How easy is Participation in ship ownership (in German Schiffsbeteiligungen) as an investment?

A lot of people invest on different kinds of luxury properties. Most people invest in real estate, food franchises and of course sports club ownership. These types of investments are of course for people who have a lot of money to invest. What a lot of people don’t know is that you can invest in something luxurious without breaking the bank.

If you have just enough money to invest in low-cost real estate or cheap food franchises, I think you should consider participating in ship ownership as an investment.

Now, before you say that it’s going to be really expensive to own a boat, let me tell you that a cruise ship has something called a fractional ownership and unlike fractional ownership of aircrafts and houseboats, fractional owners of cruise ships can all use the ship simultaneously.

The good thing is that there is enough space for you and your co-owners to stay in your ship; you can even use it as a full-time residence if you want.

However, you should know the basics of sharing your first ship and this is the acquisition cost. There are a lot of older cruise ships in the market today, that’s selling for less than a million dollars and the newer mega cruise ships (of course are really expensive) costs around $500M.

Now, imagine if the cost of your cruise ship is around $750,000 and 100 people pool equal amounts of money. It will only cost around $7,500 to get 1% share of the ship.

Of course there will be other costs including maintenance and service fees but this will all be distributed equally to all the owners so it should only add up to $1,000-$1,500 for the total cost of everything.

Just remember, as soon as you settle acquisition cost, the second most expensive cost would be service and ship standards. Just make sure that you check the ship’s condition and standards, especially its SOLAS standard (Safety of Life At Sea).

Maintaining compliance with this standard is extremely important and a lot of older ships cannot comply with this and they are being scrapped instead of being fixed because of the high costs involved. There is also another SOLAS implementation coming up on 2010 which talks about fire safety codes. These codes deal with combustible materials available in ships.

Now a lot of ships cannot comply with this, so you better check this before buying an older ship. A lot of older ships run on combustible material and in order to reconfigure their setup it will cost people a lot of money to do and most ship owners anticipate this and thus, have already had their ships scrapped.

Now that you know the basics of ship ownership, you can easily deal with it, since it doesn’t have too many legal problems since you are investing in a piece of shared property that has enough space and can be moved to different locations. All you have to do is follow regulations.

And if all goes well, everyone will share equal costs for the total costs (expenses and maintenance) for such ownership and each one of the investors will get equal sharing of everything and have a lot of fun under the sun.

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Geschlossene Fonds

As we all know, a lot of people use their money to go into investment funds. However, there are different types of investment funds in the market and you need to know which ones fit your needs and budget. Normally, in order to make sure that you are investing legally and safely you will need to open an investment accounts with either a bank or a brokerage.

There are different investment funds accounts available in the bank and brokerage. However, you should know their different uses and how you can open an account for each one.

1. Individual Retirement Account (IRA)

Now, this is one of the best accounts to invest money for retirement since it gives out tax advantages. The money placed in an IRA is considered pre-tax and you do not pay any taxes on any returns until you take your money out (http://www.opc-beteiligungen.de/). Since you do not pay any kind of tax until you take it out, the money invested will easily increase profit.

You can invest a maximum of $4,000 per year tax free and individuals who are 50 and above can give out 100% of their income or $5,000 maximum per year.

The only downside on this is that if you pull out your money before you reach at least 59 and a half years of age you will have to pay taxes plus additional penalties. This is why this investment should be long-term.

If you have excess income you should diversify and invest in some short-term investments like (401k plans) that you can get for emergency money in the future.