[john & becky]

What is the general consensus on whether to employ a consultant firm to help with your application for PR, how much does it cost in total and what if you do it on your own?

Would be good to have an opinion from a few who have the experience..........

[Bubbles]

Never had personel experience with any immigration consultants, done it myself and with help from this forum. However, the general opinion of them from people who have is not very good I'm sorry to say. Here's a recent thread that was posted about such a company.....................

http://www.emigratenz.org/forum/showthread.php?t=5202&highlight=corners


Use the search function at the head of the page, I'm sure you will turn up a few more threads.

John

[Smiler]

Noooooooooooooo agent but DIY. It's easy enough, you're in control and responsible for everything, you can chase up , check etc. If all of us can do it.................

Once you've filled in you EOI and thats excepted, the ITA is a printed copy of that. You can do all the preparation, medical, police certs and know that they are all done within the time limits rather than sitting on someone's desk!

As John says there are some older threads too on this and hopefully several people will see this and reply.

If you get stuck, just ask on here, we all do.:laugh


Good luck

Deborah

[westies]

Would definately agree do it yourself, looks quite daunting to begin with, but falls into place with relative ease!!!

Lots of help on the various forums as well, someone will always have the answer you need

Good luck
Traceyx

[smitjo]

I have to agree. STAY AWAY!!! We decided to use an agent (First Contact) and they were absolutely dreadful. Hardly ever stayed in contact with us and to be honest by the end of it we were actually dealing with the NZIS directly because the agency were such a waste of time! They charged us about £1800 to complete our application which we could easily have done ourselves.

If only we had known about this forum before we applied!!!

Jo

[gil]

Hi John and Becky,
I think there's a clear message coming out here: better to DIY. It is actually very straightforward and what's more YOU are in control of getting it together.
If we've all managed to do it, anyone can and there's TONS of help available through this forum, just ask! :D
Gil

[MB]

Here's one of those older threads on this topic:
http://www.emigratenz.org/forum/showthread.php?t=5007&highlight=relationships

Quite a few of us contributed to it.

[Wannaway]

It seems a lot of people on this forum DIY, and apart from the odd curveball question etc thron at you by NZIS during the process, most people seem to get on fine with this approach (they do have a wealth of knowledge to use on this forum, which helps!). I guess you do have to be prepared to commit a bit of time in terms of form filling and chasing and the like.

However, we did use an immigration agent because at first sight our application would have been borderline (and in fact on our first squizz at emigrating 3 years ago it did not look as if we could get in at all). Now I know agents get a lot of flak, and based on some of the horror stories some people have shared on this forum justifiably so, but I did find our agent was first class. We used Malcolm Pacific in London and they were very good, professional, responsive and approachable. We had a bit of a nightmare with the NZQA but they helped us through that. So, I think there are good agents out there, but they ain't cheap! MP cost us about GBP3k plus expenses, for that they handled our NZQA assessment and PR application. I got lucky because my NZ employer paid half the fee, because it saved them the cost of getting a work visa for me, so it was really good value for money for us.

[mossum]

we're diy'ing too

whats really amazed me is how long eveything takes to get together !!! we sent for the forms in early november - still waiting on some family stuff from nz - police checks are in (been told will be 4 weeks ) . We are hoping to book the medicals end of feb & then get the form & big cheque in :clap :clap :clap

Anyone know when you stop feeling sick & anxious ???

vic x

[john & becky]

Thanks guys, i think we will try and do it ourselves. £3k pays for all the flights so it is surely worth a bit of effort on our part. If we have a load of docs to find, we'd have to do it anyway, even if we used an agent.

So, biiiiiiiiiiig question. Has anyone kept a diary/log of how much money this has cost them in total, applications, meds, shipping, maf.................would be interested to see the results.
We would like to think we could buy the house we want when we get there, if it costs us £50k to move we might be in for a surprise......................

.

[MB]

shipping, maf.................

John and Becky - you've probably done this already, but comb the forum for posts from people who have shipped stuff over. (We didn't, so in a sense I don't know what I'm talking about). I'm sure that many people save money by shipping their household contents, and/or gain a lot in other ways by importing things that mean a lot to them. Good on 'em, I say. But more than one forum member has posted saying, in effect, "When it all arrived in the container, we realized that we'd done without it all for months which gave us a new angle on whether we should have shipped it after all..."
We just decided that we didn't have enough valuable (in any sense) stuff to warrant the cost of shipping, by the way. Given that, it really would have been too pricey for us.
Anyway, just a thought.