victoria24
7th February 2009, 11:07 AM
I thought I'd like to document these thoughts before we go as our viewpoint might very well change afterwards. I also get asked a lot about our journey to the decision of emigration.
As a family, we have always planned to emigrate. We weren't sure where or when but it was always there. Our children have been brought up always knowing this would happen so its quite natural to them that we are going.
Along the way, we have discussed different variances of life abroad; having a holiday home, living close by in europe, working remotely for my mortgagae business etc and when we talked it through realised that if we stayed in the UK and continued forging forward in a typical british fashion, all we would be doing would be to pay off our mortgage as quickly as possible in order to sell to then fund our emigration. We also realised that we couldnt identify what was "enough" to feel financially secure enough to feel that we would have minimal pressures.
Things accelerated during a holiday in Florida last April. We went on one of those air boat rides at boggy creek and got talking to a family from augusta, Georgia. Now, to be honest, they weren't the type of people we would usually have much in common with; very republican god fearing, golf playing types but the conversation we had was very inspiring. It was along the lines of "why dont you come here to the US, we'd love to have you and you'd get a great job easily". Now, this was pre credit crunch but in finance we knew what was coming. The American guy was also in banking and what was refreshing is that while us british financiers were thinking doom was on the way, his view was that because things were bad, that must mean that we were at the start of a new upward trend!
Back at the villa, elaine and I discussed this during a rare solitary moment in the pool and talked through our perceptions on life and what we wanted to achieve being more philosophical than practical for the first time and agreed that we should go for it sooner rather than later. We also agreed to discuss destinations once back in the UK as we needed internet access to research the entry requirements which would play a part in our final decision. You might want to live in the Falkland Isles but if you couldn't get in then what was the point of considering it as an option!
Anyway, back home we decided to go for an english speaking country. We listed in order (pre research) Australia, USA, New Zealand, Canada.
Canada was struck off first due to weather although it would be an easy move as my uncle is a major employer and is always tapping me up to run his company so he can retire.
Next to go was the good old USA due to massively complicated visa requirements and an arbitrary approach to immigration.
That left Oz and NZ and after a beak on tinternet seemed we could get in to Oz. We have family there also so started to umm and ahhh over Perth and Adelaide and hit the forums and migration agents to suss it out. This didn last for long for 2 reasons: I dont like extreme heat and Elaine has quite a spider phobia!
We didnt know much about NZ so joined this forum and started to investigate online. What became obvious early on was that NZ's emigration policy seemed a lot simpler than others and that we could do it ourselves (with an awful lot of help from this forum and you guys). Also, the weather seemed more moderate and no killer spiders and snakes!
We paid £97 to an agent for a pre assessment in order to cut through the grey areas to see if our thoughts were right.
Crestfallen, we were advised that we needed a job offer to get the points. I recalculated the points and was sure that we had enough to go in the pool.
Fair play to the agent, after I queried this, they refunded the money but still stuck to there theory that we were short of the 100.
With a new sense of vigour, we cracked on and submitted our EOI then sat back to see what happened. We only had 110 points but thought that 6 months might see us selected and with encouraging stories from forum members on 105, crossed our fingers and began our "dual" lives. I describe it as like having an affair (not that I have!) but it can be hard having to remember who knows what and who knows who.
This began an unhealthy obsession with all things NZ. Any program or website that had anything to do with NZ was firmly on the agenda. We met with Janey and her family from this forum who had just returned from their recce and listened with open ears to their wonderful stories of the land and life that we had started to dream of. Luckily, she told us of some NZ programs about cops and some doee uppy houses shows on Men and Motors!
This prompted our 2 month saga of "shall we, shant we" for our recce. In the end, we decided that it would be right for us even if we love it and end up £7k down which we could have spent on a car or something when we get there for good.
Remember, remember the 5th of November. EOI selected! we did a little dance in the kitchen (not because we usually dance in the kitchen!) but thats where the lappy sits on the brekkers bar.
The joy was shortlived because our CO didnt think my qualis warranted the 50 points we were claiming and after some serious scanning and emailing of transcripts and category matching, we eventually won the battle. The game was back on!
....until, we discovered that we had claimed 5 points in error so got dumped back into the pool as the selection hadnt dipped to 105 in the 6 months and that day was the last of the 6 months so... EOI declined :(
We decided to forget about the EOI for a bit as we had the recce on the horizon and I needed to concentrate on job hunting and Elaine on finishing her course to qualify as a hairdresser. Either way, we would have a decent amount of points. The good news was that we had kind of had our EOI pre assessed so were confident that those points would see us in.
In all his time, our house remained on the market. I wont go into the skills of the order takers...oops! I mean estate agents. We thought that if I could secure a job then the risk would be minimized as we would have an immediate income stream so could rent the house out and worry about it later.
I applied for close to 35 jobs and secured some promising interviews. 2 with accredited employers so right now, our fingers are firmly crossed and chapter 2 of our great adventure is only 5 1/2 sleeps away :)
We just hope that NZ will be everything we hope it to be. Either way, we're both aware that the next few weeks will shape the rest of our lives either way....
As a family, we have always planned to emigrate. We weren't sure where or when but it was always there. Our children have been brought up always knowing this would happen so its quite natural to them that we are going.
Along the way, we have discussed different variances of life abroad; having a holiday home, living close by in europe, working remotely for my mortgagae business etc and when we talked it through realised that if we stayed in the UK and continued forging forward in a typical british fashion, all we would be doing would be to pay off our mortgage as quickly as possible in order to sell to then fund our emigration. We also realised that we couldnt identify what was "enough" to feel financially secure enough to feel that we would have minimal pressures.
Things accelerated during a holiday in Florida last April. We went on one of those air boat rides at boggy creek and got talking to a family from augusta, Georgia. Now, to be honest, they weren't the type of people we would usually have much in common with; very republican god fearing, golf playing types but the conversation we had was very inspiring. It was along the lines of "why dont you come here to the US, we'd love to have you and you'd get a great job easily". Now, this was pre credit crunch but in finance we knew what was coming. The American guy was also in banking and what was refreshing is that while us british financiers were thinking doom was on the way, his view was that because things were bad, that must mean that we were at the start of a new upward trend!
Back at the villa, elaine and I discussed this during a rare solitary moment in the pool and talked through our perceptions on life and what we wanted to achieve being more philosophical than practical for the first time and agreed that we should go for it sooner rather than later. We also agreed to discuss destinations once back in the UK as we needed internet access to research the entry requirements which would play a part in our final decision. You might want to live in the Falkland Isles but if you couldn't get in then what was the point of considering it as an option!
Anyway, back home we decided to go for an english speaking country. We listed in order (pre research) Australia, USA, New Zealand, Canada.
Canada was struck off first due to weather although it would be an easy move as my uncle is a major employer and is always tapping me up to run his company so he can retire.
Next to go was the good old USA due to massively complicated visa requirements and an arbitrary approach to immigration.
That left Oz and NZ and after a beak on tinternet seemed we could get in to Oz. We have family there also so started to umm and ahhh over Perth and Adelaide and hit the forums and migration agents to suss it out. This didn last for long for 2 reasons: I dont like extreme heat and Elaine has quite a spider phobia!
We didnt know much about NZ so joined this forum and started to investigate online. What became obvious early on was that NZ's emigration policy seemed a lot simpler than others and that we could do it ourselves (with an awful lot of help from this forum and you guys). Also, the weather seemed more moderate and no killer spiders and snakes!
We paid £97 to an agent for a pre assessment in order to cut through the grey areas to see if our thoughts were right.
Crestfallen, we were advised that we needed a job offer to get the points. I recalculated the points and was sure that we had enough to go in the pool.
Fair play to the agent, after I queried this, they refunded the money but still stuck to there theory that we were short of the 100.
With a new sense of vigour, we cracked on and submitted our EOI then sat back to see what happened. We only had 110 points but thought that 6 months might see us selected and with encouraging stories from forum members on 105, crossed our fingers and began our "dual" lives. I describe it as like having an affair (not that I have!) but it can be hard having to remember who knows what and who knows who.
This began an unhealthy obsession with all things NZ. Any program or website that had anything to do with NZ was firmly on the agenda. We met with Janey and her family from this forum who had just returned from their recce and listened with open ears to their wonderful stories of the land and life that we had started to dream of. Luckily, she told us of some NZ programs about cops and some doee uppy houses shows on Men and Motors!
This prompted our 2 month saga of "shall we, shant we" for our recce. In the end, we decided that it would be right for us even if we love it and end up £7k down which we could have spent on a car or something when we get there for good.
Remember, remember the 5th of November. EOI selected! we did a little dance in the kitchen (not because we usually dance in the kitchen!) but thats where the lappy sits on the brekkers bar.
The joy was shortlived because our CO didnt think my qualis warranted the 50 points we were claiming and after some serious scanning and emailing of transcripts and category matching, we eventually won the battle. The game was back on!
....until, we discovered that we had claimed 5 points in error so got dumped back into the pool as the selection hadnt dipped to 105 in the 6 months and that day was the last of the 6 months so... EOI declined :(
We decided to forget about the EOI for a bit as we had the recce on the horizon and I needed to concentrate on job hunting and Elaine on finishing her course to qualify as a hairdresser. Either way, we would have a decent amount of points. The good news was that we had kind of had our EOI pre assessed so were confident that those points would see us in.
In all his time, our house remained on the market. I wont go into the skills of the order takers...oops! I mean estate agents. We thought that if I could secure a job then the risk would be minimized as we would have an immediate income stream so could rent the house out and worry about it later.
I applied for close to 35 jobs and secured some promising interviews. 2 with accredited employers so right now, our fingers are firmly crossed and chapter 2 of our great adventure is only 5 1/2 sleeps away :)
We just hope that NZ will be everything we hope it to be. Either way, we're both aware that the next few weeks will shape the rest of our lives either way....