We Live in a Boatyard in Mexico. Here’s What It Costs for a Year.

People ask what it costs to live the way we do, and for years I gave the vague answer: “less than you’d think, except the boats.”

We split our time between a Sprinter van and, right now, a boatyard in Mexico, where we’re retrofitting our newest boat. We’ve lived without traditional housing for the last decade, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheaper, especially when sailboats are involved.

I finally sat down with our spending app, Rocket Money, and added it up. This is that article. Real numbers, real merchant names, and a couple of totals I had to read twice.

First, Why We’re Living in a Boatyard

We’ve been hauling out at Cabrales Boatyard in Puerto Penasco, Mexico since 2021 after sailing our boat down from San Francisco. It’s a DIY yard about an hour south of the Arizona border, on the northern tip of the Sea of Cortez, with a cruiser community we’ve come to love. For years the routine was simple: our 1972 CT-41 ketch spent hurricane seasons on stands there while we spent summers in the campervan. During winters, we’d launch the boat and hang out in the gorgeous Sea of Cortez.

Then, in February 2025, we complicated our lives beautifully. We bought a second boat.

Payah Kun is a Nelson Marek 46 that had been sitting at a dock for ten years. No sailing, no maintenance, a good boat silently rotting away. We bought her in the San Francisco Bay Area, spent the spring waking her up, and sailed her down the coast to Mexico. That fall we moved into the yard with two boats and one very long project list, and stayed from the end of October 2025 until the middle of July 2026. We plan to head back around the end of October 2026 for another boatyard round, getting Payah Kun ready for a sail to the South Pacific.

Eight and a half months. Living aboard one boat, on stands, while rebuilding the other. Here’s what it actually cost.

The Yard Itself: What Two Boats Pay in Rent

The first season was simple: the June 2025 haul-out and storage for both boats through the fall ran us about $3,000. The round-trip haul-out itself is only about $500 of that. The rest is the months on stands.

Now that there are two boats, the arithmetic changed. This spring we paid the yard around $8,000 in cash, up front, for a full year of storage for both boats and things like mast removal and boat moves. Payah Kun is located in the yard’s paint shed where she’s undergoing a complete retrofit and exterior paint job.

The storage itself costs us around $600 per month for two boats. We get a place to live, access to water, power and bathrooms.

Of course, boatyard living isn’t glamorous but it gets the job done. Tom works on fixing Payah Kun while I work on my online business, which is running Facebook Pages and my blog.

The Voyage That Started the Ledger

Before the yard year came the delivery trip, and our spending app accidentally recorded the whole voyage as a series of marina fees. Reading it back is like reading the trip log:

Safe Harbor in the Bay Area while we prepped. Monterey. Long Beach. Then the fees go Mexican: Puerto Escondido, Santa Rosalia. And then one final entry in June 2025, the $3,000 to Cabrales for the haul-out and both boats’ storage through the fall, where the water part of the story stopped for a while.

Total marina and harbor fees for the voyage year: about $6,100.

The Parts Ledger, or: A Confession About West Marine

Now the painful part. I added up two years of boat parts, and the total is about $26,400. Roughly $12,400 in 2025, and about $14,000 so far in 2026.

More than half of it, about $14,000, went to one place: West Marine. Sixty-plus orders across two years. There were months our spending app basically listed West Marine as a dependent.

The rest of the ledger reads like a portrait of boat restoration:

• About $2,800 to Easy Composites for fiberglass and epoxy supplies
• $1,256 by check to the Prop Shop in Richmond for a new propeller shaft for our first sailboat
• $220 to the U.S. Coast Guard for the Abstract of Title, the least romantic purchase that has ever made me emotional. That’s the receipt for her becoming ours.
• Sailrite, Forespar, Defender, Minney’s Yacht Surplus, The Sail Warehouse: the tour of every marine supplier a project boat demands.
• Endless small runs: Harbor Freight, hardware stores, fuel for tools, paint sprayers. And the border tax on all of it: every package we ship to the gas station in Lukeville costs $15 to hold for pickup. Thirty-one packages in eight and a half months, about $465, just to get the parts across.
• And my favorite recurring character: Todo Para El Carpintero, the little carpentry supply shop in Puerto Penasco. First visit: $9.40. It’s the smallest line in the ledger and somehow the most representative. Boat projects are a thousand tiny errands wearing a trench coat.

The Cost of Living in Mexico Keeps us Sane

While we spent most of our money on boatyard rent and boat parts, the cost of living in Mexico is affordable. I pulled the real averages from our spending app for the whole eight and a half months. That stretch includes a couple of trips to the United States, so if anything these numbers run a little high.

What we spend on	Average per month, two people
Rent	$0 (the yard fee covers it)
Groceries	About $860, a huge chunk goes to Costco in the states
Eating out	About $140 (closer to $235 in the months we were traveling)
Fuel	About $60, split between the border station in Lukeville and the Pemex in town
Two phones on Visible	$90
Starlink	$100
Health insurance	$178
Water	A few dollars a week, in cash
Laundry	About $8 every couple of weeks, in cash

Call it $1,450 a month for the two of us. And $368 of that (the phones, Starlink and health insurance) follows us wherever we go, van or boat. Strip those out and living at the yard costs us roughly $1,100 a month. For scale, the boats ate about $1,200 a month in parts over the same stretch. The boat spent more than the two of us cost to feed and fuel.

Our biggest living expense was groceries because I am addicted to Costco in the U.S. Mexican groceries at the local WalMart were a significantly smaller part of our bill.

We didn’t eat out much. Mornings were coffee in the cockpit and bike rides with friends. Evenings were sunsets over the harbor that cost exactly nothing.

Sometimes, we’d splurge on restaurants and overpriced breweries, but that was a special occasion, not the rule.

That’s the honest shape of boatyard economics: the boats devour money precisely so the life can cost almost none. We didn’t pay for a single night of lodging for eight and a half months. The ladder up to the cockpit was the whole mortgage.

The Total That Still Makes Me Cringe

So, the year in the boatyard on the boat side, parts plus two-boat storage plus the hardware-store runs and the border packages, came to roughly $19,000. Add the $1,100 a month it cost us to be alive there and the whole year lands near $28,000.

Zoom out to the whole adventure, from buying Payah Kun in February 2025 through today: the voyage, two haul-out seasons, and every last stainless bolt, and we’re at just about $40,000.

Is that a lot? It’s real money. It’s also less than two years of rent for the one-bedroom San Francisco apartment I gave up years ago, and at the end of that rent I would have owned nothing. At the end of this, we own a world-capable cruising boat brought back from the dead, a CT-41 that’s carried us for years, and a season of life I wouldn’t trade for anything with a foundation under it.

If you’re wondering how we fund it, the short answer is the same work that funds the rest of this life; the longer answer is over in the ways sailors actually make money. And if you’re eyeing a cheap project boat of your own, read the honest breakdown of what sailboats cost and the brutal truths about living aboard first. Then double your estimate. Our ledger suggests even that is optimistic.

Epilogue: The Anchor

We left the yard in mid-July for van season, which should have been the end of this year’s spending.

Then West Marine, the company holding roughly $14,000 of our money, announced a massive closing sale. We did not (or could not??!!) look away. So many stores are closing that we shopped like it was the last chandlery on Earth, and August became the biggest parts month since we moved into the yard: a pile of discounted gear for next season, bought at closeout prices from the store that owned us.

One of those bargains was a 50-pound anchor. It is, as I type this, riding on the hitch of our campervan somewhere in the middle of the country, 1,000 miles from the nearest boat. People at gas stations look at it, then at me, and I can see them deciding not to ask. Nothing says van life like a boat anchor.

The boatyard is a long way behind us right now. The spending found us anyway. We go back in the fall, and the boats are waiting, storage paid through February.

So now I’m curious about your ledger: what’s the number YOU’VE stopped counting? And what’s the single line item you least expected? Tell me in the comments. Misery loves company, and so does boat ownership.

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