How long do you have to wait for an 804 medical?

[Diana Webster]

After not seeing us for so long, our son is very keen for us to go out and join him and his family.
Does anyone know how long it takes in Perth WA for the first 804 medical please? We have two properties in the UK to sort out and a lot to think about but have a flight booked for mid March. 
Also, can anyone advise on a good immigration agent in Perth please, who can advise on the 804 visa?

[Marisawright]

There is a preliminary medical for the 804 soon after you apply, but it's not too stringent.  You will likely be dead before you have to face the full medical (the waiting time for a 804 visa is 30 years), so there's no need to worry about that.

Be aware that an agent will advise you on your eligibility for the 804 visa and will help you prepare an application, but it's not their job to explain all the practical  pros and cons of living on a 804.  You may be aware of them and if so, you can ignore the rest of this post.  But just in case:

I assume you'll arrive on a tourist visa, pretending you're coming on holiday, then apply for the 804 once you arrive in Australia.  Once the tourist visa expires, you will be given a Bridging Visa while you wait for the Aged Parent Visa to be processed - which, in practice, will be for the rest of your life.  While you are on the Bridging Visa, you are in limbo. You are not even allowed to leave Australia - every time  you wish to leave, even for a holiday, you'll need to apply to the government  for permission*. 

Aged Care and other benefits

On the Bridging Visa, you are not eligible for any benefits available to a permanent resident.  That includes things like aged care and home help - are you confident you will  manage without any support in your very old age?  You might think you could just return to the UK if you find you need those services - but because you've ceased to be a legal resident of the UK, you're not entitled to those benefits any more (being a citizen counts for very little!).  You should be able to regain access to the NHS quite quickly, but there are qualifying periods for many other services. 

Medicare/NHS

I'm assuming you are moving directly from the UK.  If so, you will be covered by the Australian public health system (Medicare) under the reciprocal agreement.  However it's not like the NHS - it doesn't pay for everything.  Depending where you live, you may find a doctor who "'bulk bills" (i.e. his fee is fully covered by Medicare), but if not, you'll be paying anything from $20 to $80 per visit to the doctor.  Prescriptions are subsidised but you won't get the special pensioners' subsidy like you do in the UK.   That means you'll be paying up to $40 per item, and don't assume common items will be on the cheaper end.   For instance, my asthma preventer puffer costs $40 a pop.  Most of us start to need more and more medications as we age, so you'd be wise to budget a few thousand dollars per year in extra costs for medication/treatment.

You can get health insurance, but it would have to be Overseas Visitor health insurance because you are not legally a permanent resident.  It is more expensive than the health insurance available to Australians, but it does provide more comprehensive cover.  \

Property purchase

If you want to buy your own home in Australia, you will be treated as a foreign investor and must apply to the FIRB for special permission to buy.   You will then be charged a hefty surcharge on top of the purchase price (e.g. on a $500,000 home, the surcharge is about $40,000).  

Pensions

I hope you're aware your UK state pension will be frozen at its current level for the rest of your life, and you will not get an Australian pension.  

Other concerns

While being with your son can feel like the most important thing right now, do think carefully about the lifestyle and home you are giving up, and what life will be like in Australia.   Visiting children in Australia is lovely, because it's short term and they make an effort to spend a lot of time with you.  Once you're there permanently, you may find they go back to their usual routine and there's less room for you.  Will you be able to find pastimes to fill the gap?  Are you confident you can make new friends at your age? 

If support for your son's family is your priority, do check that you can afford to buy a home close enough.  I have friends who came expecting to help with the school run and baby-sitting, but then found that houses were so expensive, they had to live over two hours away.  Still close enough to visit on weekends but too far to be any help during the week.  Then of course, once the children got a little older, they wanted to spend their weekends doing sport or with their friends rather than going to visit grandma and grandpa, so they don't see their family nearly as much as they imagined.  

A good tip is to look up the U3A (University of the Third Age) in your proposed area, as a potential source of friends.  They are really booming in some places and not so much in others.  You can get an idea from the kind of courses and activities they offer.

 

*I should clarify that strictly speaking, you CAN leave Australia any time you want. However, if you try to return, you'll be refused entry at the border because your bridging visa (BVA) is not valid as an entry document. That's why you must apply for a BVB, which gives you the right to re-enter. 

Edited January 1, 2022 by Marisawright

[Diana Webster]

Thank you so much Marisa.  That’s really good advice and a lot to think about.  It may have to be the contributory visa.  Is that the one you have used? Was the medical very rigorous?

[Marisawright]

1 hour ago, Diana Webster said:

Thank you so much Marisa.  That’s really good advice and a lot to think about.  It may have to be the contributory visa.  Is that the one you have used? Was the medical very rigorous?

Sadly, the contributory visa now has a waiting time of about 15 years, so you might actually be worse off.  At least with the 804, you'll never have to face the rigorous second medical.  With the contributory one, the risk is that you wouldn't pass the medical in 15 years' time.  There is a medical visa that you can apply for if you fail the medical, but it's a stressful process.  We recently had someone post here, whose father had been refused the medical visa and was facing the prospect of having to return to the UK and start again from scratch in his 80s.

I came over to Australia in my 30s.   I've taken an interest in visas through these forums, and I have also met several holders of parent visas through the U3A in Melbourne.  From what I've seen, the two biggest issues to consider are finances and friends/lifestyle. I'll do two separate posts to make it easier to read.

[Marisawright]

 I would suggest writing down a budget, to make sure you can afford your proposed move.  Remember, if you move to Australia you will have no safety net in the form of benefits, so if you run out of money you'll be in trouble, and have to rely  on your son to support you.  No one wants to be in that position.

Include all the extra costs you'll incur, compared to if you stay in the UK.  The first thing to consider (apart from the one-way airfare) is, will you ship all your belongings, or will you sell up (which probably means giving most things to the charity shops) and replace everything in Australia? 

You can get a quote for shipping now, even though you don't know a date. That will give you an idea of the cost.  If you decide to sell up, you'll likely still need a Movecube (a small shipping box) for the sentimental stuff, and then you'll need to replace everything else when you get to Australia.  Remember you'll need furniture, pots, pans, cutlery, crockery, kitchen appliances, towels, bedlinen, whitegoods, the lot.  If it's a while since you bought some household goods, it will definitely cost more than you think.  The best way to get a realistic figure is to get on the internet an do a pretend shopping trip on harveynorman.com.au, petersofkensington.com.au and ikea.com.au.  If you're not internet-savvy, then a pretend shopping expedition in the UK shops will give you a rough idea, even though it won't reflect Aussie prices.

Don't forget to include the costs to clear out and sell your properties in the UK. You may also need to budget for some temporary accommodation in the UK as it's not easy to coordinate your moving date with your flight date. 

Then there's the cost of buying a home in Australia, if you're going to do that.  Include the FiRB application fee and the surcharge.  Check if you have to pay stamp duty, and include that if so. 

https://stampduty.calculatorsaustralia.com.au/

Now for your annual expenditure.  As I said previously, look at your regular medications.  If you like, you can research the actual cost on the PBS, or you could just allow $40 per item to get a rough idea. Also be aware that dentists and opticians are not covered by Medicare at all.  You'll have to go private for those, so add those in.  You can't go back to the UK to get new glasses or dental work either, because you'll be no longer resident in the UK and therefore not entitled. 

Income: if you have a private pension, that will continue as normal. However your state pension will be frozen and you won't get any increases.  It's hard to work out what impact that will have (apart from the basic fact that in ten years time, the value of the state pension amount will be eroded), so you'll need to make some assumptions.

Now you can add up your relocation costs, and the extra cost per year for however long you hope to live(!), and compare that to the cost of visiting for, say, three months every year. One of my U3A friends finds that her annual medical costs in Australia come to more than she used to spend on her annual visits, but I know she has health issues so that may not be the case for everyone. 

Of course finance isn't the only consideration, and you may be well-off enough to absorb all these extra costs.  However, I'm 68 and my husband is 69 and we've both been shocked to see how quickly our nest egg, which we thought was so  healthy, has eroded.  

Edited January 1, 2022 by Marisawright

[Marisawright]

Now for friends/lifestyle.  That is such a personal decision and everyone is different - including the two people in a couple!   

One friend - the one whose medical costs cost more than her annual visits did - is a widow.  She's been able to buy a home close to her daughter. She had no other family in the UK and not many friends, as she always worked in a high-powered executive job with little time for socialising.  The few friends she and her husband had as a couple, were mainly his friends and she wasn't that close to them.  So she's had no regrets about leaving them behind.  She's very into the Arts and has found groups to go to concerts, films and theatre with.  She has no regrets.

Another friend, whose daughter lives in Sydney, has not been so lucky.  They decided to move but then had a lot of delays for one reason or another, and by the time they were ready to buy, house prices in Sydney were astronomical.  They ended up buying over two hours' drive away, in a town with few amenities, and have to live in a small house on a tight budget.  The grandchildren are now older and have sport on Saturdays, and (as she says) you can't expect the young family to give up every single Sunday to spend with the boring old grandparents, so they are seeing them less and less.  She has struggled to find new friends or interesting activities to fill the rest of her time.  

Nevertheless she's a cheerful soul and says it's worth all the boredom and sacrifice to be able to see her grandchildren occasionally.   Her husband, on the other hand, is miserable. Before moving to Australia, they had set up home in Spain where they had a beautiful sea-view home with a pool, a great lifestyle and he had a busy social life with lots of friends. He doesn't feel that seeing his grandkids for a few days a month was worth giving up all that.  

Those are two extremes but I hope it gives you some insight into how differently it can work out for different people. 

[Diana Webster]

Thank you Marisa.  These are all good pointers you have given us and we have plenty of issues to consider and to investigate further or to take up with immigration agents.  

My husband is an accomplished saxophonist and artist and always finds bands to play in and arty activities and I’m in choirs and book clubs and would definitely join U3A, If we ever made the move.  In fact I once gave them a talk here about a previous job I was in.

We are already aware that teenage years are fast approaching for the grandkids, so we know we will not see too much of them but we do miss being with our close family so much.

[Amber Snowball]

@Diana Webster @Alan Collettis an agent on the forum who provides lots of support around parent visas. You don’t need an agent where you are as it’s all done via email etc now so you won’t meet an agent in person wherever they are. His company is Go Matilda or search for him on here and flick him a message. Good luck! 

[Quoll]

You might want to consider an alternative. My parents visited for 6 months of every year for 16 years when they retired but then the travel got a bit much and they decided that their old age was better provided for in UK.  They were in the fortunate position of building a granny flat on our block (thank heavens for the good old quarter arcre huh?) they bought a  car which served as our second car from March to October when they went home and they spent their 6 months here on  the golf  course and travelling around the country. They really had the best of both worlds. They made friends here and retained their lifelong friends in UK. They always said how happy they were that they did get to see a lot of the grandkids growing up but even though they were on our block we weren't in each others pockets. They got travel insurance for each trip but reciprocal Medicare kicked in just once when dad had a TIA.  I have a Canadian friend who does much the same when visiting her son in UK - airbnb seems to be her saviour for 2-3 month trips which she does every 9 months or so. 

When they weren't able to travel any more our eldest son happened to have emigrated back (well, he went on holiday and never returned) so they were able to attend some significant events in his career and we made sure that they got to meet their great granddaughters a couple of times for a couple of months and I visited every 6-9 months. Eventually we decided that they needed support so we went back and stayed in their back bedroom for 9 years and that actually worked well until dad decided that he really did need care and was happy in his "care Hotel" and we packed up his life and returned to Australia. Comparing what my parents had by way of support through the NHS and other social supports in their very old age with what my mother in law had here, I'd say they had a better outcome but old age is difficult and expensive wherever you are.

Everything Marisawright has written is true. I think it is a real gamble about whether you gel with the place and find friendships - my parents did because they were "out there" people and they loved  the heat.  I haven't - even though I've been here over 40 years - I just have transients no matter how hard I've tried and the 9 years we had in UK were the happiest I've been in a long time - I hate the heat (and the flies do me in).

Good luck with it. Being a Skype grandparent sucks but you do get used to it (never had all my grandkids on the same continent!) and when governments close borders and you don't have the freedom to come and go at will it does get difficult. 

[Marisawright]

8 hours ago, Diana Webster said:

We are already aware that teenage years are fast approaching for the grandkids, so we know we will not see too much of them but we do miss being with our close family so much.

Very understandable.  The main thing is not to think about what life has been like under Covid, but what life will be like when life gets back to normal.  If Covid hadn't happened and enforced this long separation, would you have contemplated moving?  If not, then moving now is more likely to turn out to be a mistake.

[Alan Collett]

On 02/01/2022 at 02:04, Amber Snowball said:

@Diana Webster @Alan Collettis an agent on the forum who provides lots of support around parent visas. You don’t need an agent where you are as it’s all done via email etc now so you won’t meet an agent in person wherever they are. His company is Go Matilda or search for him on here and flick him a message. Good luck! 

Many thanks for the kind words.

@Diana Webster: please feel able to complete the enquiry form here if you would like a freebie initial chat https://www.gm-parent-visas.com/category/804-visas/

Best regards.

[Diana Webster]

Thank you everyone for your help.  Lots to think about and follow up on.
 

 

[ausdre]

Hi All,

 

 I read thus post about the parents visa, recently I got a request for initial medical assessment for my parents,

They have diabetes,BP and my mother had breast cancer (25 years ago, she was assessed earlier as well and was granted visitor visa), My concern is there a chance they can fail this initial medical test, Have you seen any forum where such incident has happened or this initial assessment is just to check if any communicable disease is there or not lime HIV,TB etc .

your help will be really appreciated.