craigyboy

Your location says Scotland

 

Probably living beyond their means and not being realistic in the early days.

is it really acceptable for intelligent people to make smug remarks about other people's circumstances ie what they should and should not have, or indeed done given the situation!! Personally I see no need, you probably have no idea what challenges they faced, or indeed their situation, likewise you may have had good fortune and they not. Seems a shame to judge other people's life's and circumstances when the facts are not on the table. Most people I met in oz as a migrant where struggling for the first few years and yes things got better, but it all cost money and time. Just be grateful for your own good fortune and show some gratitude. I've found being grateful and a wee bit more humble helps, not only you, but everyone around you. In short, don't judge others until you have walked a mile in their shoes.

I love the gold coast- great place. You shouldn't believe the crap they put on tv. Burleigh heads is fantastic and so is Broadbeach, Mermaid Waters etc. Most of the bikies seem to have moved down here to Victoria, sad to say from my point of view.

Surely you jest, $12!!! It is possible to grow them from seed!

I think I disagreed with you on another thread, but will soooo agree with this! We have bought and sold many times in Aus. We do do up houses! But never to the expense of safety or dishonesty. I feel like putting the gold coast and sunshine coast into the same sentence with safety and dishonesty! I just don't get building on flood plains. And out of principal hubby and I have become monsters, because we have denied our children the cheap theme park gold tickets anymore! It is just sooooo expensive for the tackiness you get. I have given up ever trying to find good accommodation in the gold coast anymore for a reasonable price. What you get offered is "Oh my good, keep your shoes on, don't touch and I bring my own pillow cases and cleaning spray!

 

The first house we ever did up was a cute two bedroom cottage in Harpendon, Hertfordshire. I don't know if it has changed, but I just don't remember the same dishonesty or bull.....T going on in England that now goes on in Australia! (experience only to NSW and Gold coast and Queensland).

E

unfortunately, the Gold Coast is famous for shyster development. I can't believe some of the chancer I have found out during the diligence period of the development process. With regard to housing the rental market is governed by private landlords charging way over what the properties are worth in badly designed communities designed for profit and the people who will live there a sorry second. for example a 1 metre long back garden is common place!!! The best place I've seen is North Lakes for value, particularly areas like Narangba nearby with excellent schools and good transport links to Brisbane. As far as developing here believe nothing until you have checked everything!!

So much is being built in my area for investors - all targeted at negative gearing - I wish they would start building proper homes again instead of nasty town homes with sky high body corp or units...

 

BTW Craigyboy - I've been dying to ask a surveyor this - They are building on the flood plain at the end of my road. One plot was full of water (really deep) from recent heavy rainfall. Then one day they got a load of earth and filled in the pond, flattened the earth and compacted it. These are building plots - Would all that water be absorbed by the earth or do you think the plot would slump over time?

Hi depending on the environmental classification of the land the type of foundations would have to withstand flooding ie house level is off the ground. The soil treatment is compacted to provide a compaction certificate which is presented to the vendor to verify the soil classification M classification is the ideal type. Regarding water disappearing that depends on the water table. As I said if it is a designated flood zone the house level must be above the ground.

The thing is equally you will hear the same things from people in Australia, she just sounds incredibly homesick.

Also when you have your heart set on going to live somewhere else all you see are the negatives, it could be sunny for a month and the first cold day that is all you see. To be fair Scotland isn't somewhere I would live BUT I have quite a few friends up there and they seem to have very good lives.

Yep rat race sums it up !!! I am head of property for a FTSE 250 listed group living and working in Melbourne. I have been in property for 13 years plus both on client side and developer side. You need a brain transplant if you are buying in this market and thinking it would be a wise decision. Do me a favour work out if you could still afford your mortgage if interest rates went to 8 percent if you can't then don't - mortgages are for 20 -35 years if u think they won't go up then u need to wake up. 40 percent of new mortgages are interest only basically that means 40 of people have bought properties they can't afford. Been there done that pre GFC in the uk and lost 60k plus but everyone said u need to buy as it will always rise and there is lack of supply. Would have better putting all my money on the roulette table and praying for red. Watch this space things will change and if they don't I will happily retract my commentary and admit I am the stupid one

Definstely a young mans game. I lived in Perth for a few

months and

found it to be a two speed economy with prices geared towards mining salaries. For example, set of three peppers (capsicums) in WA $12, but in QLD $4 big saving. So I hope a recession gets some reality ch CLS with prices out west in general but does not hurt too many financially.

Try Kent, they moved us back and i thought they did a reasonable job and were the best on price and were hlpful, we insured thro the company that are on pio and that was cheaper than the removals company.

Sorry to hear about your job woes but i'm a rics gp surveuor and had similar experience even with low level jobs so it's not about you, it's just protectionism and insularity, i would say tho that fro what i saw with contractors they did not seem to build up prices from any recognisable base but seem to aim to get the job and then make it pay thro extras and cutting corners.

This quote is on the money, I never realised how important ethics is until I witnessed some shocking contractual strategies during tender stage here!! RICS goes for nothing here, and that's a shame because the organisations has so much to offer.

Hi Guys,

 

Its been a while since I have posted, but I am back and with a heavy heart.

 

Australia just isn't working out for us and we are tired of fighting. We have been here for 1.5 years and love it...my kids have settled so well, there is so much to see and do, the weather is amazing...our problem...work!

 

I am a Quantity Surveyor and haven't been able to get a job due to lack of Australia experience. I have worked for a company since May last year doing admin and a bit of contracts administration, but I had to leave due to bad management affecting me personally. My hubby works in Oil and gas and has pretty much had work constantly apart from over the Christmas period, he cant get a contract so has been working for all different companies. Its not great and we are not financially secure and cat see that changing in the future.

 

So due to the above we have decided to go back.

 

Can people recommend shipping companies?

 

Thank you in advance

i absolutely agree with your post. I've done everything but real estate development management since arriving 2 years ago. Though I have had some cracking jobs, one better than the other, even ended up the sales manager for Mercedes Benz lol. I've just returned from Scotland and realised home is where the heart is!! You are probably a RICs surveyor and being told constantly about is experience is in time just too much!!! What I loved about being home , was that I knew what to do and everyone got me follow your instincts, I'm soon going to be behind you!!

Ok I'm going to cheat and do mine in two parts and I'm also going to pinch the text from one I prepared earlier :wink:

 

Our names are Robert and Kate, after considering the move to Australia for approximately 8 years on and off, in 2004 our dream came true and we received our permanent residency.

 

Kate had never visited Australia before and Robert had only visited 10 years earlier for a 6 week holiday. We had so many questions about everything, where do we live? Do we bring our furniture? How do we get a bank account? How can we get a rental? What are the schools like? Do we bring our elderly cat? Where do we go once we get off the plane? How much is the cost of living? Believe me the list was endless. It was a very stressful time especially for our young children who needed us to be strong for them. We didn’t know anyone in Australia and arrived with just 5 suitcases with all our worldly goods which was not bad for the last 30 years of our lives.

 

 

When we arrived we went in to a short term rental which proved a life saver, we had contacted estate agents around Melbourne from the UK and none were willing to consider us as a tenant until we were in the country. We were also advised that for each property that came up for rent there would be a minimum of 7 applications and because we had no Australian references we would be at the bottom of the list. So with this in mind we booked in to a short term rental for 5 weeks the cost was $1500 a week but I would have paid double this for the peace of mind it provided us. We even had the option of renting a car from them which cost $500 for the full stay this was great.

 

 

The first week our body clocks were totally thrown out we were waking up at lunch time but then we were wide awake until about 5am so this first week we didn’t accomplish much. We had access to the internet which was wonderful as it meant we could search for properties without driving around aimlessly. We had no idea where we wanted to live but knew that most expats fell in love with Berwick and the Mornington Peninsula, so we based our search around these areas. We had no luck at all finding properties to rent in Berwick as they were snapped up immediately, we focussed on the areas around Cranbourne (a new upcoming area), Narre Warren (home of the Fountain Gate Shopping Centre) and the surrounding suburbs we applied for a couple of rentals and got knocked back so we applied for around 10 rentals which was rather daunting as we were worried we would end up getting them all, unfortunately we didn’t get any of these. We were not going to let us stop this in our search and eventually we were lucky as one of the agents was an expat and felt sorry for us, she didn’t care about us having references, we had offered 6 months in advance but were informed agents cannot accept this. Anyway we got our first rental property in Australia yippee and it only took us 3 weeks.

 

 

The next thing was to purchase a car, we still had to wait for most of our money to come through from the UK so we purchased a small run around for $10k. That was easy and we could collect the car in 3 days.

 

 

We had been using our UK Drivers License since arriving but we needed an Australian one to help us put everything else in place i.e. banks, tax file number, Medicare. So off we went to change this over which was great as we didn’t need to sit a test.

 

 

We then needed to purchase furniture for our rental. In Australia 98% of rentals are unfurnished. Wow it was so strange starting buying things for your house again things like coat hangers that most of us have way to many of we had to go out and purchase, cutlery, plates etc. A lot of people asked why we didn’t ship our furniture but I think we decided on the best option, it takes around 12 weeks for your furniture to arrive and it would have meant buying or renting furniture, washing machine, fridge freezer until ours arrived so it really wouldn’t have been cost effective.

 

 

So with a rental and a car we now had to consider getting our life back to normal and organise schools and work, before this though we opted to drive up to the Gold Coast and have a 5 week holiday.

 

 

On our arrival back to Melbourne we got the children in to school and Kate started volunteering at a wildlife park where she soon gained employment as a Wildlife Ranger. She then moved on to work alongside 40 vets at the largest animal hospital in the Southern Hemisphere and has been employed with them ever since. Kate continues her studying in both the Veterinary world and animal psychology, behaviour and training.

 

Did we like Melbourne, well lets say it was totally different to what I expected, I thought it would be more baron, red sand everywhere and great weather and surf. Well when I got off the plane it was freezing and raining and looked just like Manchester lol.

I still loved it but it didn't really feel any different to the UK until I started working with the wildlife and then wow, I loved it and never looked back.

 

Property wise, in the UK we first started off in a 2 up, 2 down we then purchased a kennel/cattery on half an acre and were lucky to sell this to a developer to build a couple of houses. Unfortunately back then on the 136 we didn't have enough points and were 5 short, the only way to gain these extra points was to sell our house first as we needed to put a $100,000 in government bonds for a period of 12 months. This was the most scary time of my life, we had to sell the house not knowing if our visa would be granted and if it wasn't I didn't want to leave this house, it was very hard and I was very emotional and kept changing my mind and thinking "are we doing the right thing" "do I really want to go to Australia" etc, I even backed out of the house sale at one point which worked in our favour as the developer was trying to knock us down further, so when I screamed at him forget it I'm not selling he went white as a sheet.

Anyway we did sell, we moved in to a rental and 8 months later we were granted our visa. Our agent at the time was excellent but I've changed my mind on him since hearing lots of horror stories.

 

I am currently out so don't have photos of our first house together but it was a terrace a little like this

[ATTACH=CONFIG]20517[/ATTACH]

 

and the other was our house in Melbourne

Me, OH and DD age 6 moved to Queensland last June 2012. We stayed at a holiday let in Noosavilee for 5 weeks whilst OH (EC&I Engineer) looked for work :err: I have to say it was very daunting on arrival having never been to Australia before. We were jet lagged and scared half to death lol. Looking for work was tricky at first, getting to know what and how to search, tweak CV abit more but hey presto after 5 weeks OH got offered a fantastic job in Central Queensland! Perfect location for us as we're not and never intended to be city dwellers. I have to say he's on a great salary and never had it so good. The amazing climate here suits us, we're always out and about, taken up camping, Kayaking, going to the beach! Apart from the odd grizzle and at times it's still hard and still getting used to the culture, these things really do take time and patience but thanks to the glorious weather and super lovely locals in our area we have made a really go start. We certainly live a good life now, doing wayyyyy more than we would of or could have afforded back in the UK. My Daughter has a truly amazing state school and is very happy there. We still take things slowly and a month at a time but for now we are as happy as we can be....and long may it continue.......

 

Im not one for writing much but hope this all make sense :wubclub:

Ok I have been asked to start a thread by a couple of members now. This thread is for members who have moved to Australia and love it here, it's the stories of their ups and downs and successes and how living in Australia has improved their lifestyle etc.

 

Warning - Any negative comments on this thread will be deleted, if we miss one just hit the report button.

Wow thats a big jump - will look into depreciation in oz! But with the figures it's a no brainier! Even if we spend 5k on transport and air con and other changes - we still sell more than we could get in this country - plus the obvious we use it first! I don't know if we would want to caravan in OZ - it's not the same when its not raining :-)

I think it will be worth it cos the equivalent van in oz is around £30000.

we toured oz a few years ago and if you stick to sealed roads you'll be fine, we went down a few corrugated roads and my fillings nearly fell out so uk vans not built for this, unfortunately some of the best camp sites are on these roads.

All ozzies think uk vans can't cope: they took a bailey all round Australia and it did fine. Got to agree with the post though: would you take a land rover down those track, never mind tow a van

Hey craigyboy, Bringing a caravan over is different to a car, so there is no 12 months of ownership criteria to adhere to. If the van is VAT free out of the UK, as ours will be then you pay 15% GST (saves 5%), however I am trying to ascertain if the 15% GST is solely on the cost on the invoice of the van, or this cost plus the cost of shipping, I am waiting for a reply from Ironlady imports, once I have this I will post an update. If it helps others we were at the Swift dealer from Brisbane 2 weekends ago when their latest shipment of Swifts arrived, and they confirmed that the only legal requirement was the gas braiding requires changing. We reckon that all up we will save approx. $12-13,000 by importing ourselves over buying from an agent over here.

Hi great post: can anyone shed some light in what the import duty and how it would be calculated in the event you didn't own the van in excess of the criteria for personal import scheme?

ADHD is not a mental health problem. You will have no issues with migration and don't eeven mention it on your application. PM

me if you need to discuss.