LKC

What about somewhere in East Anglia? We lived in villages near Cambridge, Ely, Saffron Walden, Bury St Edmunds and Newmarket before we moved to Sydney, and found them all nice places to live. It isn't too far to Bedfordshire, easy to get to the coast, fairly close to London, and has the airport at Stansted which is handy if you like going on overseas holidays. From what I remember of the area, the roads towards Bedfordshire aren't too bad. Lots of really lovely villages around that area, with slightly larger towns within easy reach for cinema, shopping etc.

The same things that you'd do pretty much anywhere else, to be honest. Australia isn't just about bars, night life and barbecues, there are plenty of things to do. I drink and I'm not vegan, but I didn't hang around in bars or attend barbecues in Australia. There are plenty of beaches, national parks, and other outdoor things to do, depending on the sort of sporting or leisure activities you enjoy. There are also theatres, cinemas, coffee shops and restaurants (including vegan ones I would think, although I never looked). There are plenty of special interest clubs, groups, classes and societies to join, depending on your interests too. Just look for what interests you and do that.

When we migrated, many years ago now, we had a toddler and an infant, but decided to pay for the seat for our baby. Our reasons were partly because it gave us extra baggage allowance, but more importantly it gave us extra room on the flight with a wriggly toddler! We sat slightly further back, in a row of 4, so I could sit on one side with the baby, OH could sit at the other side, and toddler had the choice of two seats (which was great for sleeping with the armrests up). We have flown Qantas, Singapore and Qatar (although we flew business with them, so I can't comment on economy), and found Singapore to be a little bit better than Qantas, particularly with the kids. The last A380 we flew on with Singapore did look a bit tired, though.

We have cats rather than dogs, but used Dogtainers. They were absolutely great, and looked after our cats perfectly from the moment they picked them up for the pre-flight stay, right through to delivery at this end. They sent updates and photos for us, which was reassuring, and they kept in touch with us until after they had been delivered by their Scotland partner. They took care of everything, and timed their flights so they'd arrive in Dubai overnight, have a stay for food, water and some exercise, and then arranged the second flight on to Glasgow for a time that arrived in time for them to clear customs and be delivered that same day. The cats were slightly crumpled and a bit smelly when they arrived, but as soon as we let them out of their crates they were back to normal, as it were!

To be honest, you'd be better off looking at where you're likely to be working. NSW is massive, it would take something like 15+ hours to drive from the north of the NSW coast to the south of the NSW coast. On that coast is Sydney, plus a number of smaller towns/cities such as Nowra, Wollongong, Newcastle and Port Macquarie, and many small townships, but honestly there isn't much in between. You'd be best off concentrating on the larger towns/townships to see what work is available, and then work out from there. There are families in all parts of Australia, so it isn't necessarily about finding family friendly areas in the state, but about finding work and then finding the areas that will suit your family around that work. Work will be more plentiful in the towns/cities, but living costs will be higher. Living costs will most likely be lower further out, but work may be hard to come by or commute times may be high.

Where in Sutherland Shire are you? We lived in Sutherland Shire for almost nine years, so I might be able to give some advice on saving money, groups you could join to meet people etc. We loved Sutherland Shire whilst we lived there, it wasn't Sutherland Shire that pushed us away, but other things that pulled us back to the UK. Happy for you to PM me, if you'd rather not say exactly where you are on the forum.

Like Marisawright says, it's about the balance on the scales. At one time Australia suited our family best, as it did yours. At a different time the UK suited us better. The scales just tip depending on what your family needs at the time. Our eldest girl must be about the same age as your son, if we'd moved back to England she'd have been due to start high school last September. As it was, we moved to Scotland where they go to high school slightly later, so she went into P7 and will start high school next week (eek!) with the friends she made in primary. Like you, the time was right for our family to make the move. It's a move forwards, not backwards, and I wish you every success with the move! We've never regretted moving to the UK for a second!

Have a look at the Woolworths or Coles websites and do one of your online shops, to see what it comes out at.

We don't have any regrets about moving to Australia at all, we had a great adventure there, and we got to live in and see a part of the world that others can only dream of. But we knew it was time to move on, so we did. We don't regret our move to Scotland either. It has been hard work, we've never lived here before, and have had to start from scratch in many respects. I'm glad we had the courage to try something new, though, rather than try to go back to what we had before. Australia changed us, and for that reason we had to move on, rather than back.

There were lots of reasons, to be honest. A large part of it was to do with timing. Our eldest daughter was due to start high school, and we realised that if she started high school in Australia, it would be more difficult to move back later on down the track, and that if we stayed we needed to be prepared to stay in the longer term (we were there for almost nine years as it was). The longer we were there, the less settled we felt, particularly for me. I felt like a square peg in a round hole. We found it extremely difficult to make friends. Don't get me wrong, everyone was friendly, but deeper friendships never developed at all. I've never needed lots of friends, but I have always made and kept good friends wherever else we've lived (including here in Scotland, where we'd never lived before last year), so I found the lack of friendships hard. More than anything though, we just didn't belong there and it wasn't home. We came over to the UK for a holiday, and it made us realise that we didn't want to live in Australia any more. So, we moved.

We've been back in the UK for almost a year, but we used to spend around $350 to $400 per week for two adults and two children, including cat meat, cleaning products, fruit and veg, meat from the butcher, fish from the fishmonger, limited processed/convenience foods. Of course people will come along and tell you that they spend no more than $25 a week, but that isn't realistic for a family in my opinion. Your budget does seem a bit low, to be honest. You will probably find that your budget for your car too small, plus you'll need to add on rego, CTP and insurance. Plus of course you'll need to add in running costs such as petrol. Our shipping was a bit over £4000 in 2009, for a full container, but of course this will depend on how much is being shipped and where from/to. People usually recommend coming with six months of wages, just in case it takes longer to get a job, and you may find that if you try and get a rental place before you have a job contract, you may have to offer to pay six months rent up front. Don't underestimate how the little things add up. Even silly things like store cupboard ingredients add up, for the first few months you spend way more than you think you will on things like that. As Marisawright points out, things like towels, bedding, pots and pans, mop and bucket etc will need to be bought too. School costs also add up because schools don't tend have generic uniforms (eg. grey skirt, white shirt, blue jumper) that you can buy cheaply from the supermarket. It used to cost me $200+ per kid per year for uniform, excluding shoes. Plus you may have to buy their books and things for school, as those things aren't always provided.

To be honest, this is a pretty hard question to answer in some respects, and really easy to answer in others. Australia is approximately the same size as Europe, and there are huge differences in climate between the different cities and states. Families live happily in every area, but it really depends on what you specifically want. For example, we lived in Sydney, and we could have quite happily lived in Tasmania or Victoria, but Queensland, WA and the NT would not have been to our liking. Work is going to play a massive part on where you can live in terms of actually getting a job and affordability. Sydney (for example) is great for families, but if there are no jobs and you can't afford the (very expensive) rent, living there is going to be pretty miserable. If your husband has the possibility of a job in Brisbane, I'd probably explore that first, and find the suburb to fit around the job, although as far as I know Brisbane isn't beachy, but there are areas nearby which are. However, commute distances will be more. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to visit Brisbane in the time we were in Australia, so I can't advise on suburbs, but I'm sure others will be along to help soon. My OH had a job offer in Sydney, and we chose an area to live around his job/commute, and that worked pretty well for the time we lived there.

Yes, you'll need to do a tax return for the next year. We arrived back in the UK last September, and are just getting the paperwork together to do our 2017/18 returns. It's a bit of a pain, but I'm actually looking forwards to having it done. It'll feel like a line has been drawn under Australia and we can stop worrying about the things that need to be completed. Like Amber Snowball, Australia seems like a distant memory, it's all faded and I can't quite believe we lived there for so long. Very happy to be back ?

Thanks for the thoughts Ramot. We got back two weeks ago and were on Kefalonia (gorgeous and well worth a visit), so we weren't affected. The fires near Athens have been horrific, even one life lost is too many, and it seems that the fires were lit deliberately which somehow makes it worse. Sadly, I think we are likely to see more of this sort of event in the future.

We renewed our British ones a couple of months ago, because we had a holiday to Greece booked, and our Aus passports were due to expire when we were there. It was really easy to organise, and they were back within a couple of weeks. I don't know that we'll renew our Aus passports at the moment. We live in Scotland, and I think we'd have to go to London to do it. Not that bothered at the moment, to be honest. Australia seems like a distant dream, we've settled so well here.

Given how much they cost in food and other, you should be allowed to put a negative value ?

You will be able to claim it back. It just might be worth making sure you have documentation for the cats to hand, for example their adoption certificates from the pound if they were rescue cats, just to show what you paid for them. We brought our cats back and had no trouble because we had our TOR reference, but you might need to prove what you paid for them before customs will release them (or that you didn't pay for them, I guess). It also might be worth finding out if you pay duty on just the cats, or whether you have to pay on the shipping costs too.

We just provided my mother-in-laws address and sent a covering email to say that we'd be looking for a rental once we arrived, copies of our passports to prove citizenship, but we also provided a copy of my OH's work contract because he'd managed to find work before we left. However, you don't have this. Could you email them back and ask what other information you need? Also reiterate that you are moving back to your father's address temporarily whilst you look for a rental/work. I would imagine there are lots of people who go back in the same circumstances, so there must be a way round it. Worst case scenario, you might have to pay import duty on your cats, but you would be able to claim it back once you find a job/rental and can prove your intention to resettle. If you are shipping belongings you should be able to sort the TOR out whilst your things are still at sea.

Gosh, I hate to say it but your sons sound awful. How anyone could treat their parent/s like that is beyond comprehension to me. The UK is most certainly not a shithole! The cost of living is cheaper for most things, people are on the whole friendly, there are lots of community things going on for people of all ages, and if you pick your area carefully, you could quite easily create a brand new and much better life for yourself. Sure, there are bad areas and not everything is perfect, but you get bad stuff wherever you live. Do you have any idea where you might think of moving? Where are your husband's family based?

Hmmm, that does make it more tricky. I suppose the way to think about it, is that they are two completely separate education systems with different curriculums, and different styles of teaching. You can't really compare like for like. It isn't exactly like he will go from one curriculum, miss a whole year of that, and then start again in the next year with that whole year of knowledge missing. It's more that there will be pockets of information that he's missed, but other bits that he hasn't. In our experience, teachers seem to teach to stages rather than years. What I mean by that, is that in a particular stage, kids are taught the same thing, but at varying levels, so that by the end of the level (which contains a few years of school), they are all up to speed. When we moved back there were things the kids were ahead in (as you'd perhaps expect, given that they moved back a year), but also things that they were behind in. The teachers weren't worried, and just taught some of those missing bits to bring them up to level. As I said before, a supportive school is probably key, and if he is going back to the same school that he left he is going to be on a good footing to start with. I'd do what Quoll suggests with some extra maths foundation work at home (that will probably be the main sticking point, since you need the foundations of maths to build on), and then maybe a tutor if school think it necessary.

I don't know where in the UK you are moving back to, but would holding him back be an option, so he goes in to year 4? I don't know what the possibilities are in England, Wales or NI, but we moved back to Scotland in September last year, in part because it means that our girls got held back a bit due to the different cut off dates and starting ages. Had we moved back to England, eldest would have gone into high school, but in Scotland she went back to the start of the last year of primary. Our youngest had a birthday close to the cut off, so she would have gone up a year, but we requested she be held back to the year below, and that was no problem, since we were coming from overseas. I'm not suggesting you move to Scotland (unless that is where you're going) but more that you might have the opportunity to hold him back, since his July birthday is close to the August cut off (assuming you're heading to England), and that with the mitigating circumstance of moving back from Aus, they might allow him to be held back. It has done wonders for our daughter to be the eldest in the year! That said, your husband is probably right, and he will catch up if you put him in to a supportive school environment, so choice of school might be key, with some extra tutoring if he is having trouble catching up.

I've been in your shoes, and I know exactly how you feel. I persevered and tried to make things work, because I thought the kids (and OH) were happier and better off in Aus. It wasn't that I was homesick as such, just that the more time that went by, the less settled, out of place and lonely I felt. I put a smile on my face and went out and tried to meet people and make friends, but in the end I realised that I just didn't fit in and I wasn't ever going to make friends, no matter how hard I tried (and I really did try). We went back to the UK for a holiday, and whilst we were having a break from the family-visiting part of our trip, on holiday up in the highlands of Scotland, I finally told my OH how I felt. The thing was, it turns out he was a bit 'meh' about Australia too, and we agreed that we'd at least talk about moving back once we had settled back after our trip. Getting back on that plane to Australia was incredibly hard, and I'd have been quite happy to let my OH go without the kids and I. We moved back to the UK in September 2017, and it is without doubt the best thing we have ever done. We moved to a different area of the UK from where we had lived before (we came from Suffolk but moved back to the southern edge of the Scottish Highlands), by choice. We didn't want to move back to where we'd come from since we figured we'd changed too much, but wanted a new challenge. We have been welcomed into a great community. The kids attend excellent schools, we've made friends individually and as a family, been invited to barbecues, for drinks, to community events, we have neighbours who babysit and who trust us with their kids, whose chickens feed in our garden in exchange for eggs etc. The weather has been great. We got snowed in in February, but the community came together to help each other out, and honestly the good weather far outweighs the bad. There is no right or wrong answer really. Both countries are great for kids, and in neither will kids enjoy life more or less. A visit back to the UK might make you feel better, or it might make you feel worse, but at least you'll know, one way or the other, how you really feel about Australia and the UK.

I agree with the others, credit rating shouldn't matter providing you have the other things in place. We've not needed a mortgage, but we did need a credit card which we knew would be refused if we just went through a simple application, due to our lack of credit rating. So we had to go and see the bank and they got the card application approved by the lending team because of the savings we had. There are always ways round these things.

I have no idea how we coped with the heat in Australia! The kids have finished school today, so we had the leavers assembly (eldest left primary school today, so it was tears all round!), and it was cool in the church. However, when we came outside afterwards it was like stepping into a furnace! I've got to get her ready for her prom in a bit, and am hoping it cools down a bit before we go back to school to take photos. The kids have done nothing but moan about the heat! We've a paddling pool set up outside for them and the neighbours kids to play in, but it is too hot at the moment. We're going to Greece next week, which I'm looking forwards to, because our villa has a pool! Coping with the heat is much easier when you are on holiday, and don't have to worry about things like work, housework and cooking!

I agree with both Marisawright and Quoll. There must have been reasons for you to return to the UK, and if you return to Australia surely those reasons will still be there. Like tho others, I expect it is the situation you've found yourself in, rather than the UK. Is your husband looking for jobs closer to where you're living, and are you looking for somewhere to live closer to his work? I suspect the pressure of being separated, and you having to deal with staying with your mum and an unhappy 13 year old is making things worse.