Personal boat lifts: my gawd, don't these people ever want to give their children a chance to scrape barnacles and learn to sand and paint with epoxy paints? It builds character!
I've resisted the urge to discuss my nautical childhood much after seeing your sailboat purchase, but I did learn two things watching my father, when I was a boy:
a) sailboats are great! Borrow or crew on somebody else's
2) Or, have a small one
Hooray for #2.
When you said boat lift, I thought of much larger, industrial things. Every year, our marina would, for a fee, take our boat out of the water, pick it up with a large steel contraption that had four steel columns, a motor, slings etc etc, and carry it over to some wooden V-shaped (I forget the nomenclature... cradle?) and leave it there for the winter. And if they set it down at the wrong angle the cockpit would gather rainwater and leak into the cabin below.
Also, my father, being cheap, liked to build his own boats. This was a 21 foot boat that was a kit he mail ordered. (A semi truck dropped off a very large crate in our driveway.)
Let's just say we spent more time building and maintaining than sailing. (But all that being said, I did learn a lot as a wee lad, with the building.)
OK, something else I learned, from the thinking-outside-the-box brain of my father, the amateur naval architect, and you can apply this to your li'l boat:
Want to go faster? Commission a sailmaker to sew you up a catamaran-style full-batten mainsail. (My li'l 10 footer only had a mainsail, though, and you have a jib... I have no idea if it was a good idea, but it seemed to work for us.)