Rental Income/Money

Pando rang me from Montenegro today and said the landscaping and the water will be connected by the 20th May and the swimming pool will be filled by then too. Great. It would be good to have a full season this year of course. Originally the 'season' in Montenegro was 100 days but now it seems people want to visit all year round and our previous visits in September and February have both been great - nice weather and lots going on. This means there is no 'ghost town' feel when you visit out of peak months and the restaurants are still excellent and there is still a real buzz about the place.

I talk about money in this blog because that's what people ask - often indirectly but nevertheless I can see their brains ticking over and wondering what exactly we are going to live on and then outloud, how much it's going to cost us to move. What I can tell you is how much it is likely to cost you to relocate. You plan as best you can but there's always an element of juggling and this is what you need to be prepared for. Today was an example of that at 9am but by 5pm everything had changed. This is how:-

* Resigned to booking our flights to St Lucia at an increased GBP2,700
* My brother & sister-in-law step in and very generously and offer their airmiles, reducing out cost to GBP1100
* I want the children to complete their school year here so I postpone the packers to July 3rd. This pushes us into high season price and an increase of Euros 900 to their quote.

So that's how it goes and you can only do so much in preparing yourself for the final cost of a move as there are so many unexpected variables, so it's always tricky when people ask how much is it going to cost to move..... Later on this week we have our landlord coming around and will find out what this part of the process is going to cost us. It's very complicated here - our rental agreement is 25 pages long, in Dutch. So that will be interesting.

So there you go, money, and as they used to tell me in the Middle East:-

"Mafi felous mafi saddique"