Ouch!

On arrival in the UK we will have a wait of about three months before Waiouru is delivered.  This means we need to think about transport. It would appear that for at least a third of this time we are going to be rather transient so I’ve considered purchasing an old car for the three months. I set myself a maximum price of £500 and started looking on the internet. It does appear possible to purchase a 12-14 year old car for this amount and as long as it remains roadworthy for the 3 months then whatever we can get on resale will be a bonus. I don’t really want to pay additional tax (registration?) and MOT (which I assume is similar to a warrant of fitness?). Everything was looking fine until I did some research on insurance. The cost for three months looked to be about £400. There was an initial figure of approx £115 and a monthly payment of £80. Suddenly the idea of purchasing starts to appear expensive.

Back to the idea of renting. The need for the car is driven (pardon the pun) by our transient accommodation. We have booked into a number of Travelodge locations in the general area around Stafford. The actual daily location has been determined by the price. Jan has found rooms as cheap as £9 and up to a budget maximum of £19. Actually, “cheap” is a relative term when the original plan had us moving directly onto Waiouru. This means we need a car to move our possessions between Travelodge locations on a frequent basis.

I’ve compared the cost of renting from Australia using www.driveaway.com.au against Enterprise in the UK. The latter has a slightly better price with the car costing about £720 for the first five weeks. This should give us time to get settled and for the remainder of the waiting period we will rent on an “as required” basis.

The unbudgeted cost of the accommodation and car rental is going to increase our establishment costs by about an additional £2000 <ouch!>