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the reasons for going

May 2002
Sold our house to look for a "cottage in the country" at about the same time that everyone else in England decided to do the same thing. Prices of country cottages took off..

As we had also sold our business, decided to spend the proceeds by going to Catalonia in eastern Spain to look for a small holiday cottage for ourselves, relatives, friends and perhaps cover our costs by letting it occasionally. This trip was very much a holiday and although the countryside was quite delightful, it did snow, hail and rain during our stay, so we decided that we needed to look further South...

December 2002
Received various statements from endowment and pension providers and decided that we would not be as well off in the future as we thought. We came up with the brilliant plan to throw all of our resources into finding a country house in Spain that we could partly convert into holiday letting accommodation to provide us with an income for the future and into our retirement. Did a lot of research into relative cost of living, costs of building, etc., etc..

Convinced ourselves that we could make a go of it in the long term and still enjoy the journey along the way.

March 2003
In view of the wildly fluctuating £/euro exchange rate, we decided to set up an interest paying euro account and start to make deposits when the rate was in our favour. Due to laundering rules, it took 2 weeks to set up the account and we missed the boat on the initial transfer, ending up with a mediocre rate. Subsequent transfers have been at better rates, once we learned how to read the foreign exchange market. It seemed that the rate was worse on a Friday, presumably as the result of dealers closing their positions before the weekend but better on a Monday when they are all full of enthusiasm for the new week. Such is the fickle and paranoid mind of a For Ex dealer…..

Several purchases over a period allowed us to maintain a good average rate and enabled us to fix our purchase at favourable exchange rates. We also had the benefit of earning interest, albeit at European rates, and even with the loss of the high U. K. interest rate, we remained well ahead of the game.

Came up with a "master plan" which was effectively a huge budget forecast which we used to plot our outgoings and project our future income. We are now on the 43rd version of this plan and it still changes every week..