Financing

Buying a boat is not like buying a house. Biggest and rather disturbing difference is that a boat depreciates whereas a house should at least retain its value, over the long term. Having said this though, the Sigma 36 described below had a price tag of around GBP30k in 1983 when new, today she still sells for GBP30k. Says something about inflation... But it is possible to borrow money to buy a boat, turns out it is primarily a matter of finding that friendly banker. The irony is though, financing of yachts usually does not go beyond the 20th year of the boat's life so I realised I would either be buying an old, written off yacht with cash, or a young specimen with borrowed money. The prospect of the latter was rather enticing. Time to take the next step.

Best place to start is the internet. So there I went, during the warm months of the summer of 2010, trawling the net with my 'yacht financing', 'marine finance', etc, searches. Plenty of hits. "Financing up to EUR 25m possible!" were encouraging first results. Although, encouraging? This was UHNW stuff, not man-in-the-street down-to-earth marine mortgage terrain. Luckily all had online application forms, which I filled in carefully (also tried to get an actual price for a boat by designing my own boat on the Dehler website and having pressed "get quote" I waited patiently for .... ever. I clearly would not be buying a Dehler of any size or colour). As far as the online applications went, not one reputable financing house was happy to see me filling out their online application as evidenced by the deafening silence emitted by my inbox.

OK let's talk then. To be honest I don't recall exactly what happened on the phone apart from the fact that not much happened. I phoned around to firms in Holland, Switzerland, France, Germany and the UK and checked whether someone in a far-flung corner of Credit Suisse would be willing to lend me some money. What struck me mainly was the general lack of interest displayed, more or less across the board.

Except by one firm in the UK: CGI Finance. I have rarely experienced service and dedication as good as that displayed by CGI. Having established that this firm would also be able to finance non-super yachts, we had a very good discussion about what was needed to obtain financing but the advice was to turn to their parent SocGen in France who would probably know more about Swiss based clients. "Non!" they came back with "you're based in Switzerland, sorry", so back I went to the UK and there I was adamant I wanted to use their services. The UK answer was solid, yes they could do this but would potentially require a lot of certification of my papers by a notary which would cost money. And if they were to extend financing, the yacht would have to be UK Part 1 Registered which could prove to be an arduous process. And the yacht would be sailing under the flag of the UK.

Having obtained a list of all the documents I would need to send in to apply for the mortgage I did just that, submitted everything I had. Gloriously, two weeks later the deal was done, no certification, once I knew which yacht I wanted to buy, I could draw down a sum of money to finance a yacht beyond my wildest dreams.  Of course with the same stroke of the pen I would also commit myself to a decade of debt but hey, you don't get happy without a little pain on the way.