Believe it or not, building wealth while you’re working on board a superyacht is very simple. Not only that, it’s easy. So why do most crew leave the industry having spent most or all of their money and having built no wealth for themselves during their yachting career? 

What can you do to make sure the same doesn’t happen to you?

Simplify your wealth creation

It’s mostly true that simple things aren’t easy. The simpler something is, the more effort has gone into it to make it simple. In other words, making things simple can still be hard. But once the work is done, you can forget about it. Or even better, what if someone else has already done the heavy lifting for you and simplified something?

That’s exactly the situation with building wealth. It’s simple from the point of view that someone else can do the hard work for you—in fact, they should. And it’s simple in that once you’ve done your bit (you will have to do some work; but don’t worry, it’s fun), you can sit back and watch your wealth grow.

Not only that, when it comes to building your wealth on board, simple doesn’t mean hard. It’s easy. It’s mind boggling that anyone could leave yachting without a substantial sum of money to set themselves up for the next phase of their life. Yet they do. 

Here’s the secret to creating wealth on board a superyacht

It’s not really a secret.

And when we tell you, you won’t be impressed.

Ready?

OK.

Here it is:

Just do it.

The plain fact is that while superyacht crew have an unrivalled opportunity to build a significant amount of money for themselves during their yachting career, most actively choose not to.

That’s right. The Number 1 reason most people leave the industry with nothing to show for their hard work and dedication is:

Superyacht crew don’t take action to build wealth for themselves.

Obviously, that’s going to upset a few people reading this. But we’re not here to be your friend (although we are very friendly), we’re here to help you turn your hard work on board into wealth for yourself. So we have to speak some harsh truths sometimes. 

But here’s the good news. Those who do leave the industry having built up wealth (a tiny minority) do so because they did take action. They chose to leave with something to show for their hard work and dedication. And the one thing you can do, the one thing that is totally within your control, is to take action. By the way, the sooner, the better—.

Taking action is easy. What’s hard is deciding to do so.

Why superyacht crew don’t take effective financial action

You might think we’re being critical of superyacht crew. We’re not. We know that the odds are stacked against you.

Working in yachting distorts your perception of reality—without you even knowing it’s happening. That distortion is tough to overcome. Very few manage to.

If you work in the world of luxury superyachts, you’re constantly exposed to an alluring and luxurious lifestyle. All that input amplifies the temptation to copy that lifestyle. In other words, you spend your entire day in an environment that makes you want to spend your money on luxury too: watches, cars, exotic holidays, premium drinks, Michelin-starred meals, you name it…

Not only that, you see many of your colleagues doing it, so why not join in…?

It’s a hard thing to resist. You sweat for your money, so of course you want to treat yourself. In fact, you should. Life is there to be enjoyed. But don’t do so at the complete expense of treating Future You. (We talked about Future You before and how you don’t want to upset them.)

Amidst all the temptation to spend money, it’s difficult to decide to take action to create money instead. Sadly, for most crew it’s just too hard a decision to make. If it weren’t, everyone would have substantial savings. We mean at least in the region of USD 250,000 to 1,000,000. If you leave yachting with less than that, you’ve missed the best opportunity to create wealth for yourself you’ll ever get.

So remind yourself every day of these two things:

1. you work inside a luxury bubble that doesn’t represent the real world outside it.

2. when you leave yachting, you will live the rest of your life outside the bubble.

That’s why it’s important to take action now to ensure you can live a meaningful and fulfilling dream life outside the bubble when the time comes. In other words, take action to build wealth for yourself.

Here’s how.

How to create wealth while working on board a superyacht

Fortunately for you, there is a recipe for success you can follow.

1. Decide how much you will need to fund your life after yachting.
2. Decide to take action to make that happen. 
3. Make an effective financial exit plan.
4. Follow the plan to the end.

There’s a bit of work involved, though it’ll be some of the most fun work you’ll ever do. On top of which, 

you can get someone else to do most of the heavy lifting for you.

When it comes to making and carrying out a financial plan, there are two bits of hard work you absolutely must let someone else do.

The first is matching your financial goals (how much money you want to build up and by when) with an effective and suitable investment strategy. There are a tonne of variables at play here, so let someone else do this time-consuming and intricate work for you. The team at Yachting Financial Solutions do this for superyacht crew and we can do it for you too.

Actively use the active activity of others

The second thing you should let someone else do for you is make your money work as hard as possible for you. A common piece of advice superyacht crew give each other is, ‘Stick your money in a fund that tracks the top 100 stocks’. While this is undoubtedly better than doing nothing, it is not going to help you squeeze the most out of your yachting career. In other words, you’re going to leave money on the table, possibly quite a lot of money. Which, when you think about it, is the same as losing money.

Fund managers, like the very experienced and sharp people at Momentum, who manage a good bit of our clients’ money, dedicate their lives to creating investment funds that are geared towards a particular outcome: more money. And they combine funds to make funds of funds that actively manage the risk that goes with investing. (Incidentally, risk is nothing to be feared; watch this video Risk and Reward—Two Sides of the Same Coin.)

They pump immense amounts of time, energy and money into doing this. So instead of ‘just stick it in a tracker’, why not benefit from the full might of the hard work experts have put into making robust funds that are actively managed, rather than leave your money to the vagaries of the stock market?

Where it gets difficult

Once you’ve got your financial plan in place and you’ve made your investments, you’ll have taken the big action that will build wealth while you’re working on board the yacht. Or rather, someone else will have done the bulk of the work for you. Yes your participation is required, but combined it’s likely to be fewer hours than a couple of day’s shift on the yacht.

Isn’t leaving yachting with USD 250,000 to 1,000,000 worth the same amount of hours as a 2 working days? 

With all that in place, you have to do one more thing.

Stick to the plan.

The only person who can keep the plan funded for the time it will take for the plan to come to fruition is you. You have to keep going to the end. We’ll be here to guide and support you all the way, but you’re the one who is going to have to stay in yachting until you’ve reached your target.

If you do that, you should succeed in your financial goals.

Timing is everything

When it comes to investing and building wealth, timing is everything.

We don’t mean timing the market so that you buy when stocks are cheap and sell when they’ve blown up massively in value. That’s a pipedream. You cannot time the market, don’t even try. Instead, invest on a monthly basis for an extended period of time.

The longer you invest your money, the more chance you are giving it to grow. Time in the market is way more effective than timing the market.

So the simplest thing you can do is just leave your money alone. Let the investments do their work. Sure, keep tabs on performance and make adjustments as needed. Even then, let someone like Yachting Financial Solutions do all the hard work of monitoring and liaising with fund managers on your behalf. We’ll do regular reviews with you. That’s all that’s required of you.

Once you’ve done minimal work upfront (making a financial plan together with us), building wealth on board a superyacht is both simple and easy. All you have to do is your job on board and keep putting a share of your salary into your investments each month.

Simple.

Easy.

Just do it.