How often do the same folks give the advice to "just do it!", "pursue your dream", and now answering a request for a lender recommendation with - if you have to finance it, you can't afford it??!!
Like everything else in life when it comes to paying for a boat there is no one-size-fits-all solution. There are a lot of things it makes sense to finance, and there are some things that don't give most people a choice, like a house.
The points raised about how financing a boat can make better use of x-amount of money than paying cash can be a smart solution for some people. Paying cash for non-essentials aka "toys" is the smart solution for other people. There is no right or wrong here.
However Doug brings up something a lot of people overlook, more often than not until it's too late. An example is my mother.
She grew up during the Great Depression and like a lot of people who lived through that experience she retained an innate fear that someday the Depression would come back. So she took a very conservative approach to spending.
My mother had always wanted to travel to Europe and later in her life she did bring herself to do that once. But her answer (to herself) about things like buying a house instead of renting, traveling, buying a brand new car, and so on was always, "I'll do it later when I know I'll have plenty of money to do it"
Problem was, "later" never seemed to come. There was always some rational (to her) reason to put something off "a little while longer."
Now I certainly don't advocate over-reaching one's means and ending up living in a box under the freeway. But we all go around just once-- on this planet anyways-- and when it's over it's over. I have always been an advocate of doing things I and my wife really want to do as soon as we can possibly do them rather than take my mother's road of waiting until "it's safe."
Because to me remembering all the cool things I
did is a far, far better way to see myself off the globe than thinking about all the cool things I
wish I'd done while I was here.
The challenge, of course, is to find the right balance, and that's going to be different for each person. For me and my wife it's been to figure out how to do the things we've wanted to do without incurring any debt in the process. So for us pay as you go is the answer.
For others, financing enables them to do the things that are important to them at the time in their lives when they are best prepared or able to do it.
I think Doug's point is the most important one brought up in answer to the question of how best to acquire a boat. We can talk about the value of money and compare interest earned to interest paid. We can talk about the value of financial freedom if we simply pay cash and are done with it.
But perhaps the more important value to be talking about is the value to one's life of having a boat versus not having a boat. That, too, will be different for each person.
One of my favorite sayings is a line from a Mary Chapin-Carpenter song: "We have two lives, the one we're given and the one we make." If a cruising boat is truly going to add value to the life one makes, the right way will be found to acquire it. What other people have done or advise to do is irrelevant.
I must be hanging around the wrong group of people 
Geeze guys. 
