Just picking up on the Sim thing, I think it will be money well spent.
I'm planning to start my IMCr around August. Having talked to my instructor people tend to run into problems putting it all together towards the end of the course. That's another 10hrs one can expect to have to do.
I use FSX with a yoke and pedals. Looking at my first attempts on the sim (it tracks the course) what a waste of money it would have been in the real plane.
I'm finding that one just 'gets it' after a while on the sim. No amount of book reading helped with an NDB approach, doing it over and over in a sim eventually leads to just the right compensations and feel for it all. My biggest surprise was running the whole thing real time in a sim was that there will be no time for error, you absolutely need to know what you are trying to achieve before starting out, something that could have burnt up a lot of cash in a PA-28 to find out.