I have always said that it is better to have a friend who owns a boat than to own one yourself. The same thing applies to swimming pools, vacation homes, wine cellars, and other cool things.
I’m not suggesting that you “mooch” from these friends. Be generous. Bring gifts. Pay for gas. Don’t overstay your welcome. Be the kind of guest that people want to invite back.
It’s great fun to go out on a boat to fish, ski, or just motor about. But it is ungodly expensive to purchase and operate. It’s a pain to clean and store. If you buy a boat and put it out on the lake you suddenly have an obligation to spend your weekends, every weekend, out on the boat (mostly cleaning and repairing it).
It’s very pleasant to go out on the boat once or twice a summer. More than that and it becomes an obligation.
We enjoy vacationing on the beach and we typically rent a house or condo. “Wouldn’t it be nice to own a home here?” Maybe, but then again, renting means we are free to visit other beaches and locations and rent other places. Even if we get to the point in life where we want long vacations, renting means only paying while we’re there, not all of the time.
Winning at The Spend Nothing Game doesn’t mean sitting quietly at home. A real win, a big win, is doing fun, exciting things without making your life a financial hell.
Only own the things that you really need, the things that you’d enjoy using all of the time. Congratulate your friends on their new boat and offer chip in for fuel or to bring the food when they invite you out. And they might invite you out again.
That’s winning with style.
The Spend Nothing Game Expert Level: Friends Who Own Stuff by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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