Traveling around America’s Great Loop doesn’t have to break the bank. This article explains the detailed monthly expenses of one couple’s journey around the Great Loop. By sharing our Great Loop monthly expenses with you, we hope to inspire other people that you can do the Loop on a budget at any age.
Completing the Great Loop is a unique experience as it varies from person to person. The Great Loop is full of a variety of people with varying-sized boats, budgets, and lifestyles. This article is to help show the various expenses of a young couple with a dog on a budget who are balancing working full time, traveling to new places, and learning how to cruise. This is by no means the only way to do the loop, but it’s how we are doing our loop. Just as the Great Loop experience is completely customizable, so is each person or couple’s budget. We have chosen to anchor as much as possible on our loop to maximize our time away from marinas that tend to be rather pricey. Our time at marinas is typically very focused on getting convenient boat tasks done like washing the boat, filling up our water tanks, grocery shopping, boat work, projects, etc. We find that spending the money to have a reliable and trustworthy anchor setup was valuable to our overall budget because it helps us limit our time at marinas which can be rather pricy. With this being said, marina expenses will vary from person to person depending upon their preference and budget to anchor or visit marinas more often.
Traveling on the Great Loop has many of the same expenses as on land, however, there are a few specific to life on the water. We divided up our Great Loop expenses into a few categories including marina, fuel, groceries, housekeeping, restaurants, attraction/tours, insurance, boat projects, and others. Here are how we made these categories and what is included in each of them:
Before we dive into our March expenses, it’s important to understand where we traveled, how far we cruised, and some peculiarities in our particular loop experience. We began our travels in the Florida Keys traveling from Marathon to Key West and on March 2, 2022, we re-started our Great Loop. Here is our Nebo travel summary for March:
As you can see, we spent most nights on the anchor for a total of 24 nights and spent 7 nights on a mooring ball. We were lucky to have mooring ball options available to us, as mooring balls are usually much cheaper than marina docks and help us to keep our marina budget low. We found marina docks upwards of $8/foot in Miami, Florida, which for a boat our size (34 feet) would total $272/night plus electric. That was way out of our budget, so finding safe, dog-friendly anchorages was important to us. If you’re interested in learning more about what it’s like cruising full time with a dog on America’s Great Loop, check out our blog post!
Some anomalies about March that are important to consider are our guests aboard as well as our time home. We spent 4 days at home with our parents, where we did 10 loads of laundry. If this were included in our monthly expenses, it would have added about $40 to our housekeeping and total budget. We also had Elliot’s dad visit us for one night and Jen’s aunt and uncle visit us aboard PIVOT.
We spent a total of $2,229.88 on our Great Loop expenses for March 2022. This list does not include our healthcare, phone bills, and business expenses as those are all vary from one person to another.
Our greatest expense this month was groceries for a total of $869.24. We did a major provisioning run while we were home and were able to stock up on a lot of pantry items that we try to avoid purchasing every week so we don’t have as much to carry back to the boat. Provisioning runs are usually made every month or two, depending upon our stock. We also had family visit us for 4 nights between Elliot’s dad and Jen’s aunt and uncle. The price of groceries was a little bit higher than what we have normally paid living in Atlanta, however, we attribute that to being in the Florida Keys for a week where we found food prices were slightly higher than mainland Florida food prices. Most of the meals we eat are cooked on our boat, making this a particularly high category for us.
Our second greatest expense was fuel for a total of $708.37. We bought about 150 gallons of diesel at $4.90/gallon, which was higher than normal. After searching around for fuel prices and doing our homework, we did find the cheapest fuel available to us in our region. This is something we’re not able to escape as we’re in a motorboat, so we’ve tried to save money on other areas of expense.
Our third greatest expense was marinas for $329.64. We spent a total of 7 nights on a mooring ball and paid for 9 days of dinghy access while being anchored out in the Florida Keys. We found this was typical for the Florida Keys as mooring balls and dock access are very hard to come by and when it is available, it is very expensive. The cheapest marina in the Florida Keys that we found was at Bahia Honda State Park, which we did a video on, but decided not to stay there. There are not many places to take our dog out and go to shore for free, which is why we needed to purchase dinghy dock access. If we didn’t have Ollie, we may have been able to wait out storms and such without land access. When possible, it’s important to us to take Ollie to shore even if it costs us money. The dinghy dock access ranged from $8-23/day, which we felt was expensive, but it was typical for the Florida Keys.
The remaining categories were pretty nominal. We didn’t do as much exploring, touring, or visiting restaurants as we would have liked, but we were on a schedule to get back to St. Augustine. In future months, we expect this number to be a little bit higher. Thankfully all boat projects and work expenses were nominal as we had spare pieces and parts already on board. About $100 of our Walmart grocery bill was spent on oil for our next oil change, even though it’s listed in the grocery.
There were a few boat expenses that we pay for on an annual basis. These items did not make our March Expenses because we paid for them earlier in the year, but felt it was important to include them in this monthly budget analysis:
This totals $393.05 of previous expenses paid that will last us for the upcoming year. It’s part of the cost of doing business in completing the Great Loop.
Overall, this was a pretty low budget for a month on America’s Great Loop as we didn’t stop and explore many towns or destinations along the loop. Going forward, we expect to stop and explore more spots, which will mean we’ll be spending more money. We hope this post provided you with some insightful information on how much it costs to do the loop on a budget. We will continue to make these monthly expense reports as long as they continue to be helpful to our viewers. If there is something you would like us to include in our April Great Loop Expenses that we missed this month, let us know in the comments below!
The ups, downs, and everything in between, we share it all. If you like what you see, there are lots of ways to show your support and say thanks!
In this blog post, we share our total expenses as we traveled around America’s Great Loop in one year. After sharing detailed, month-by-month expenses, we have totaled up the past 12 months in this post. By sharing our monthly Great Loop expenses, it will inspire prospective loopers that you don’t need to be retired or a millionaire to go on this journey of a lifetime.
In this blog post, we share our monthly expenses as we travel around America’s Great Loop – a 6,000 nautical mile journey around part of the US and Canada by boat. As a young couple on a budget, we hope by sharing our monthly Great Loop expenses, it will inspire prospective loopers to going on this journey of a lifetime.
For our second to last month on the Great Loop, we came in high for our January Great Loop Budget! Included in this report are what expenses to expect on the Great Loop to how much we spent exactly in one month. Spoiler: our second largest expense this month was boat projects.
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Thank you for sharing this. The Key Lime Pie expense seems very reasonable and I’m sure worth every cent. 🙂
You’re welcome!
The Key Lime Pie was absolutely worth every cent 😉
We do this kind of spreadsheet for our business expenses and will definitely be implementing it when we start the loop. It’s always kind of scary to know if you have enough money saved for when we retire and start the loop on our boat so this is a great start to get a feeling of costs! We were banking on around $4000/month because we’re always hearing so much about those boat dollars and things needing to be repaired. Great information and thanks for sharing! Safe voyages and we hope to maybe meet up one day on the water or when your close to Georgian Bay (Midland)
I’m glad this gives you an idea of costs. Those boat bucks ($1,000 = 1 boat buck) do add up, so that’s a great idea to plan for it, just in case.
That would be great! I believe you’re already signed up for our Sunday Summary, so when we get closer, please reach out 😊
BOAT = Break Out Another Thousand
Your weekly report and video is always well done. One might think that doing the Loop is all a big vacation. But it’s clear to me that you guys are working a lot to provide this content. Thanks for taking us along. PS I live in Stone Mountain so we are neighbors.
Thank you very much! You would be correct, we are not retired and this is not a vacation. We try our best to produce high-quality content, so thank you for taking note.
Very cool, another Georgian!
Thank you so much for the information and putting it out for all to see. Keep having fun and be safe.
You’re welcome!
Thank you for your show that you had with the other answers and questions my husband and I are starting the Great Loop on Daydreams and January 2023 our question your videos are fantastic what type of GoPro do you use where do I order that and how do you edit videos do you put them on like a computer and edit your videos are gray and they’re getting better and better we love all the information that you guys tell us about we’re taking notes and hopefully we’ll see you on the water and again thank you for all your information answers a lot of our questions that we have Victoria Raymond and Brian Bush
You’re welcome! I’m glad you’re enjoying the videos. You can find all of our camera gear on our Gear Page. As for editing, we use Adobe Premiere Pro. We’ve watched thousands of video editing tutorials on YouTube over the past three years and have taught ourselves how to edit. We’ve come a long way since our very first video, but constant practice makes us better video editors and storytellers. There are also some great courses on Skillshare on video editing and storytelling that we’ve taken and highly recommend. Let us know if you have additional questions and we can write up a blog post on the resources we use to edit videos.
Is your you tube Chanel keeping you in the positive as far as costs?
Hi Jim. Our YouTube channel does make money, however, we are not at the stage of breaking even just yet.
Hi there,
Been keeping up with you since your first attempt at the loop. We are planning the trip in 3 years. Carolyn will retire then, unless we find her a work at home job before then. I was wondering what your mpg or gph usage averages.
Hi!
Awesome – sounds like a fantastic plan. We typically burn anywhere from 1.5 gph or 2.5 gph on a cruise and at 1.5 gph we are almost 4.5 mpg!
Cheers!
Thanks for the info. I really enjoy your videos and get really bummed when you take a couple of days off. Question, after all of your experiences this past year or so, do you think a person could do the Loo[p solo?
You’re welcome. Thanks for watching our videos, Mick!
I think it depends… a few things to consider are how much boating experience you have, how comfortable are you handling your boat solo, and how comfortable are you traversing through various conditions in your boat (locks, big waterways, docking, etc.). I’m sure people have done it solo in the past!
Thank you for you YouTube videos, The information on monthly expenses is incredibly helpful to Mel and I, We are looking to purchase our first Trawler sea trial haul out in the next few weeks. Very much enjoy your videos of all that is happening with our Loop adventure!
Mark & Mel
Beyond the Waters
I’m glad it is helpful! Best wishes for a successful and uneventful sea trial. What an awesome adventure lies ahead of you!
Good level of detail, if you were to go more into how you actually make a living, earnings from work, earnings from youtube etc. would be very interesting to your viewers. Boating is what we expect, but when you go into other aspects of your life you will get more views
Thanks for the monthly breakdown, I mean monthly costs. We are planning to start the loop in 2-3 years. Your videos and information is very helpful and enjoyable. Thanks.
I’m glad our videos and information are helpful. Thanks for watching and following along, Robert!
You two are amazing! Inspiring me to anchor more!
Thanks, Beth! Anchoring does save a lot of money!
Very good information, very well presented. One suggestion for your costing would be to include all fuel and engine related expenses,including consumables such as oil, filters. etc, in an “Operational Category”. You could later divide that by your operating hours to get cost per hour of operation. Thanks for sharing
That’s a great idea, David! I think we’ll try and do that at the end of the year in a Loop Expenses recap so we can include all miles and all boat expenses for a more comprehensive look.
Appreciate the details. Planning Great Loop adventure next year. How old is Ollie? My lab, Sydney will be 10 next year but is healthy as can be. She loves going for a ride in anything. Might need some special training for ‘on-board’ nature events:)
We are shipmates. Thanks so much for sharing your expenses. Rob Roy and Sherrie Rice onboard motoryacht Bullet Kemah Texas😎
How cool! Thanks for reading and glad we could be of help.
Safe cruising 😎
Maybe we will see you in Ft Myers in January 2023😎
Thanks, Rob!