times more carbon than the average car” thing to consider.)

• A rule of thumb, per CNN, is that 10%+ of a superyacht’s purchase price will be spent yearly to keep it afloat.
• Running 10 weeks on a boat Alfa’s size through a cost calculator spits out a ~$4m estimate.

It’s not all sunk costs, though: Some owners try to recoup losses via chartering.