Most of the trip planning is nearly complete by now -- see next entry for that.  A breakthrough came in the way I decided to plan going forward.  

While trying to book the necessary large expenses first, such as flights and accomodation, I ended up reverting back to old habits.  That is to say, the dreaded credit cards.  The sad reality is that at the time of planning I didn't have a surplus of funds to work with.  The easiest way was just to use a credit card online.

Having made great experience on a budget last year, I wondered what had gone wrong.  It seems all that great foundational budget work stalled when I got carried away on stock trading and the steep learning curve involved.  Once the markets started to stabilize, then it was back to basics and focusing on the budget once again.

I was able to make two corrections.  One was to immediately free up some funds for this trip by selling a few stock positions and depositing them into various bank accounts. Then I continued planning this trip based on those funds as well as making a plan to pay off the incurred credit card debt from the earlier planning.  The second correction was to project my budget all the way into the next holidays for a year and beyond.  I realized that there had to be massive funds available for the inevitable planning that would come next.

Now, what about solving the credit card problem?  Simply really, just pre-load the cards in advance from available cash.  The budget I developed was able to project far off into the future to manage all this.  That way the next time I make bookings, it is still a matter of using a credit card online as usual.  But this won't go into debt since it will have been pre-loaded.

All of this was admitedly a huge headache but it was worth all the work.  A trip is only as good as the money that can finance it.  If a budget can project at least a year in advance, then it is far better than the former stupid habit of short-term thinking.