LKC

As far as I know, you won't pay capital gains on the money, if it is the only property you own and it is/was your main residence. I'd definitely recommend doing what ramot has suggested and see if Allen Collett could help you.

I suppose you could contact a few mortgage brokers and see if they could help you. I'm not sure if it would be allowed though. I'd have thought you'd have to show something like a contract of employment or some pay-slips from your UK job in order to get an offer of a mortgage.

As the others have said, it isn't cancelled. We've recently gone through this process. You need to look up on the Royal Mail website and find a post office that can do DVLA applications. We just went in with our old licenses, passports, proof of our new address (we took our tenancy agreement), the lady in the post office gave us the forms which we filled in, and then we went into a little booth for the photos and to do an electronic signature. The old licenses were sent off, and within about a week the new ones were in our hands. I don't know if the process is different if you don't have your old license though. The worst part about it, was that we did it the day after we landed back in the UK, so we were both severely jet-lagged, and consequently our driving license photos make us both look like they were made with police mug shots!

You could hire furniture too. We did that when we moved over. It wasn't cheap (OH's company put something towards it) but it was a huge help. I'm racking my brains trying to remember the company, I think they were called 'Living Edge' or something like that.

You might find he prefers a packed lunch in the heat anyway. My girls sure are enjoying their hot lunches here in Scotland at the moment, but once the warmer weather comes they'll probably go back to packed lunches.

I do vaguely remember having to complete one of these. From memory it was a Capital Gains Withholding Tax Clearance Certificate that we filled in, but it was whilst we were still resident in Australia. ETA: We were citizens at the time and still in Australia. I've just checked back on my emails and this is the form that we had to complete https://www.ato.gov.au/FRWT_Certificate.aspx. I would have thought your conveyancer should be able to advise you on what you need to fill in. Can you contact them directly?

You could do a bit of both. When we moved back, we decided that we wouldn't bring the mattresses or the sofas, but shipped everything else. Our things were shipped on the Friday so we were in an empty house with just the sofas and on mattresses on the floor until we flew on the Monday. We donated the sofas to the kids school (they were setting up little study nooks so had them for them), and arranged for a mattress recycling company to come and collect the mattresses on the Monday morning. We arranged holiday accommodation for when we arrived, and just as ew moved into our new house we went to IKEA and ordered sofas and mattresses to be delivered, and again used them on the floor until the bed frames/rest of our furniture arrived. We also got a couple of cheap side tables, and a plastic garden furniture set to use in the kitchen. It worked out fine to do it like that. The kids enjoyed 'camping out' on the floor.

Our school was packed lunches with the option of buying a sandwich, sausage roll, fruit etc from the canteen. There were no hot lunch options, other than things like the sausage rolls with would be warmed through. The canteen at our school was run by parent volunteers (I don't think there was provision for it in the school budget), so if there weren't enough volunteers to make the food, serve it at the counter and clean up then it wouldn't open. The kids sat to eat either in the classroom or outside if it wasn't too hot/wet/cold. The canteen owned a couple of barbies which it would roll out for special occasions (open days, school discos etc) to sell sausage sandwiches (which is a sausage wrapped in a slice of bread with tomato ketchup).

We live in one of a cluster of three villages, which has house prices from under £100,000 (a two bed sold for £55k in October last year) to up to £1 million or more. The house we've just bought falls somewhere in between those two figures. Our house in Australia was sold for quite a bit more than we bought for here, this house is slightly bigger, and we are approximately the same driving time from Edinburgh as we were from Sydney. That said, house prices are crazy in Sydney, and as house prices had increased so much over the time we were there, we did quite well when we sold it. The huge difference between top and bottom house prices here was a surprise to me when we first started looking. I'd not experienced that before, and always lived in places with a smaller difference between the least and most expensive. I wonder if it is to do with school catchments? The catchments in Scotland are more fixed and tend to be based on geography rather than numbers of pupils, as I think they are in England. If you are in the catchment, you get a place and the school will be given more/fewer teachers as required. No one seems to talk about moving to get their kids into a better school, because schools seem much more of a level standard (of course there will be exceptions), so I guess the house prices aren't influenced as much. We don't have SATS and OFSTED, you just go to your local school. If we did, and our school was rated as good or outstanding, the bottom and mid house prices would have been pushed upwards as people moved to get their kids into the school, narrowing the range of prices.

We moved to Australia on a 457 with my husband's job. A month after we got PR his occupation was removed from the list. We'd have been fine, because although I was at home with the kids at the time, my occupation was (and still is) on the list, so we could have switched, with him at home with the kids and me out working for the visa. A temporary visa is a temporary visa, and you should probably not risk it with kids without a backup route to PR, if that is the aim. I know there have been lots of changes recently with the temporary visas, so you need to double check what those are. If you are happy to treat the move as a temporary thing, then move on a temporary visa. However, if you would like to move on a more long term basis I would always recommend PR with kids unless you have a solid backup.

Yes, do Medicare first. Our Medicare cards arrived within the week, just don't tell them it's temporary. I think you can drive on a PR visa on a UK license for three months after you arrive, so it isn't urgent. Once you have a Medicare card you are registered in the Aus Government system, so other things become easier.

We do a bit of both. Some weekends we need to do things at home (we've just moved into a new house so every weekend seems to be filled with building bookcases or wardrobes and unpacking boxes at the moment), but some weekends we go off on adventures. We've two holidays coming up in the next few months, so we're doing a bit more around the house to try and get things done before we go. At other times we'd go out every weekend. Depends on what's going on.

I trained as an optometrist, and it is indeed the UV that causes damage. It can cause cataracts, macular degeneration, pterygium (a sort of pink non-cancerous growth on the conjunctiva), photokeratitis (sunburn of the cornea, usually from being by the sea or snow all day with no sunglasses - from reflected light), and of course skin cancer which can occur on the lids and lid margins. I am finding the low sun more troublesome here, but it is due to the location of my house and the direction I have to travel in. In this house I am driving just off east when I take the kids to school, so the sun is in my eyes. If I go out at lunchtime the sun is positioned where I need to look south before turning north at a junction, so it is in my eyes. It isn't too bad when I come home from school. When we lived in a different village on the opposite side of school from where we are now, I had the opposite problem. If your house and workplace/school is located in a place where you are not driving east in the morning, south at lunchtime or west in the evening, you won't have any trouble. That said, UV levels are higher in Australia so I would always recommend sunnies are worn outside. Glass blocks/absorbs UV, so it won't matter from an eye health perspective if you don't wear sunnies in the car (providing the windows are closed). However, they also cut down glare, which helps with visual comfort. Hope that helps

Yep, house prices in Sydney are mad. We sold our house in the Engadine area (right at the southern edge of Sutherland Shire) for $1.52 million. It was a gorgeous house, but it went for way more than we were hoping for. It wasn't even a potential development site for units or anything, just a local family bought it.

This was sadly the case with our eldest, who was diagnosed with Asperger's at the age of six. She got no help, aside from what we paid for. School really offered her very little support, and as she is a polite and quiet girl she pretty much went unnoticed, until she developed anxiety problems (due to being bullied in part) at which point it was easier for the school to phone and have me fetch her home, than encourage her to use the coping strategies that her psychologist had taught her. Basically she fell into the 'Too Hard' basket, and as she wasn't disruptive it didn't really matter. Her paperwork didn't even get passed on when starting a new year. Her year 5 teacher called me in to ask why she was doing certain things in class and had no idea about her diagnosis. I asked if she knew that DD had been diagnosed with autism, and she was like 'Yes, that makes sense now'. To be fair, she was the best teacher she had though, once she knew. Her school here in the UK has been the complete opposite. Within a few weeks of her starting school I had had meetings with the school's SEN teacher, had met with the head of the SEN team at the high school she will be going to in August to discuss her transition to high school and see how they can best support her, and she had been referred by school to an OT. She has since seen the OT for an assessment at the hospital, and they have arranged for an OT to attend school and help her with some things.

I know, it's just that this is how most other people (who haven't returned) seem to see it, as do people who have never tried migrating at all (a couple of family members/friends have said this to me, despite themselves having never moved from the part of the city they were born in). I don't think that anyone who returns has failed. You can't see what is going to happen in the future and how circumstances will change. Failure is not giving it a go in the first place.

Lake Garda is on my (very long) list! Looks beautiful! I think this time we might go to Kefalonia.

I know, I was being facetious! I've been to Barcelona, albeit very briefly, and really enjoyed my time there. I quite fancy Granada, it looks really interesting. I did Spanish for a short time at school, although these days I think I would only be able to ask my way to the town hall!

We don't consider that we're failed migrants either. We went for an adventure, we had an adventure, now we're having another adventure. That said, we chose to move to a place in the UK that we've not lived in before (Scotland, funnily enough) so maybe it is easier for me to see it as another adventure than if we'd just gone back to Suffolk. I'm happy with the choices we've made in our lives. I think we could possibly have done with moving back to the UK slightly earlier than we did because the last two years were particularly hard for me, but who knows? Maybe I needed things to be hard, and it was that that made our move to Scotland a very positive one. The kids are happy, they love it here, and that is really what counts. We're just thinking of booking our first European holiday, and I can categorically state it won't be a boozy trip to the Costa del Sol!

They sure are!

We didn't have any problems with anything, and I don't recall being told to clean things when we moved back. It wasn't mentioned at all by the shipper. I did have a look at the HMRC site to find out information about the TOR etc before we moved, and as you say it just mentions illegal goods etc.

I used to use it in Aus. It is expensive, but I found it lasted ages, and it didn't cause my skin to break out. You can get it a bit cheaper from online shops.

Dermalogica do a sunscreen 'Solar Defence Booster' that you add to your normal moisturiser, which might work. Alternatively Skinstitut do one which is nice.

Probably not helpful, but get a cat or two! We had cockroaches (in my oven gloves amongst other places), but once we got our cats they were no more! We didn't get spiders in the house either once we got them!

@katieoz, I don't mind at all. We moved to Scotland. Nothing to do with the area we were in, it was just time for us to return to the UK. We missed family, the kids were coming up to high school age so it was a kind of now or never moment, and lots of other reasons. We really liked Engadine, the school was great and there were lots of things to do. The girls used to do swimming lessons and gymnastics, we used to do lots of bushwalking, it's close to Miranda for things like the cinema, shopping and restaurants, and also not too far to the airport. OH used to cycle to the train station and then get the train to Hurstville for work. It was just a really lovely little suburb. Slightly apart from the rest of Sutherland Shire, so a bit more laid back, but still convenient.