lechatnoir

I have a similar conundrum where my Australian wife and Australian kids are happy and consider Brisbane home. My real friends and family are in the UK and as such home for me is not Australia. I want to go 'home' but the rest of the family don't want to and probably wouldn't enjoy it as much as living in Australia.

It's more affordable to buy/secure a good education here. Try getting into a 'public' school system in the UK without a bankers salary, at least in Australia if your local state school is **** you can get an affordable alternative.

Totally nailed it - home is a state of mind.

Not very inspirational or aspirational is it? Footie, telly, beer, aussie aussie aussie ...

Guess it's who you know. I know of quite a few people who found the job market too unfavourable and saw it as an opportunity to go back to the UK. I don't think they were making a decision based on UKIP or current politics.

It's also been the only time in the last 7 years that British people are going back the the UK and everyone is not calling them 'completely mad'. There's definitely a change in the air now that the UK is getting back on its feet.

We've been in Brisbane for 2.5 years now, we rented in Bulimba for 6 months before buying a place in Morningside. Our daughter is in her prep year at St Peters and Pauls in Bulimba. We are not religious but we didn't like Morningside SS as much.

It isn't easy to say better because there are so many considerations, but we have a 5 bedroom house in a good suburb close to Brisbane, our kids have an outdoor lifestyle, they go to a very good school without needing a bankers salary. The fresh food is very good, our diet has a lot of seafood and fruit and vegetables. In the long term future I do worry that Australia can be a very limited environment, there are only 2 maybe 3 genuinely renowned universities and there is an inherent culture of sexism, racism and a particularly poor view of women that really need to be brought in line with the modern world. The 'Aussie bloke' ideology and mentally is quite embarrassing. But then i remember the faceless town centres in England, the chavs, the racism that also exists - so there's no real winners and losers. The thing for me is that i don't identify with Australian culture and persona, and despite having citizenship I don't say I am an Australian.

Yes we were fortunate enough to earn good money but at the time this affected our child care rebates and once we were paying two lots of child care for at least 3 days a week in Glebe (Inner West Sydney) it was just not worth it

Hi - Me (36 yr old environmental engineer), my wife (3? year old mum) and our two kids nearly 6 and 3 live in Morningside. I'm from the UK and my wife lived over there for more than 6 years. How did you go meeting people? Are you still in the area - what school is your son going to?

I'm interested to hear from people who have moved back to the UK with kids - how do schools compare? were your kids unsettled? how much does the weather dictate your lifestyle?

Look into the price of renting/buying property and typical salaries for your career. Using this as a guide workout what percentage of your income will go on rent/mortgage and compare that to what you spend in the UK. Whilst Australia is cheap for some things, the price of living is going up and if you want to live in Sydney or Melbourne (and even Perth) don't be surprised to find its as expensive as London.

Register with Medicare Don't go to Bondi with all the other tourists, backpackers and poms with no sense of adventure Consider hiring or buying a car as public transport outside the major cities is pretty non-existent

If you mean Seven Hills in Brisbane then I would say it is a really nice place to live. It is a small suburb so good property can be a bit hard to find and as the name suggests there are some really steep hills in the area! However, it is a peaceful and safe suburb with a good natural outlook (trees, bushland & parks). It's right next to Norman Park and Cooparoo which have shops and cafes and the busier Bulimba is a short drive away. Our daughter went to the new Seven Hills C&K day care centre and its brilliant. Seven Hills junior school has a good reputation too and our friends children enjoy going there. Just be mindful of some aircraft noise, whilst the flight paths do change Brisbane airport has no curfew.

If it was just me then I think I would seriously consider going back to the UK in the New Year. At the moment I would like a bit more confidence in the job market before moving. However, because we are a family now a move to the UK is 99% out of the question. When my wife and i sit down and weigh up the differences and the pros and cons - Australia always wins. Despite the lack of family support, we can offer our kids a better standard of living here and the reality of everyday life in the UK is not summer in Italy, spring in Paris and winter in Switzerland. What i would have liked to have changed was to spend more time as a couple building a life here before we had kids. And secondly having done that, actually sat down and thought where do we want to have a family.

Why are you moving to Ipswich? There's much nicer places in Brisbane :cool:

Just say sorry i couldn't catch that because your Kiwi accent is a bit strong

Paul1Perth - that is why it is so important to make the best use of your time in Australia to build the life you want before you take on responsibilities that limit your opportunities to progress your career or have solid, trusted friendships. My friends and family in the UK are all still together and now have their own kids and spend time together. All that changed is that I'm the only one not there. I didn't leave the UK because i was unsatisfied with my life there and because i couldn't recreate that happiness in Australia I regret moving. But that is just my experience, I know other ex-pats who had different circumstances and now never look back. But I would say they do spend more time with ex-pats than home grown Aussies.

You need time. Time to build a life, a career, confidence in your surroundings. I got married and had kids very soon after moving here and because of this never developed my own networks and friendships. And now because personal time is a premium i want my real friends and family i left behind. You can have the money, the environment, the sunny days but if you don't invest in time it won't feel like home. Appreciate just how long it took to build the life in the UK and realise you'll need the same time again if you want Australia to feel like a home in the same way.

I moved to Sydney in 2007 to support my then Australian partner, now wife, due to her mother's illness. Because we did not know if she or we would be returning to London the move involved a de facto spouse visa, quitting our jobs and saying goodbye. We lived in Sydney for nearly 5 years and with two kids moved to Brisbane where we have spent the last 2 years. Below are some of the good and bad experiences from living in Australia - and perhaps explain why I now wish we had stayed in the UK. I appreciate that my experiences are not the same as others and equally those of you reading this should appreciate there is often greater complexity to life so each success and failure has its own back story. Work I'll start with employment as this is probably the most important issue for those not backpacking or on a gap year. I am degree educated and back in 2007 found the job market in Sydney very accommodating. Looking for a professional job was almost too easy; most interviews began with "when can you start?" rather than the interrogation I was used to in the UK. Within 2 weeks of job hunting i was turning offers down and cherry picking a great career move in consulting. I transferred to Brisbane without any concerns and my employer readily gave financial assistance to moving the family. Whilst many large firms operate a State business model (ie if NSW staff have too much work there's no guaratnee it gets shared with QLD, WA etc.), there is acknowledgement of people's professional experience. For an upwardly mobile country there are many people who have degrees but not so many who have been there and done that - across all professions i have found UK people doing very well with senior roles. However, as you may be aware whilst Australia generally avoided the 2011 GFC fall outs, now since 2013 the economy is in quite a fragile transition. On face value we are told that the massive down turn in the mining industry has resulted in both government and private enterprise lacking money coming in. The other issue is that many firms and government sectors are using this period of slow growth to cull large numbers of staff. Don't come here expecting a buoyant job market, good jobs are hard to come by and it's become competitive for the first time. For example, the major car manufacturers are closing substantial operations, Qantas is near bankrupt and letting thousands of staff go, the QLD and VIC state governments are in substantial debt and thus spending on services is being halted and state owned assets, including local parks, are being sold to drastically raise revenue. Having said that if you are in certain niche industries there is I'm sure plenty of opportunity but it definitely feels like the days of UK people falling into great jobs has, for now, come to an end. Child Care and Schools I have 2 kids who are under 6 and have been in child care and now the pre-school system. Unfortunately, beyond my own school experience i have no comparison to the UK as a parent but here are some thoughts. In Sydney we needed 2 incomes (total gross salaries of >$170,000 per annum) to live anywhere remotely enjoyable and close to the Sydney life style. This meant my wife worked a minimum of 3 days a week full time and our first child went to child care. The child care centre was fine and particularly once she was over 2 years old the daily activities were fun and of course most of the day was spent outdoors in the fresh air! Once we had two children, even with government rebates, the cost of child care within the inner suburbs of Sydney was more than my wife's salary (after tax) so it was quickly apparent she was going to work and we had less money as a result. In Brisbane however the cost of living is much lower so once we moved her my wife quit work and we have been a one income family ever since. So a big plus for our family and providing parental support during the important early years. A disappointment has been the public school system (state funded schooling), we found that schools rigorously applied our postcode to their catchment areas. In fact we found out from schools and from real estate agents that in some streets the cut off for a school is a house number so you could find you can't send your children to the same school as your neighbours. This had two outcomes - firstly the real estate (housing) market can be very competitive once you find out the right streets. Secondly, we had to opt for private schooling to ensure our children had the best available education. School fees are around $2,000 a year up to the age of 11 so its not unreasonably expensive before people think we are very wealthy and sending our kids off to some $10,000 a term school for the children of lawyers and doctors. The reward has been a school that seems vastly superior to what we could get in the UK. My mum is a school teacher of over 30 years in Kent and on her last visit spent a few days in the school and could not be more impressed with the teaching, resourcing and class sizes. She even said that we couldn't get a school like this in England. As he has his older sibling at the school our youngest child will also be able to go there. So overall schooling has a huge tick against it for now. By the time the kids are at high school age we expect to have to pay about $12-15,000 a year to ensure they continue to get a good private school education because again we cannot afford to live in the postcodes within the catchments of the best state schools. Friends and Family As I am the one in our family living away from family, this has been the biggest negative of the whole experience. Australian life is very different from UK life. People are quite local in their lifestyle, I found in my own work and witnessed in others that the sprawling geography means people do not live very close to each other and spend a lot of time in their own localities. As such i found it difficult to be doing the same things and being in the same place as the Australians i got to know through work. As such friendships rarely progressed to a stage where people were inviting me into their social circles in fact most relationships through work start and end with the working week. Having said that I was the outsider and most people had their own lives and their own friends. I just found that whilst very friendly Australian's have a notable separation between work life and non-work life. For the first few years the novelty of being in Australia meant i did not feel i was missing home and family very much. But as the novelty wore off, my kids grew older and I'm afraid to say the older generations of my UK family died - i realised that my life was happening increasingly detached from all my family. This is a pretty obvious outcome from moving but it is not one to underestimate. You cannot just pop over to the UK to see family - for example 4 flights this Christmas is $10,000 (just the flights alone!). Skype is wonderful but it does not replace your parents coming over on a Sunday for lunch and a play with your kids. It doesn't not provide any support if you are sick, tired or just need 10 minutes of time from a close friend or a treasured relative. Unfortunately my wife's family can't offer us much support and our experience has been as your kids get older you soon realise you are doing it all on your own. For those of you without kids or considering kids - again do not underestimate the emotional and physical challenges of raising a family with no support. OK plenty of people do it and our kids are great and thriving but for my wife and I it has certainly taken a massive toll on our relationship, energy and sanity. Environment Let's get the obvious statement out of the way - in Australia, especially in summer it can be very, very hot during the day time and night. If you don't like the heat don't come because life is not lived indoors here. The overwhelming bonus of living in Australia is the climate. From my experience in Sydney and Brisbane there is no real cold weather, the lowest it gets at night in winter is about 5-10 degrees so all those coats, wool jumpers, hats, scarves - leave them in the UK unless you are going to Adelaide or Melbourne. Because of the weather everyone is outdoors and not necessarily sunbathing (in fact Aussies are very concious of the dangers of too much sun, its mainly the Europeans spending 8 hours on the beach getting high levels of UV). Most of your time will be spent in the parks, beaches, beautiful landscapes and this is ALL year round. No winter blues longing for the rain and grey skies to go. No getting soaking wet before you are even at work or school. No need to pack for all weather conditions. The seas are warm, beaches on the whole are clean and there are some great touches like free gas BBQ's in the parks and beaches. You can easily spend all day in the fresh air. Add to this the wonderful holiday destinations with the pure white beaches and crystal waters, the expansive star laden skies, the mountains etc. - all those tourist brochure photos are all here to enjoy. The only two negatives are a) it is more expensive to holiday in Australia than to go to Fiji and b) in Queensland the sun is up at 4am in summer and because of the high humidity you have to be ready to start your day early because some days even walking from your house at 11am can have you sweating and looking for air conditioning. Money I won't discuss money too much as it is relative to people on an individual level but overall i find certainly in Brisbane we have more disposable income than in the UK. Salaries are comparable in so much as try not to use the exchange rate but work out what percentage of your salary in the UK goes on rent/mortgage and food bills and see what percentage that would be in Australia. Two downsides are that if you have to rely on Australian dollars to travel - its is expensive (with possible exception of the USA at the moment) and second if you want anything from overseas there seems to be a massive Aussie tax even if it comes from China. The price of cars, internet and food between the UK and Australia is one such disparity - to me there is no logical reason why these commodities are so much more expensive (in terms of percentage of income) than they are in the UK. I suppose its down to the lack of a free market economy - there is minimal choice in things like gas/electricity/internet supply for example so you just have to pay the going rate rather than have providers fighting for your business. I think this is probably enough for now. In summary i regret moving because despite trying I just can't recreate my friends and family over here and once the novelty wears off I have realised its the people not your surroundings that really add value to life.