Les Avalook
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Everything posted by Les Avalook
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I know each bank is different but Nationwide has a online limit of £10,000 per transaction so if I need to transfer £25,000 to UKForex I have to do 2x £10,000 plus £5,000 all one after the other as long as there are cleared funds in the account. It then takes 3 days to crawl to UKForex in the UK and about 24 hours to fly right around the world and end up as cleared $s in our son's Commonwealth bank account. No charges for either of us. The wonders of the UK banking system. :wacko:
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That's a long post to say.......the rate goes up and down....if it helps.......I can get $1.53 on $25,000 with UKForex right now....... never found Moneycorp to beat UKForex yet......:wubclub:
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????????????????????????? I think the answer could be yes. :wubclub:
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To late for you David, maybe you missed my posts in March, but we had almost 2 years to go on our old passport when our visa was granted, we asked our CO not to issue it on the Passport number we had applied on and we applied for a new UK passport, they allow up to 1 year to be added to a new passport if the previous one is still valid. So we then scanned the details of the new 11 year passport to our CO by email and then along with the grant letter sent that off to London to stamp in the new passport, good until 2022. Like you we hope to have sold our house by then. :wink:
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............thanks for not waking me..........:biglaugh:
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Don't think that the 3.00am thoughts will stop now because they don't. :twitcy:
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:shocked::shocked::shocked: What going on now?? $1.46 to the :Randy-git: £ Cue Country music. :arghh:
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:idea: You should have a file ref number from your acknowledgement receipt, quote this and use the general parents@immi.gov.au We just asked would we get a 'CO' for our Christmas present or should we expect to wait until the new year ( it was 20th Dec 2010 when we emailed) and we got a reply saying they would pass it on and then on 23rd Dec we got a CO, who then went on 6 weeks holiday :shocked: but that's another story. :twitcy: The visa was validated in the May half term week so we have almost 5 years to sell our house (and it feels like we might need it:wacko:) and move out to Oz.
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I would email them, we noticed we had had dropped 4 weeks behind Framboy getting his CO when we were 2 weeks apart on application thanks to Steve's tracker, we emailed them asking if we could expect a CO soon and 3 days later we got one. I don't think one email will hold up the process and it could just jog things along. :yes:
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You were lucky, when our son and his wife went out they had about 10 kgs between them over weight and Singapore would not let them take the extra without paying, it cost them approx £200 to send 1 of their suitcases from Heathrow which they thought was bad enough but then they had to pay approx $170 to pick up from Brisbane airport. :shocked: As they had decided to say their good-buys at our home and not at the airport they were on their own with very little choice, the total cost exceeded the value of the goods sent. :cry: Be careful out there. :wubclub:
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Yes they weigh hand luggage and people, very strict, :policeman: :twitcy:
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Lucky you Cakey. :yes: P.S. You need the family to pick you up as the public transport shuts down at 7.50pm and the flight from Singapore touches down at 7.30pm. :shocked: Early to bed and early to rise these train drivers. :rolleyes:
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.........a sticky brown mess after 5 weeks in a container sailing through the equator and beyond. :wink:
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Queensland is changing it's rules for the first time buyer allowance to make it only available to a first time buyer anywhere in the world and not just in the state of Qld (as it was). At the same time it will raise stamp duty for anyone else buying to fund this grant from 01/08/11 :sad: Just to be clear, if you have bought a house in the UK prior to moving to QLD (like us) you will not get the first time buyer allowance.
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Well they haven't changed for 27 months and still the pound has fallen by about 25%+ over that time, so if they stay at 0.5% for the rest of the year or more what stops the drift downwards? Me thinks it's more than UK interest rates and likely that the rest of the world think the UK is :Randy-git: We are doomed, we are all doomed I tell yer. :shocked: :twitcy: P.S. Has it stopped raining yet , I want to go out to play? :jiggy:
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If that money is already in Aud $s yes it is good news. If you have £s to exchange then what is given with the left hand is taken away with the right. :wubclub:
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Another way to look at it, 2 years ago it would of taken 275,000 of our lovely English pounds and now it would cost £300,000, not such good news now. :swoon: Thank God it's Friday, I can't take much more good news. :twitcy:
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Isn't the same thing happening to UK house prices? .....and the £ was 10% higher than now last year. :frown:
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Good point, when China comes to renew contracts on commodities and finds the rest of the world is cheaper than Oz the high Aud $ may not seem like a such a good idea.
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Very hard to guess where rates will go from here but this a real life example: When our son & d-i-l went out with P.R. in May 2008 we had decided we would want to join them if we could, at that time the rate was about $2 to £1. We put £30,000 into a 3 year bond in the UK and fixed it at 7% (those were the days). We needed about $68,000 for the 2nd Vac and at that time it was taking 2 years to prove settled plus 15 months for CPV. We had no idea how much exchange rates could or would move against each other, the only time we bought foreign currency was for holidays and were exchanged and used in a week or two. This June the bond came out and with interest was worth £35,000 but if we buy Aud $s we will get about $1.50 which is $52500 or more than $16,000 short of what we expected. :shocked: Fortunately along the way we decided to transfer money over to Oz over the course of our wait for the CPV visa so had had most of the money required for the 2nd Vac payment that we made in February this year (visas are also coming through quicker than old predictions) at an average rate of exchange of the last 2 years. The down side is most of our money is still in the UK and the rate is the lowest we have seen in over three years. :cry: Logically none of us are certain we will end up with a visa when we apply so no one would want to send all their savings out to Oz right away and it is only with hindsight that you will find out if the rate available now is good or bad. At the moment it would seem wise to send some money out to Oz (not necessary all at once) up to perhaps a maximum over time of 50% of what you expect you require as and when you can afford to and any time you see a blip up in the exchange rate. We just need to keep our figures crossed that Mervyn King does not continue to make the £ the cheapest currency on the planet.
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64,000 dollar question. Do you exchange now at record low rate of exchange and get 6% interest or do you leave it here and get <3%> interest and hope the exchange rate improves by 3 cents? Tough call. P.S. my 88 year aunt, who lives in Melbourne and is as bright as a pin, tells me to get everything over to Oz asap as the UK is still going down the pan. :confused:
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Hi Val, Something very wrong with your bond, £82 net is about 0.025% when it is easy to get 2.75% with instant access. (Northern Rock, Birmingham Mid-shires, Nationwide etc). Unless you feel safer using your bank for transfers most on here use a UKForex, HiFix or Moneycorp (to name a few) money broker to arrange transfers. It is not only the fee that you need to look at when you transfer but what rate you are given also. Banks do not give the best rate.
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Another option: We started sending money (not large but regular amounts) over to our son's account when we started out, we decided that if we did not get the visa then we would still use up the money on holidays to Oz. (:idea: He put our money in an off-set mortgage account so that helped him when he was starting out.) When the time came to pay the 2nd Vac we had to add about $20000 at the then current rate of $1.55 which happen to be the worst rate we have exchanged at to date. When it bounced back into the $1.60s we sent some more out and that is in his off-set account waiting our finial move out to Oz, we haven't sent any more since the rate dropped to it's current level. With Commonwealth bank he had to pay $25 to get the money out of his off-set account but nothing to send the bank cheque to Perth. We have not opened a bank account in Oz in our name and have made all payments from his bank account without any problems.
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......and we are only talking about 2 vac payments, it's house buying money where the real pain will be. :cry: