It is not possible to put a price on your dreams but if you are setting out to turn them into reality it helps to have a budget and to be able to stick to it.

Lots of people ask how much the move to France has cost us. Some want to know whether we plunged ourselves into poverty for posterity, while others just want to know if they might manage the same thing.

So let's emphasise from the outset that the change was made possible by Dublin's elevated property market, which allowed us to come here with Lotto-figure amounts of cash. The house in France will be paid for outright.

With no mortgage to pay and fewer monthly outgoings, we can live on the more modest income we now earn tele-working.

The second part of the equation was good jobs and good records in Dublin newspapers, and colleagues who continue to employ us on a freelance basis even though we now live a day's journey away.

We bought our first home, in Ranelagh, Dublin 6, in 1995 for £124,000 (€158,000) - we thought we'd be penniless forever after.

When we sold it five years later, paid off the mortgage, the estate agent, the lawyer and everyone else, and added in some savings, we were left with more than £200,000. The gift horse was waiting at the door.

Houses We sold our house in Dublin for more than £300,000 (in October 2000). It cost us about £8,000 to sell, between estate agents and lawyers.

We are about to buy a fourbedroom farmhouse on nine acres in France for £145,000, including notaire's fees of £8,500 - which includes the French equivalent of stamp duty. (By the by, I see that for the same sum in the Republic we could buy a nice-looking, four-bedroom, farmhouse-style home on an estate in Longford, "within commuting distance of Dublin".) We bought privately and did not employ an estate agent, which would have added another £8,000.

We pay two taxes on our new home - tax d'habitation and tax fonciere - they cover services such as sewerage and street lighting.

Since we have neither of the last two, the cost for us is low. Both taxes are determined by the location and size of our house (2,200 sq. feet). The total for the two taxes is less than £800 a year.

Work: Last year, in Dublin, our combined income was more than £70,000. We expect to earn about £18,000 this year, working between France and Dublin. However, France has no form of PAYE; the head of the household makes an annual return for the family's total income. It is perhaps not surprising that one third of French households declare a taxable income of £14,000 - or close to the threshold of income tax liability. Social security and social insurance payments are high - about 26 per cent. But we don't fall into the net until the end of next year.

We have spent £15,000 on computer equipment. The computers are our cash cows, our money machines, our future in tele-working. I write, and in the future I will sub-edit, from here, and my husband edits supplements for the Republic's biggest Sunday newspaper. We did not skimp.

Childcare: After the mortgage, our biggest single expenditure in Dublin was childcare, at about £500 a month. I had to pay for a full place in a creche, even though I used it just 2-1/2 days a week.

Here, playgroup three mornings or afternoons a week costs £1.50 an hour. My monthly bill is about £60. In September, if we wish, we can send Sarah into the state education system for free. The local school is good; I may think three is a bit young to start, but the option is there.

Sadly, I have to pay for babysitters now, instead of press-ganging my teenage inlaws. The babysitter costs £3.70 an hour.

Moving costs: The move cost us about £6,000: £4,500 went to our removal company, Cronins; we shipped a dinghy and a second car in the lorry with our possessions; and the rest went on fares, accommodation and smaller stuff such as boxes. A good-quality cardboard box costs about £5.

Car and transport: We took a bit of a financial hit on our Irish car, a one-year-old Passat estate.

We sold it back to the VW dealer in Dublin at about £2,000 less than we may have been able to sell it for ourselves - had we been around to do so.

On the other hand, we bought a new car here, a Renault Espace, for £22,000. The same car in Dublin would have cost us £14,000 more.

French car insurance costs less. Our Renault is a comparatively expensive model to insure and we also have a classic Porsche. Our total car insurance bill in the Republic was £1,400. Here it's £850. As an added bonus, annual road tax was abolished in France just last year, saving us another £400.

Petrol, on the other hand, is more expensive in France than in the Republic - currently 87p a litre. Diesel is considerably cheaper (60p a litre). So we bought a diesel car and a tank lasts forever, which is just as well since France is a big country.

Services: We expect our electricity bills to increase slightly because electricity here is expensive (why, when France has nuclear power?) and our house won't be vacant for half the day. And what we expect to save on central heating will be consumed by the swimming pool!

We have to pay for water here, and as yet we have no idea how much we use as a family.

Shopping: Ah, the food, the drink. We spend more on wine than we used to! But not a fortune, nonetheless - but because it's cheap (Mas D'Aurel, Gaillac, £2.80), we drink it every day. It's important to support the local economy.

Our weekly grocery bill, including nappies, is about £100. That's a little more than we spent in the Republic, but it feeds all three of us for three meals a day. We easily save £100 a week on lunches, takeaway pizzas and the like.

Entertainment: We spent £6,000 to £10,000 a year on holidays in the past few years, mostly in France. We expect this year to spend about £2,000 on tax-deductible trips to Dublin, and to earn that amount while we're there.

Communications: The real cost. Phone and mobile bills are about £200 a month, and climbing. We pay £30 to our Internet providers, and £20 a month to France Telecom for the ISDN line. It's not hard to justify these costs because what they save us is time - the real saving. Living in the inner suburbs of Dublin, we had a blessedly short commute - half an hour each. At least until you added in the creche. Although it was only a mile from my husband's work, and he was travelling after 9 a.m., it stretched his journey from Ranelagh to Terenure by 30 minutes on a good day, 50 on a bad day. Between us, we save 20 hours of commuting time a week by working from home. Estimate the cost of our time at £40 an hour and that's £800 a week.

But it's not about the money. It's about the time. It's about control.

It's about working our work time so that time-wasting is minimised - and the time we save on commuting, worrying and rearranging schedules under pressure, we invest in an interesting, challenging daily life.