Moving overseas

Decisions to make:

Are you taking furniture/ putting in storage or selling?

Do you own your house? If so selling if not giving notice to landlord?

Are you on any fixed hps or cell phone contracts. Maybe settle them first before leaving.

Student loans. You need to contact them first and then arrange to make payments.

If you are shipping furniture or items you need to check how long you need to give them to arrange it.

Gosh just the tip of the iceberg really. Good luck I have done three international moves. High stress and hard work but worth it.

2 that sprung to mind that can get overlooked;

Redirecting mail or notifying people/organisations of your new address (every piece of mail from now on write down who sent it so you know all the people/organisations you need to notify later).

Notifying utilities (water/power/landline phone) of the date you're moving out so that you don't end up paying for the next person.

If you are wanting daycare, you should get on a waiting list early! We moved to Canberra when DS was 6 months and the waiting lists were 18 months plus! Put their names down anywhere and everywhere and make up your mind which one you like when you get there

kiwigal

My friends moved to aus with a ADD child and the support they received over there was so much more superior than here. He is 22 now so don't know how relevant it is now. My suggestion is to email a dr over there or support service and find out what is available. Hopefully someone can come up with some names for you to contact.

kiwigal we wanted to go to Australia a few years ago with an older special needs child, she is now 24 and would not have been able to get a disablity allowance or invalids benefit for her until we had been in Australia for two years because of not being australian born

We moved to Aussie two years ago but no baby at that point, bear in mind that it can take quite a while for your stuff to be shipped over so think carefully about what you might need...and where are you going to live when you get here. It took over 6 weeks for our stuff to arrive but then it was going to WA. We then moved from WA all the way over to North Queensland and that took ages for our stuff to arrive then too, I think about 6 weeks.

You also have to think carefully about how much it is worth bringing when you are paying a bazillion dollars for shipping...lucky for us we had our stuff paid for by the company but the movers said that one person didn't want to take the air out of their swiss ball so it cost like $50 to ship lol.....so now I always think in terms of how much does it cost to ship compared to replacing an item...if it is small and expensive it is worth shipping, big and cheap then not worth shipping! Unless the company is shipping for you, then you can bring all kinds of crap....haha.

It is a good time to do a clear out but even tho you might think you don't need warm things...you will!! I wear winter jammies up here, we have a feather quilt on in winter AND still used the electric blanket...but maybe we have acclimatised....It just isn't hot all year round (tho a lot warmer than NZ).

kiwigal, be open minded about special schools as your son gets older, my now 24 year old was mainstreamed until intermediate age and then went to a very good pdu unit and then a special school as the delay in her development got wider with the mainstream kids, guess they will have special schools in Australia

Haha, our shipping was huge! It cost like $13,000 or something like that NZ to WA...we took pretty much everything tho since the company was paying. We are even thinking of shipping our car home when we leave because according to my calculations it is worth it since we got it new and it would only be about $2000 to get to nz including nz registration. Whereas if we sell we will lose more than $2000 on it.

It does depend on how long you are moving for and the value of your goods. There are some things I won't be sad to say goodbye to but some things have sentimental value so would never be left behind.

Good to know, WestiesGirl, I thought once we'd been here for 2 years we could get help from centrelink if we needed to, didn't know you had to be a citizen

Anyways, I found THIS SITE so helpful before we made the big move. It is especially for kiwis moving to the Gold Coast, but a lot of it was still relevant for us going to Perth.

If you have dual citizenship then I shouldn't think so, however probably depends what passport you come in on...I remember there being something about this recently.