s713

Probably finance. The suburbs in the far North and South are like that, and people move there because they're affordable. You can get a house like that, near the coast, for $500k. BUT, you're stuck in suburbia, it's crap. If you want the hills, or the western suburbs, the price is hiked. We lived in Joondalup and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I'd always advise anyone to get a smaller pad in Mt Lawley, Freo, Applecross etc. than get a McMansion in one of those suburban areas.

Second that. The western suburbs are your best bet in Perth. Cottesloe, Fremantle etc. Personally Freo for me.

On 14/10/2020 at 18:30, tea4too said:

Lovely photo Bunbury, and not too far from us. Never mind the weather I think Wales is massively underrated (but happy for that to remain a well kept secret in many ways ).  T x

I'm not Welsh nor do I work for the tourist board but Wales is my absolute fave place, it's amazing. It's got everything, beaches, forests, mountains you name it. We try and have a weekend there every couple of months with the pooches. Gorgeous.

On 11/10/2020 at 10:52, bunbury61 said:

Just had to have my best mate put down - bloody heartbroken .

Sorry to read that, must be awful.

I just went to the post office, got a form, filled it in, said I had lost my old one, attached a photo and had a new license in a week. Easy.

There's a 'moving back to the UK' section on this site, have a look in there, you'll see lots of examples of people in similar situations.

My Dad had a mate in Tamworth, said it was amazing. Nothing like that in Perth.

We all spend money on different things. We earned nearly $200k in Oz, we earn £70k here and are better off. Our mortgage in Oz was a killer, despite a modest living. Depends what you spend your money on, we love going out etc.

It is what it is. Put it this way, people in the UK moan about the weather, people in WA moaned about the weather. Whatever your motivations are for moving to the other side of the world, I'm not sure the weather should be one of them. Personally, I don't think it's enough.

No idea, good luck with it though, we jump across to Wales whenever we can, it's fantastic.

I lived in Perth, it's nice to have seasons here in the UK. The weather this year has been fab, it's fantastic this week, got up at 7am this morning and walked the dogs in shorts and t-shirt; not bad for the middle of September. It will change to autumn soon but, by the time it does, I'll be ready for it. Then winter and Xmas. I've been in shorts since mid-March, I'll take that no problem.

The weather has surprised me in the (near) 18 months we've been back, I don't know whether it is better now than when we left in 2008 or just whether we were moaning for nothing. Either way, the weather here is absolutely not a negative IMO.

It sounds as though it is suburb specific. We lived in Perth far Northern suburbs (Joondalup) and the agent more or less stated that people aren't looking at the Metro extremities as much as they used to, I think buyer demographics have changed a lot. Your basic pom-by-the-sea type buyer is much less evident these days.

We sold last year for less that what we paid 10 years previous. The estate agent told us prices in most suburbs were at pre-2008.

Just out of interest looked at realestate.com.au and there are houses still on there that were for sale in April 2019 when we moved.

16 hours ago, Island said:

Hi S713

How soon before the flight did you get confirmation your dog could fly?

Did you have to go into quarnatine when you arrived back in the UK?

Which company did you go with?

 

We moved back to the UK 16 months ago so, Covid wasn't a factor. It was Jet Pets.

12 minutes ago, Anita85 said:

Ok so they tell you what's available and you just have to work around it? I've been trying to understand how all that works. Thanks you 

Ours had to fly on a Monday and via Dubai. And there was an extended stop-over at the half-way point. So basically they were collected from home in Perth Monday morning and I picked them up at Manchester freight terminal Wednesday morning. I think I was more traumatised than them.

The only things they required in Perth was a rabies shot 3 months before and a bit of a check-up.

So yeah, we worked our flights around theirs.

2 hours ago, Anita85 said:

Thank you 

It's never going to be easy and, if you're like us, and these are your babies, it's ridiculously stressful and upsetting. Our boy is terribly nervous but they handled him well, I couldn't fault them at all. This was well pre-Covid though, as the other poster mentions, god knows what the state of play is now. We had to use Emirates, no other option out of Perth, and the summer months were blanked out for our smaller pooch. We basically had to organise our flights around theirs.

On 10/07/2020 at 05:12, Lynne shenfine said:

Hi everyone. 

This is my first post on this forum, however, I have been reading for a few weeks and have found it to be extremely interesting and helpful.

This could be a very, very long post but i will give a little bit of background and cut to the chase! I am Scottish and we are known for waffling on!

My husband and i emigrated to Adelaide from Newcastle upon Tyne in March 2013. His family all live in the north of England and my family in the  highlands of Scotland. My husband had spent time in Oz during his training in both Melbourne and Brisbane for a year at a time (we are going back around 25 years!) He said Australia got under his skin and despite landing an excellent job in the U.K he never quite settled and dreamed of going back. He was previously married with a daughter when we met. A fantastic opportunity arose in Adelaide so we decided to go for it knowing we could travel and visit family and we could go home if it didn't work out. We had to give it a go or spend the rest of our lives wondering what if?

We left with our nine month old daughter and our second daughter was born three months after we landed. Our children are now 8,7 and we have a 3 year old too. Our families supported us but were equally heartbroken which we never really talk about!

My husband had been travelling twice a year to see his now teenage daughter and she had come to visit us too as she was getting older. I have never been back since we emigrated as my mum and dad were coming out at least twice a year and I wanted to wait until our children were a bit older before we made the trip. That was meant to be this year! Obviously Covid  has pretty much put paid to all of that in the near future and we are left wondering what now???? My husband id devastated at the thought of not seeing his daughter. Despite the distance they are very close (we all are!) and we have . done an amazing job of maintaining the relationship via visits and weekly FaceTime video chats and phone calls. My mum and I are also very close and I phone her every day but its just not the same.

Life is good here. My husband is a consultant surgeon due to come a professor very soon, loves his public job and his colleagues and has a thriving private practice. We live in a beautiful house with a pool close to the beach and  our older girls go to the local school where they are happy. I am a nurse but don't work so I am home with the kids. We have friends but haven't really found our tribe. We also have two dogs and a cat which we adore! We are permanent residents but haven't gone for citizenship yet.....stupid we know!

But............

It all looks great on paper, however, we spent most of 2019 VERY unsettled. We talked constantly about family and going home. At this point our parents were ageing and becoming less able to travel. My husbands family, including his beautiful 80 year old mum, and the majority of my family have never met our two youngest children. Hubbys trips back to the UK were beginning to take its toll as all his holidays were spent travelling home while i stayed here with the kids and no support network just praying there wouldn't be a disaster while he was away! 

We do love Adelaide, however, have issues. the summer is brutal and I often find the kids and I are confined to a fairly indoor lifestyle during the summer school holidays. My husband earns well but despite gruelling hours between tax and cost of living we aren't much better off than when he worked in the NHS!  His private work also buys him body and soul but it is very much something you are expected to do here.  We feel extremely isolated from the rest of the world and are beginning to regret coming here. 

My husband applied for a few jobs last year but we pulled out thinking that equally we would be insane to leave. I should probably add that my husband is 50 and Im 41 so the thought of starting again is daunting.

We pulled out of the jobs thinking as long as we can travel we can probably cope. Then covid happened.

We are genuinely now torn every single day as to what to do. Every time we say we will stay literally within 24 hours one of us has changed their mind! 

Its become all consuming and we feel we can't move on with life. We are also acutely aware that time is not on our side with regards to our childrens education, and friendships and our ages.

We just can't shake the feeling that our Aussie dream has run  its course. We miss our families and feel we are denying our children contact with them and in particular their  big sister.

My husband has applied for a job in Bath which he is discussing with his ex UK colleague this weekend to see if it would be suitable.

However we are also worried that going back won't be what we think it. That we are rose tinting it and we won't see as much of our families as we think or that UK winters are far more miserable than we remember! It would be a one way trip for us. If we went back we wouldn't come back to Oz again for by the financial implications we couldn't put our families through the heartbreak again. We haven't even discussed this with our families as we  don't want to get their hopes up!

It really is an impossible decision with no right or wrong answer. 

ANY words of understanding or wisdom would be so appreciated.

Thank you if you have read this far and i hope you and your families are safe and well wherever in the world you are.

P.S told you i could talk!!

 

Some points made resonated with me.

There is a lot made on this site about the 'outside lifestyle' however, as you rightly point out and I don't read about much on here, summers in Australia are excessively hot. We found that we couldn't always go out walking or basically do anything for long periods of the summer (this was Perth). People are very quick to talk about moving from one centrally-heated place to another in the UK however Australia is similar in that summer is moving from one air-conditioned environment to another. Same difference. Summers are OK if you want to sit in your back garden drinking, we didn't.

Skype/FaceTime is absolutely no substitute for real family time. When we were contemplating moving back, I made a list of what we had missed out on i.e. births, deaths, marriages, birthdays, versus what we had in Australia e.g. a big house, a pool, a nearby beach, more hot weather etc. It helped focus the mind on what is important and, for us, it was a no-brainer.

Since returning we have found that being middle-aged feels much younger here than it did in Australia. You say you are 41 & 50, we were both 48 when we returned, you go the pub, there is a much better mix, you go for a meal, much better mix, we got the first jobs we applied for etc. etc. It just feels much easier. We were moving towards thoughts of retirement in Australia, we feel young again here.

It's hard being a migrant as, chances are, you'll have a foot in each camp for the rest of your life, at least metaphorically. So, if you move back to the UK then, I'm sure, some things will be worse than they were for you in Australia. I can only go on my own experiences and, for us as 48 year olds, it's been the best thing we ever did.

We did Jet Pets from Perth to Manchester for our 2 and they were great.

The weather has been better than not all year. January was very wet, don't mind that, the place wouldn't be green without it. From lockdown mid-March until the end of June, the weather was fab. May was the sunniest month on record in the UK. July was changeable but the weather has been good again for the last couple of weeks. In fact, too hot if truth be told.

To the OP, I wouldn't worry about the weather, we have been back in the UK for 16 months and it really isn't a factor. Also, I'm not sure why you are still in Australia if, after 4 years, you can't identify with the place, have no friends, feel life is passing you by and are repulsed by the thought of dying there.

Great that your house is big and petrol is cheap but, you know, really?

7 hours ago, Paul1Perth said:

What do you do now you're back in the UK? I was glad of my yearly trip to Spain or Portugal, go anywhere in the UK on a decent sunny day, when you get one and 10,000 people have the same idea. There's nowhere to park and when you do find a space it costs you £10 an hour to park.

If you had anything like Hillary's in a UK seaside town, I can't think of seeing anything close anywhere, you wouldn't be able to get near it on a nice day, you would have to park the equivalent of Malaga and walk.

It's absolutely nothing like that. In the the hour and half it used to take me to drive to Mandurah (yawn) the options I have here are breathtaking. I don't save my money for a yearly trip to Spain, we have a weekend (or two) away every month, like we did in Australia. The weather isn't usually a factor, it's just as much a factor over there as half the time it's too hot to do anything. I've never paid £10 to park. Hillary's is OK for a bit, then when you realise it's 1 of about 3 options you've got for the rest of the your life, and you've been 800 times, the OK-ness wears off.

I appreciate that people might like that stuff, not for me though.

To be fair, I got the isolation thing. The main reason for me was that there are only a finite amount of things to do locally, then you're faced with a massive journey to do something else. We lived in Joondalup, there's very little to do there. There's beaches and Hillarys or travel east to Swan Valley and the hills, or head South (I had to stop going to Hillarys, I literally couldn't stick the place in the end). We tried further north a couple of times, as far as Monkey Mia, but most of the small towns aren't really worth the drive, it's just like driving for an hour then getting to another Yanchep, but usually not as good. You may as well just stay in the real Yanchep and save the massive drive. Moore River is nice, I rarely ventured further north than that. We just ended up in a cycle of holidays and days out to the same places over and over, I hit the wall after about 5 years.

Over East, I imagine you don't face the same constraints when it comes to travel options. Obvs, the tyranny of distance still applies.

5 hours ago, Paul1Perth said:

I love the rooftop bars, The Aviary my favourite, handy for the train too.

Bob's Bar was the rooftop bar near our work. I remember getting stung for a round in there, $54 for 3 pints of IPA. Funnily enough, that's my main recollection of the place.

I would try Sydney or Melbourne for anything IT-related. The sector is much bigger in those places.

On 16/05/2020 at 14:19, Marisawright said:

It was odd to come back to this thread and read our comments this time last year.    Up until the pandemic, house prices were still going up (against the gloomy predictions).

We sold our house in Perth last year 15% down on what we could have got in previous years. Looking at realestate.com recently, prices have dropped further.

I know it depends on area. Where we were, Joondalup WA, the agent told us migrants were down from 14,000 a month at peak to 1,000 (WA) and house prices were doomed. Looking at the website now, they are still tracking down. Great buyers market, probably cheaper than when we originally bought 2009.

On 15/05/2020 at 02:50, Paul1Perth said:

How long is it since you were here? Perth has changed a lot and there is a lot more choice in Perth now. Freo is nice but small.

Moved back last year.

I always found Perth CBD a bit sterile and lifeless. I used to work in the BHP tower so, you'd think you were in the midst of it but, there wasn't a great deal going on. There were a few bars and restaurants in that area but not much atmos in the places; and they're extortionate for not that great quality.

I liked Freo, it was a bit different. You can walk the place in no time but there are bars and eateries galore, all within spitting distance. That cappuccino strip has a distinctly Euro feel to it now. Perth CBD is glass and metal and, whilst it looks clean, nice and new, its a bit clinical and unwelcoming. Just my tuppence.