Your doing something wrong. based on your post, likely several somethings. It is a common poroblem for people that have no experience of dealing with largish lumps of money.They do not have a grasp on either its scope or limitations. 250K seems like a lot...but is just enough to get you into serious trouble and not out again....And it can trickle away to nothing faster then you can imagine (even without any of the traditional hobbies conducive to burning money).
Honestly, the thing to have done in the first place would have been to take $20-25K for travel, training and mad money and lock the rest away in a term deposit for two years.
Do a sailing course or two and then buy a cheap old sailboat (under $5K), by the time you have spent two years sailing it every weekend or more based on what your job allowed (oh yeah, you have to keep employed), you would be in a better place all-round. You would have gained:
Sailing skills and experience,
boat ownership experience that gave you a feel for how much a boat really costs day-to-day.
boat maintenance skills and MOST IMPORTANTLY what you really wanted and needed fom a boat and what you thought was a deal breaker..
You would also have had a chance to get used to the lump of money sitting in a high interest bearing investment account...and begin to learn what it could do and generate in terms of growth...You would come to own it and think of it as yours. get an appreciation of ow big a tool it was and what its real limitations were.
This sounds simplistic, but it is completely true that peoepl without experience in large sums of money are incapable of holding onto large sums if they suddenly come their way....Think lottery winners that are brokethree years after winning $10M... They often end up with less then they started with.
So the question is what to do NOW. Well, take a look at the above advice...And substitute $180K for $250K...deduct less money from it in order to do your courses and buy your cheap boat...You may be looking at four years instead of two in order to let it resuscitate a bit more in the investment account...But that is okay...Because the view and experience on a cheap sailboat si exactly the same as the one off and expensive one.... Just do your thing and bide your time. By the time it all clicks, you will either have worked the sailing bug notion out of your system and be glad you did not saddle yourself with a white elephant expensive boat, or you will be in a position to approach the big boat purchase knowing everything ou curse about not knowing now...You will be the type of buyer that makes brokers tremble instead of rubbing their hands in anticipation.
(No offense to the decent brokers here, you know the type I am describing).
That's the bitter little pill of advice. You've been doing things ass backwards and the only thing that could make it worse is to keep doing the same thing till all the money and the opportunity it offers is gone.
Sasha
....when the hell did I ever grow up so that I could offer advice like this???? When, how, huh? Oh god, I've been struck by maturity!.. And I think I might actually be okay with it.
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