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I agree that owning a boat is expensive. I also agree that it is priceless. I usually plan things out with care, but one thing I learned early on is that I never try to make a spreadsheet which calculates my sailing cost per hour.
We went to the boat show in Annapolis a couple of years ago and fell in love with a boat. It was a lot of money to me, and I hesitated, and my wife, bless her soul, said "If not now, when?" We spent more than I could have imagined, and it was some of the best money we have ever spent. We get more pleasure out of "just messing about with boats," than almost anything else. The OP is right, newbies can naively mistake the purchase price for the cost of owning a boat. But if you have the great luck of being able to afford it, sailing is wonderful and I love the fact that our boat is really ours.
All that said, our biggest cost was buying and maintaining the house whcih provides us the dock. Makes the boat look pretty cheap.
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