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Issues to consider Do have a visa that is guaranteed and are you clear about the difficulties of travel at the moment and how that might affect you if travel is a 'no go' for some months, would you re think your decision? there are a lot of unknowns about how economy's are going to fare over the next few months, would you rethink if the job market got tight in Australia Check also what regulations are about holding a big chunk of money with a currency dealer, I don't think that they are regulated like banks where the Govt guarantee to refund your money if a Bank goes under. I have a memory from years back that one of the Australian banks had a branch in London where you could open a dollar account if you had a visa but I'm talking 16 or 17 years ago, might be worth a check.

The years that you can see 10 years ago where you can still pay into them , I believe, are years where the number of weeks paid are insufficient to make it a qualifying year and NI will allow you to make payments to top up that year only, that is based on our recent experience with my OHs account. I would be very careful about making any long term decisions based on present regulations, the UK government tinkers around with pension regs and NI contributions, lessening one side, increasing the other, at the present moment the cost of contributions is very low if you are out of the country but there seems to be plans afoot to make it a universal level contribution, we were told this when we topped up my OHs years from when we were in Australia . Also are you paying NI contributions for your wife in order to establish a pension for her in her own right, as again , from my own sketchy knowledge, if you died your wife's entitlements based on your contributions may be very limited. About the best decision I made was to continue paying NI contributions whilst in Australia when they were a few pounds per week as I have recovered all of that and more with a full index linked pension having returned 6 years ago

Bob, you should write this into a book, all of this part of old Australia is disappearing at an incredible rate and needs to be there for the next generation, I reckon you'd love "The Man Eaters Of Kumaon" by Jim Corbett, the biography of a young man in northern India at the turn of the 19th century, very much in the vein of your exploits, running a rail depot and hunting down man eating tigers and leopards, a world that is irredeemably lost, some of good some of it questionable by todays standards but all of it fascinating.

Or it could be that our govt starve the UK health service of funds sufficient to run an adequate service and have always seen excess deaths as an acceptable price for saving money on equipment, buildings and staff as they preferred to live with a vacancy rate of 100,000 for the last 10 years in order to save money on training and employment of adequate staff

I'll post this and people can make their own minds up Quote Since the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses across the UK have been forced to close once again, with the number of people being made redundant climbing to a record high in the three months to October. ‘I’d relocate to London for work but don’t have the funds’ Blake Spratt, 26, graduated with a law degree from the University of Hull in July and was working shifts in an Arcadia warehouse in Leeds until he was made redundant last week. “I worked about three eight-hour shifts a week in the warehouse, which was just enough to support myself and my boyfriend, who is a student and also hasn’t been able to find work. I’m now back up in Newcastle with my parents, and have applied for jobs up here, in Leeds and in London. I used to work in IT support and have been applying for all sorts of work: telecoms engineer roles, paralegal positions, various administrative roles, retail jobs. I’d be willing to relocate to London but without any funds that is quite unrealistic. I had a few interviews with law firms in London, but no luck so far.” Blake Spratt lost his warehouse job this month. Photograph: Blake Spratt ‘I won’t be able to pay rent, the stress is making me sick’ Agata Zeberska, 34, had just accepted a role as an assistant general manager at the Albion pub in Islington, north London, when the second national lockdown in England was announced. “I had just started the new job and so couldn’t be furloughed. I supported myself with savings and credit cards. Then lockdown was lifted and we reopened in the first week of December. But now we are moving to tier 3, tonight is the last night of trading, and it’s still not certain if I will get furloughed – it would only be for about two weeks of employment. I was due to earn £1,800 after tax this month; now I will have half of this. I don’t have any savings left and won’t be able to afford my rent. “I didn’t sleep all night yesterday, trying to budget money I don’t have. It will take me at least one year to fix the damage this year has inflicted on my finances, and, of course, this will only be possible once everything goes back to normal. I can’t eat very much or eat nothing at all, and during the summer I was sick every day from the stress. But I don’t want to complain too much: a lot of people are in much worse positions than I am.” https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/16/stress-is-making-me-sick-uk-workers-on-losing-their-jobs-to-covid?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other There have been 65000 covid deaths in the UK this year

Just try reading a little of this https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/03/advice-schools-covid-infection-pupils-classrooms-test-and-trace?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other George Monbiot

Could I add Private Eye as well on line to get a feel for here at the moment.

I would recommend signing up for the free Guardian app and reading articles in that for 2 weeks daily to get a picture of what its like here at the moment, unemployment and company closures and large scale redundancies are the growth industries here, at the moment the Guardian and Huffington post is the only media telling anything close to the truth everything else is paywalled but if you want a dose of what the rest of the country believes try the Mail and the Express which rely on the fact that there is no requirement to post the truth in their on line editions.

Maybe being a lawyer gives you a different perspective.

That is your lived experience and you are as entitled to express that as a concern and I agree wih you, there is way too much every day acceptance of racist views in Australia, and was one of the contributing factors to me leaving also, never felt sure when having a conversation when some objectionable comment would come tumbling out. Although I must say brexit and the Mail and Express have made casual racism acceptable here but it is less likely to be experienced if you stay away from the lower socio economic groupings I find people are just in denial

The thing that strikes me is the delay in the transaction hitting your account, I'm no expert but that strikes me as most odd, someone in the system lifting small amounts from closed accounts.?

Agreed, too many variables and too many countries hiding the truth, but there is a order of magnitude which can be discerned and if you live somewhere you start to see what the obfuscations are unfortunately over time. Unfortunately I think I would rather take my chances in Sth Korea than in the UK at the moment

I thought that exchange agents are not subject to the same rules as banks, ie, if they fold whilst holding your money do you have any comeback against anyone for compensation and are they regulated by any regulatory bodies and in which country are they regulated given they may operate across country borders or have the regs been tightened. I am talking hypothetically of course because we have all used them as their rates are always much better than the banks and compensation through the banks is limited also. But they may be risks that need consideration and may mean that smaller deals on consecutive days need to be considered and the size of exchange company becomes a consideration, I used to use HiFX and Moneycorp and found I could usually talk to a dealer direct. We are all at the mercy of the money men.

Yep because everybody has been quarantined so deaths from other communicable causes has been reduced significantly and deaths from accidental causes has been reduced significantly.

Thank you The infection rate is all over the place because there are so many variables, the number of tests completed, the number actually gotten to labs, the number which are valid or not viable, the speed of the results returned, in the UK the number of postal tests sent out and then invalid because spoiled or not returned, the number of people not being tested because their symptoms are not severe enough or not classified as essential workers. All of that contributes to a sense of uncertainty about govt action, especially as it seems that there is a time lag on pulling stats together because of the use of private labs many miles from areas of outbreaks with little supervision. So the 'only' reliable indicator is the death rate, which continues to rise inexorably at an avg daily rate of around 70-80 which seems to clearly say that the UK's TTI processes are simply not working as they should be and until that is rectified we simply will stay stuck in 'ground hog' day