Johnny

Kelly, just ignore the trolls. Sometimes life pulls us different ways and sometimes we make wrong turns in life, nothing wrong with that and it takes a brave soul to face up to it, admit it then and try to do something about it. Is there anything like the citizens advice bureau down there where you can get free legal and debt management advice straight from the experts. There are always ways to deal with such situations, but you need to get the proper help.

You are not alone, don't feel bad. Lots of people buy into the illusion and get conned into giving up their lives. We got all the spin too from the glossy brochures back in the day.... "Huge shortage of people in certain professions" "Your skills are in demand down under" "Qualified migrants are sought after, highly prized and valued by employers" "Plenty of opportunities" "Wonderful Lifestyle" We arrived, and had to suffer nearly 8 months of unemployment in a heavily saturated and oversupplied labour market with lots of other equally highly qualified and skilled migrants from all over Europe and Asia already here and arriving by the plane load every week (and no doubt still are). We fully bought into the hype too, who wouldn't.

Best the agents can hope for are the enthusiastic excited newbies just off the plane to fall straight into their hands and sell them the dream Lets face it most new arrivals will go gooey eyed at the sight of a patio or a pool and will still happily part with their cash, no matter what the market is doing. But it wont shift the lemons in the transit camp suburbs miles out of town. .

Losing our British friends was the only hard thing about leaving Oz for us. Our Aussie "acquaintances" were forgotten about by the time we'd got to the airport.

The housing market can take a very long time to correct and reflect reality.

I thought the dual taxation agreement was scrapped years ago. For a UK only citizen, you just need to spend less than 90 days per tax year in the UK to have expat tax-free status.

As long as you have an Aussie passport you have to pay tax on worldwide income even if you don't own property or don't even live there. You are an Australian citizen once you have that passport, so you have to pay your taxes in Australia for the rest of your life There's no way out of it, not being resident or not owning property doesn't exempt you anymore.

For people in my situation who like to work for an international company, I could, if the opportunity arose, ask to be sent off overseas on an expat assignment to a Middle East or Asia office for a few years and I can enjoy full expat tax-free status being a UK citizen. Australian passport holders cannot ever have tax free expat status. Great if you never plan to work anywhere except Australia, it's not a problem.

It's simple - what's the real short-term chances of it going up in value ? What's the economy doing, growing or shrinking ? If both are tanking, then dump it asap and cut your losses, get your money out and invested properly elsewhere . If you've taken out Aussie citizenship there are tax obligations that go with it.

There was a huge mining & real estate bubble waiting to burst just at the time we left Perth. Real estate prices were going through the roof. There were lots of new sun seekers arriving by the plane load chasing the dream, and the builders were throwing up the houses quickly as they could, building big housing estates with little or no infrastructure in some pretty bland and dismal places miles out from Perth. Lots of people bought their homes at artificially inflated house prices, of course it was bound to happen. This time it will be worse, the mining and oil crash is going to be the biggest crash anyone has ever known. Its not a very clever time to be migrating really.

A lot in common with what we felt too. For us it was too slow, backward, racist, insular and cut off from the whole world, rubbish outdated expensive shops and supermarkets, poor TV (also non global and insular in nature), terrible healthcare and the weather, either it was stinking boiling hot to the point you could hardly breath and have the sand flies in your face all the time or it could be depressing bloody cold, grey, wet or windy the rest of the year and stuck in a house with no double glazing and next to no insulation, you really felt it. The whole city shut down at 6pm and at the weekends only helped rub it in how backward and isolated it was. Not like you could jump in the car and go off somewhere as there was nothing else there. Closest interesting place was Singapore and that was 5 hours in a plane. The day we got out of there and back home to the centre of the world and civilisation was one very happy day indeed.

We live & learn, I bet lots of us have gone through this too. I blew a great permanent job with a good company when I migrated ......but anyway its water under the bridge. Best to look forward to the future. I am sure you will get back on the saddle again. When you go back you will appreciate it more. Its good that you got it figured out what you want anyway.

A lot to weigh up there and a ton of research to do ! If your husband is only newly qualified in the game at 47, he also has a lot of research and emailing to do and possibly retake his exams in Australia. Some trades have to re-qualify. How do the kids feel about the move ?

That's a good point you make there about moving to Australia late in your career. If you have an established stable career in UK, it's a lot to throw away just to satisfy an itch for "beaches and a nice house". If you are over 40 it becomes a much bigger risk. Do proper research or make a special groundwork trip to Aus on a tourist visa, just to find out what work you can get first and what your chances really are. Not fully assessing all the cost/risks involved and hoping that it will just "all work out in the end" is a very stupid thing to do. Last thing you want to do is move somewhere with a shrinking economy and tightening job market to be facing the real risk of unemployment and losing chunks of your savings which you will never get back. We had many months of unemployment when we arrived, and we paid dearly for it.

Its a tough one but you are bang on in that research is the key. Failure to plan = planning to fail, as they say. Even go over for a visit and do some groundwork and meet some employers face to face before committing to throw your whole life down the pan potentially wasting thousands of your savings in the hope it will all just "work out" because there are no guarantees. It would be pretty stupid to throw in a stable life and move to a place which has a shrinking economy. When we applied for our visas in 1998 there was no info online and most companies didn't even have a website or an email address.

For a young man like yourself, UK has a great social scene what with the pub & club scene, gigs, bands, rock festivals. Pretty happening place, and your just a short hop in the plane from great travel on the continent. Were in the centre of the world and you do feel it.

Yes I thought I would have "loved" the heat too but came to really hate it. We live in the countryside now and love it. Got very bored of beaches. Medicare was a let down.

I can totally relate to all of what you said. The choking summer heat and brutal sun in Perth was never fun Much prefer the seasonal weather and we live in the countryside now.

You should give it a go if you are young enough. We first applied in 1998 for our visas and there was not really a lot of info online at the time and the internet then was over a painfully slow dial up connection where it took half a day to download a web page with a few simple pictures on it...all you would find online in those days was government and migration agent propaganda and promotion of how much better life was down under. Back then there were no sites like this where you could talk to real people living there and get inside info. We really had no idea what we were going to out to, to be honest with you. To answer your question in short, the UK has far more to offer for us personally, and of course nothing can replace family and real friends. For us, it was a case of grass looking greener elsewhere and having a sense of adventure which made us go out in the first place and in all fairness, it was an adventure at first. We don't regret having tried it but we would have really regretted not trying it.

Fine if you are still very young in your twenties without children. Pretty risky and expensive if you are middle aged to throw in the towel for a 2nd time. It will cost tens of thousands of your savings again which you can never recover from, screw up your career and possibly leave you without a pension.

The only regret was having to leave behind our nice neighbours, who were also British. Otherwise, no regrets, we have our lives back again. Living in Perth suburbia was like we had entered some kind of early retirement.

We returned to Bonnie Scotland too, so I know what you mean McFly. The thing which made it easy for us to get out in the end was that the values of the inner Perth properties had shot way up and the houses round our way were selling off fast, so we made a quick run for it. The strong dollar and the quiet property market at the time in Scotland was certainly another big bonus. I am sure the move home will work out good for you by the sounds of it. You may even find yourselves better off financially here too or at least in that your money may go further, I am not sure what costs are like there now but it was becoming really expensive just before we left.

I could ask the same question as to why you are so called "settled" in Australia yet are on a thread which applies to those considering a move back to UK ? To answer your question, I posted only to hopefully show others that just maybe moving home can work out for them too. As regards hankerings, yes- our superb Welsh & Geordie neighbours we had each side of us and all the things we did together is what we miss most.

Our move home went well. We migrated to Perth in 2000, and we left in 2008 and headed back to UK. We haven't regretted the move back home one bit. It took us 8 years in Perth to realise that we had actually left a better life behind us in the UK. Once the novelty of the nice beaches, Fremantle and Kings Park etc wore off after a year or so, it just became a grind which was not very different to a grind anywhere else. WA was very kind to us though because property was very cheap when we first arrived and we bought our home in Perth which shot way up in value during the time we owned it which in turn has enabled us to buy the UK house we live in now. I could never give up the life I have now to go back to live that slow dull suburban life again. For us the move home was everything we hoped for and much more.

You are making the right choice - Scotland is an amazing country.