Dont forget to budget for taxes. The state/county does not waste any time to hold their hand out upon seeing someone receiving an air worthiness certificate. They want their 6% of the value of the plane. After spending our own hard earned (and already taxed money, by the way) to build something from nothing it is a disgusting notion to have to pay the government a large sum of money in this manor. Oh well, what can you do...

First year insurance costs are pretty high but they are sure to come down next year once I have some RV-10 time under my belt. We ended up with a $4100 annual cost this year and I expect that to drop by at least a grand or more by next renewal. At the time I got coverage I had about 135 total flight time. Insurance mandated that I get 5 hours of transition training, which I would have done anyways. We went through NationAir and our agent, Jenny, is fantastic.

I took some time to consolidate a couple different spreadsheets I had, which helped me to track costs and anticipate when I needed to order certain items. This helped me also figure out when I needed to establish a loan because we tried to make it as far along as we could before we had to borrow. I hope this spreadsheet can be helpful for future builders. Enjoy and feel free to modify and use as necessary. You can plug in your own values and everything dynamically updates. 

Download here

I was terrified that I would build this RV and not be able to get insurance for it once I was ready to fly since I was such a low time pilot (100 hours). I was pleasantly surprised that I can get insurance and all they want is one arm and a first born child :) Joking aside, below are some estimates of what you can expect to pay for annual insurance costs to cover an RV-10. Rates tend to fluctuate from year to year so this is as of mid 2011. Usually sign off from a CFI or 10 hours in type is required to initially get the insurance. 

For me, I got quoted around $3400 for the first year and the cost should drop 'significantly' after the first year, is what I was told. What is significantly? Not sure - maybe around $1k. I was told having 50-100 time in type is the key to drastically lower rates. Get a quote of your own for more precise costs of course. This is just to give ball park estimates to keep in mind. 

Here are some other quotes from other RV-10 owners courtesy of Matronics:

$2795 for $140K hull, $1M/$100K liability. 

Pilot: commercial/instrument/cfii 
2000+ TT/1000+ high performance/20 hr time in type (at the time

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$2,800 

$150,000 Hull 

Discount for TAA 

I had >700 hours last year with 150 in RV-10…..Commercial/Instrument ticket 

I insure myself and my flight instructor..when I added him it did not affect my premium.

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$175,000.00 hull and 1 Mil liability for $2295.00

Update 2/9/2012: more discussion on the topic here: http://forums.matronics.com/viewtopic.php?t=88356

Here are some things that we bought. These are things not included in the kit.

A very important aspect of the build is cost. There isnt a ton of information out there that gets into exact specifics of costs towards an RV-10. Probably for good reasons too. Consider all the obvious things that would have to be said like "prices vary, you can buy used equipment, different products come out, everyone outfits with different accessories, might be able to get package deals, the date of the data becomes outdated so inflation has driven prices up, etc, etc". There are some decent estimates floating around the internet such as the vans cost estimator, however, it has been important for me to know more specifically what and when I need to buy certain things. 

With all that said, I will boldy go where most do not go by creating this new category called 'Costs $'. I hope this will be helpful for future builders to give some things to think about while planning your budget for your plane. In addition to simply stating how much things cost, I will try to outline some time frames of when general things should begin to be purchased. These are opinions so take them for what they're worth. 

We've bought several tools since the last tool post. Heres a list:

We started out with very few tools so most of the things needed to do this project had to be purchased. Theres a lot to be said about nice quality tools. Theres also a lot to be said about saving a buck. With that said, a lot of the things that I would consider ancillary were inexpensive tools purchased from Harbor Freight. I think most of them will be fine.

Here's a list of what we bought and the rough cost. These prices were as of 2010 and of course would change over time. Take this for what its worth. It's just to give a general starting idea of what tools were needed and roughly how much someone could spend on the cheap side (with the exception of the Isham tool kit). We got the more expensive tool kit from Isham that included the pneumatic squeezer and other nice goodies.