General question

It certainly should be do-able.

It is impossible to recommend a certain number of hours, because so much depends on how easy or difficult you are finding the topics (which also depends on how good you are at arithmetic).

You can see how many lectures there are here for each paper, so do yourself a timetable for how many you need to work through each week. Also, make sure you buy Revision Kits from one of the ACCA approved publishers (they contain lots of exam standard questions to practice, and practice is vital to passing the exam) and leave a week before each of your exams in order to practice all the questions.

They are not really so essential – it really depends on how much time (and money!) you have available.

There is a benefit in that you can see what the real exam will look like on computer, but you can do this anyway by looking at the free specimen exam on the ACCA website.

The other big benefit is that you will have to attempt them under time pressure, which is a bit problem in the exam – it is when you are short of time in the exam that you are more likely to misread questions or make silly mistakes.
If you decide not to buy the exams, then do make sure that you attempt the mock exams in your Revision Kit under time pressure – pretend you are in the real exam and see how much you can do in the time available (obviously after you have finished your studying and have practice all the other questions in your Revision Kit).

In addition you can find free online mock exams on our website.