I have been negligent in posting our expenses for the past couple of months because my Mac died, and I only recently recovered the data.  As usual, you can see all our expenses under the Purser’s Ledger tag.  (Just in case you’re new to the blog and wondering why the hell someone would post their expenses on the internet, let me just point out that we spent 10 years wondering how much we had set aside for monthly bills and boat outfitting, and there were only 2-3 other blogs that really tracked their expenses, and only one of them was trying to do it on a small budget.  So this is for all the dreamers and planners out there.)

November and Dec ember’s expenses are a bit wonky because they include the additional cost of having Becca on board; starting in January I’ve adjusted for crew and guest costs that they reimburse.  I’m not even posting October because it was an orgy of spending on provisioning for the Caribbean and repairing the boat at Port Annapolis – haulout, storage, slip fees and work on the engine topped $10K.  Although we’re still smarting from that, the engine is in fine condition these days and our outfitting costs seem to have ended and transitioned to maintenance rather than repair.  Knock on wood.  The November expenses are pretty extraordinary because, if you subtract the $5,800 or so we spent on boat repair bills from October and Becca, we actually only spent $468.13 – in part because of the great Thanksgiving bonanza from Emmy Kate, but largely because we provisioned in November and spent most of the month on passage.

December, we went a little nuts on “entertainment,” mostly grabbing a beer almost every afternoon to use the internet at a nearby beach bar.  We could have just sat on the beach and not had a beer, though, so it definitely counts as entertainment and not communications!  Personal care, which includes things like laundry, shampoo, haircuts (though I cut our hair now…), etc, took a hit in December and January because we had our laundry done by someone else after passage and had visitors bring crate-loads of Coppertone Sport sunscreen from the States.  It’s the one must-have item for us that we can’t find down here.

The big bureaucracy expense in January is Philip’s passport renewal fee.  Ouch.

I combined propane, water, trash and pumpout expenses into a new category called “utilities;” of interest to those thinking of cruising this area is that water is $.15 to $.25 a gallon and it often costs a few bucks to dispose of trash.

Food is very expensive down here, but the costs are somewhat controllable if you’re careful what and where you buy.  Everything seems to be about 1.5 to 2 times the cost of what it would be in the States, although that’s partly because I never, ever bought anything full price at home, and here I haven’t found the same kind of discounted items.

Finally, the January alcohol expenses are high because we took advantage of Charlotte Amalie’s duty-free status and cheap Kmart to stock up on a few things for the next couple of months.  (Oh, and I have to point out, because my parents were giving me crap for the alcohol expenses, that at $10 per bottle of wine, and one glass a day per person, that’s $100 a month on alcohol right there.  So enough snarky comments, guys!)

All in all, we’re pretty pleased to have come in under our budget each month while actually cruising in the islands, and with random income from different sources, we’re actually managing to save a couple hundred dollars a month.  We know that there will be some more big boat expenses in the future – it’s inevitable, right? – so we want to start rebuilding our kitty for these inevitable expenses.