Chardy

Hi all,

Thought I'd post my own blog describing our journey to a new life in Oz.

First some background.
I am a 41 year old Telecoms Technician (Engineer in the UK!), married and have 3 kids, 8,6 and 2 currently living on the South Coast of Hampshire in a house we built (95% physically ourselves) in 2007.
I always had a hankering for living in Oz for about the last 20 years and this was reinforced when my older brother and his wife emigrated to Brisbane in 1998. The life they had really inspired me further, sadly my brother was killed in an RTA while practice riding his bike for another triathlon.
In 2004 we looked into the idea again, going to an Expo at Epsom Racecourse where we stumbled across one of my mates from school who then emigrated together with his wife and both their parents.
We paid an agent to start on the paperwork but after a short while decided it was not fair to take away our parents first grandchild so decided to give it 10 years to see if we still wanted to go after that point.
Over the next 7 years the yearning never left me and I had kept a keen eye on the visa changes over time and realised in February 2011 that time was running out as after 1st July 2011 I would not have got enough points due to my age.
So I persuaded my wife to consider it again - with help of a slap up meal out at the Beefeater !.
We also discussed it with the older 2 children on the basis that if either of them didn't want to go then that was it - after all we are mainly doing it for them to have a more active, social lifestyle with hopefully more opportunities in the future.
Thankfully all agreed to give it a go as it was now or never and the what if feeling would have made me miserable had we not even tried !
Using an agent was out of the question as we just couldn't afford the fees on top of everything else and we both love reading info and filling in forms !
So we began on the process of a WA sponsored 176 visa as it seemed the quickest way to beat the July deadline although we did doubt we would do it several times.
The biggest help of course was PIO and finding other Telecoms Techs to help with my skills assessment for TRA was invaluable.
Despite comprising of 5 statutory declarations and a lot of copies of copies of documents it went through fine and that was the biggest headache over.
The WA sponsorship came back in 5 days which put us right ahead of schedule and lodged the 176 application well before 1st July............phew !
Meds and police checks all went OK and despite an agonising wait for my sons' new passport we got the grant on 1st November with a entry by date of 24th November 2012.
So the plan is now:
Get the house looking as good as possible and on the market by end of January.
We want to let the older kids finish their current school year so assuming the house sells (which it has too!) we will rent until end of August then hopefully take a Disneyworld holiday (promised to the kids) before popping back to say final goodbyes and then off to Perth in September.
Fortunately I have a cousin in Perth who has offered to put us up initially and is quite excited about having family nearby as her daughter is in Broome, 2000 km away.
Well I've waffled on enough for now, I will update the blog once the house is on the market and we start looking at shipping costs etc.
Justin