Due to a family bereavement, this blog is taking a temporary break.
We’ll be back in December 2008/January 2009.
Tags: temporary break
Similar promotion to grown-up-gap-year.com
The big ‘buzz’ of the day has been caused by 64 year old Brian Wilshaw who’s offering 46,000 tickets at £25 each for a chance to win his 11.5 acre Oldborough Fishing Retreat at Morchard Bishop in Devon.
He’s trying to beat the credit crunch as he’s been struggling to sell the property on the open market.
The draw can be entered at www.winadevonpropertywithfishing.co.uk (I’ve taken a punt already) but if you lose out on a chance with this competition, which offers a 1 in 46,000 chance of winning, can I recommend my own current advertising promotion which will give somebody the chance of a £6000 cashback payout, in return for buying 1 advertising block at £6.
If selected for the cashback, that’s 1000% more than they bought their advertising for, with a 1 in 10,000 chance of being selected … hopefully great consolation for anybody who missed out on winning Oldborough Retreat!
More information on the ‘win a house’ promotion can be found at the following sources:
Daily Telegraph:Homeowner raffles his £1m property to beat credit crunch
Times: Guest house couple seek positive equity on web
The Sun: Man sells house and land in raffle
And if you have no luck in the draw, why not console yourself with a possible holiday?
My own similar promotion can be found at grown-up-gap-year.com
Tags: credit crunch, Devon, Oldborough Retreat, raffle
New term means the clock is ticking
Back to school today and the clock is now formally ticking!
If we do this thing, the kids won’t return to school in a year’s time.
That’s a tricky decision to negotiate because my daughter is due to start secondary school next September.
Will she or won’t she?
Well, the secondary school places allocation begins in the next few weeks so we’ll certainly go through that process.
They’re building a new academy in our city, and if they try to manipulate entries by ignoring her secondary school choices and sticking her there regardless of our preferences, this gap year is more likely to happen than ever!
The secondary school issue is my primary source of anxiety about this proposed trip … I’d sooner it was in the middle of the primary years or in the middle of the secondary years.
However, with three kids, there’s never going to be a perfect time, so what the heck?
Cleaning out my closet
Not in an Eminem kind of way you understand!
My wife and I both had a day off on the first day back to school, so we started throwing out some rubbish … the beginning of de-cluttering.
We’re considering a number of options for this gap year, and although we’re making positive moves to prepare the ground, we’re not committed to any course of action yet.
Option 1: Sell the house, rent until September 2009, put our stuff in storage and see where we end up in 2010.
Option 2: Keep the house and rent it out while we’re away, putting all our stuff in storage.
Option 3: Keep the house, get someone to ‘house-sit’ for a year, but only if we secure funding from grown-up-gap-year.com.
So off we went to the tip with a car full of bin bags and boxes, and that process will continue for the next couple of weeks now.
It’s a rotten time to sell a house, but we might go ahead and do it anyway, to make sure we shake things up!
The ticking clock …
I wanted a visual reminder of how long we’ve got to get organised - there’s nothing like a bit of pressure to focus the mind.
So check out the countdown timer on the RHS of the page showing how long there is to go until the summer holidays in 2009 … and hopefully our grown up gap year!
Tags: countdown, de-cluttering, gap year, school
On your marks …
I wanted to get this blog and the parent site at http://grown-up-gap-year.com sorted out before the end of the summer holidays as effectively the new term begins the 1 year countdown for this grown up gap year project.
If it all comes off, ideally we’d head off sometime during the summer holidays in 2009 so that we take the kids out of school for an academic year.
I’ll deal with schooling issues in a later post, as we need to investigate all that kind of stuff and find out what our obligations are.
My daughter is due to start secondary school next year too, so we’ll have to continue sorting out a schol place regardless of our plans, in case they don’t come off.
Potential glitch …
There’s a slight potential glitch with timings as far as my work is concerned too.
I’ve been working part time for a year while I’ve been starting work on my business and internet projects.
I go back to full time working from 1st November, and if we stick to the rules, I’m supposed to have a year between flexible working agreements.
That would suggest that I can’t go until 1st November 2009 … that’s if I get permission in the first place - but I guess if I rolled my annual leave in and bought the maximum of two extra leave weeks that I’m able to, we might be able to squeeze out a September 2009 departure.
Still lots to sort out and think about, but by setting the end of the forthcoming academic year as our target it helps to put us ‘on the clock’ with our plans.
What about the gerbils?
One more practical thing that we’ve dealt with this weekend … the gerbils!
We think that the chances are we may well be moving house and down-scaling very soon.
We’re very keen to mix things up a bit whatever happens with the proposed gap year, so getting rid of a big mortgage and maybe renting for a while seems sensible.
We calculated that we could sell the house and rent a 4 bedroom place for half of what the mortgage is costing us.
If I put that saving in the bank for a year, it would pay for our rentals abroad for a year … ‘free money’ in effect.
The house is not likely to gain in value for the next couple of years or so in the current climate, so there doesn’t seem to be much to lose in doing this.
Free to a good home
Thinking about moving means getting rid of some clutter … including our two gerbils.
I made the ‘Free to a good home’ sign yesterday and this will be going up in the village shop tomorrow.
I’ve put a joke ‘For Sale’ sign up outside the cage to see how long it takes the family to spot it.
So, small beginnings and a key date coming up on Tuesday … the beginning of a new school year, at the end of which a big adventure could wait.
Mini-retirement
I’m 43 now, but when I was 18 you went to university, got a degree, got a job and embarked straight away on a lifetime of work.
These days you do your ‘A’ levels then take a year off. How civilised is that?
I’ve decided I’d like to take me and the family on a gap year.
I started work in 1987, which means I’ve been working now for 21 years.
If I retire at 65, that puts 2009 bang in the middle of my working life … what a great time to take a year out.
It’s a midlife break, a mini-retirement, a rest, a change, a getting away from it all.
It’s the gap-year my generation never got, half-way through my working life.
It seems like a great time to do it.
The plan
We want to live for 4 months in Spain, 4 months in Italy and 4 months in France.
That’s me, my wife and my three primary school aged children.
I want to start in Alicante because that’s where my brother lives.
This is the place I want to be in a year’s time, Santa Pola, near Alicante.
It seems sensible to start out somewhere we have a support system, but after that we’ll strike out on our own.
That’s the plan for now, but I’m sure it’ll change over time.
Staying busy abroad
I’m not intending to do nothing during the gap year by the way.
I want to explore some ideas I’ve got for building commercial websites, but I can do that as I travel, courtesy of wireless broadband and my trusty laptop.
I will be recording every step of the way, from the beginning to the end, whatever that turns out to be.
It might all go pear-shaped and within 3 months I’ve wound this blog up and given it all up as a bad idea.
What I hope will happen is that the project gains momentum as we start to plan, research and take all the practical steps that are involved.
Whatever happens, you’ll read about it here, every step of the way.
I hope that in a year’s time I’m writing this blog abroad, on my gap year, and that we inspire and help you to do the same thing.
Tags: abroad, blog, Europe, France, gap year, grown up gap year, Italy, Spain
