A New Path

Today we decided to reject the vessel. It was a tough call, but ultimately we knew that paying top dollar for a boat that we thought was in great shape wasn’t a good idea. We don’t think Jim had any idea how bad of shape his boat was in, after owning it for only 6 months. There were going to be so many additional expenses and repairs that we’d have to do which means less time enjoying ourselves on the boat this summer. Part of me wanted to wait and see what came out of the engine repairs, but I also knew that meant unnecessarily dragging along the sellers, which wasn’t fair to them.

Because of our rental properties, our debt-to-income ratio looks awful on paper. We were also having a hard time finding a bank that wanted to loan us money for this boat. We decided that we’d continue our search and pay cash for a boat, so that we wouldn’t have to rely on the boat loan, and lower our price range a bit.

Knowing this in the back of his mind, Ben had already been talking to our buyer’s broker, Steve, again and was looking at some other options. Steve is an admin on an Endeavour Trawler group on Facebook. It’s what he and his wife live on. After hearing the results from our survey on the FP, he told Ben to join the group because there were a few owners getting ready to sell their Endeavour 44.

Starting out with 3 options, we slowly narrowed it down to one in Rhode Island. Ben and the current owner had been talking back and forth for about a week or so. Expressing a ton of interest, Ben told him we’d like to come look at it, set up a surveyor for while we’re looking at it, and wondered if we’d be wasting money and time to line everything up (flights, rental car, hotel, surveyor, etc.) and go out there if someone else was in line before us. He told us we’re first in line. We booked a flight to go see it and lined up a marine surveyor for the following day.