Archived:Costs

HERE ARE THINGS which the financial-obsessive and/or cautious members of this guild have calculated will contribute to the cost

TRAVEL

• £2,000: a car. this is pretty important, and a cost of £2,000 will get us a pretty decent people carrier (read: 1998 ford galaxy, 1.9l, diesel, manual)
• £770: tax and insurance for the above. assuming guesses about the drivers (smith, ed, {ben, phil}) we can acquire insurance for c. £600. this must needs be added to with a green card for croatia, bosnia and serbia (all other countries are in the eu); i have assumed £50 for this extension. tax for 6 months on a car of the expected co2 emissions of an aging people carrier (6 months being the shortest bracket one can purchase) costs £120.
• £550: fuel. this assumes 45mpg diesel at serbian petrol costs as at the new year; we can probably manage up to 50 mpg if we have an economic driver, and get it cheaper on the massive getting-out-there stretch, but both time considerations and the bit where petrol prices may go up (especially in the balkans) mean i don't care to assume any lesser cost. also several roads are toll roads, which this rather large rounding error will hopefully cover.
• £150: channel tunnel. it's £73 each way at peak times, which given the times we'll be doing it probably will be (unless we leave the starting point (which i am currently treating as ben's house) at c. 2200hrs, in which case it will be all of £15 less); if we are sensible we will have no choice but not to push it on the return. hence, £150.

this totals £3,470, or (assuming the five canon attendees) £700 per person.

FOODSTUFFS AND DRINKING WATER

• £20 per person per day maybe? (this is based on costs in europe and the balkans being fractionally less than those here, but that we will not be eating in the most economic manner due to not living out of a supermarket (for one thing, we won't have a big fridge.) if anyone cares to revise this estimate, go right ahead

this totals £320 per person.

ACCOMMODATION

• how do we intend to do this? i have little idea. i will arbitrarily assume that for £150 any given town can put a group of five or six up for a night, but this is not based on data really. £30 per person per night over 15 nights is £450 per person total, so let's roll with that for now.

this totals (pretty arbitrarily) £450 per person.

OTHER STUFF

• we will want to go in to attractions, museums and so forth maybe? let us assume that for the whole trip this totals £100 per person (based, again, on almost zero data).
• rounding errors. you have not allowed enough money, even when taking into account hofstadter's law. let us tribute the ascent of rum doodle and allow a further £153 per person.

this totals (again, pretty arbitrarily) £253 per person.

TOTAL

the total cost of these things is - why, how significant! - the total cost of the above things sums to £1,723 PER PERSON

are we okay with that (note that this may be modified by what we choose to do with the car afterwards)