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After positive things about oz plz


Guest waitingtogotooz

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Guest waitingtogotooz

Hi all,

 

We have just been granted our 175 visa and are now actively selling, researching and planning our move to oz.

 

However, all I seem to hear and read are negative things on moving to oz, it is getting my quite down and making me have a wobble...

 

People coming out of the wood work saying we wont cope/survive, expense is sooo high compared to UK and after browsing on the returning to UK thread I am starting to panic a bit and lose sight in why we are going if only to regret and move back, bearing in mind we will be taking our three children (12, 10, 3). Even my friend who has just gone out there on a one year visa emailed me to and in her words "warn" me, same sh*t diff country, expensive, etc etc

 

We have decided on Adeaide btw.

 

Just wanted some positive things from people who are out there now instead of negative.

 

cheers,

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Guest Guest31881

What you have to remember is that the returning to the UK thread is designed for member who for one reason or another are returning to the UK. Some on there do like to make a noise about it and try to spread doom and gloom everywhere, others are very factual threads and can be of great help to people moving out here.

 

The vast majority of members who move to Australia settle and like the life here, you do not see so many posts from these members for one very simple reason. Once they arrive and settle here they no longer need a migration forum and tend to stop posting.

 

No one can guarantee you will like the lifestyle in Australia but PIO has over 50,000 members only a small percentage have returned. Some say it is expensive here because they compare prices to the UK, What you have to compare is the % of your monthly pay goes on rent/food/electricity etc, Do not compare prices with the UK, you wil be earning $ so you have to think $ .

 

Have you looked on our sister site for the Adelaide area. you may find the posts on there more reassuring and balanced for the area you are looking at.

 

http://www.pomsinadelaide.com/

 

Take a look at that site. and despite what some would have you believe it is a great country.

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Guest waitingtogotooz

Lol @ Anlopa

And

Thank u

 

It's only a teeny tiny wobble, I am a member at the sister site too thank u. I am just fed up of ppl saying we won't make it.

We won't be comparing either we will b earning (hopefully) an ozzie wage so won't have no reason to compare back to the UK.

It's just nice & reassuring to hear the good stuff, or maybe I'll just wait to find out for myself :)

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Hi, If you are wanting positive feedback and stories I would suggest to stay away from this forum! Its easly to get caught up in the negatives of what amounts to be a small percentage of a large group of people who have immigrated and for their own reasons have not been able to settle, there are just as many who have great stories.

 

I have just returned with my partner from the UK after spending the last 4 years there so I have a direct comparison of costs etc.

 

I lived prior to this in Adelaide for 22 years and am now currently in Brisbane and soon to be in Melbourne....we just live the punishment of moving too much!!

 

Adelaide is a lovely place and like anywhere in the world has its nasty bits too. If you have friends there or family use there experience to decide on where to live and go on the South Australian forum to gleen information from new arrivals.

 

The reason I loved Adelaide is that it is smaller than other Aust capitals and has a lovely slower way of life in some respects and everything is so close to get too. From The CBD to the beaches, hills, wine regions is about half and hour to and hour in any direction.

Adelaide may be smaller but is full of nice pubs, restaurants cafes and clubs, plenty to do and in the beach suburbs and the city and North Adelaide ( not to be confused with Northern suburbs! ) you can walk around and people will be sitting at roadside cafes, restauants and pubs eating and drinking till about 2am ( I have found in Brisbane things close very early). The people are very friendly and most of the suburbs are really nice, if you want to llive close to the city the surrounding suburbs are lovely but of course you will always pay more for rent.

I think that when we first arrived back even only after a 4 year break I found some things seemed expensive but once you stop converting and realising costs as a percentage of your Australian Salary you relax a little! We are not spending pounds afterall.

A lot of food is cheaper here and some especially what is considered junk food or pre prepared food is expensive this is because GST is applied to everything that has a service attached ie cooked or preprepared, biscuits, crisps, snacks, cakes. But you will find fresh produce and meat etc to be well priced and better quality. In adelaide you have a good choice of markets too for fresh produce, Central Market in the CBD is excellent. The rents in Adelaide are less expensive than here in Brisbane and you get quite a bit for your money, dont forget when renting in Au to remember that you dont pay council tax here so factor that into the price also.

Dont panic cos if you arrive with the right attitude and an adventureous spriit you will be fine. You will love the lifestyle the beautiful beaches, the wine tasting in the Barrossa and Mclaren Vale and the lovely little towns in the hills or the southern vales where there is great food and a lovely atmosphere. Your children will have more freedom to be outside and will make freinds at school and settle down its a good age for them.

If you want any particular into let me know and if I can help i will. Kath

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Hi all,

 

We have just been granted our 175 visa and are now actively selling, researching and planning our move to oz.

 

However, all I seem to hear and read are negative things on moving to oz, it is getting my quite down and making me have a wobble...

 

People coming out of the wood work saying we wont cope/survive, expense is sooo high compared to UK and after browsing on the returning to UK thread I am starting to panic a bit and lose sight in why we are going if only to regret and move back, bearing in mind we will be taking our three children (12, 10, 3). Even my friend who has just gone out there on a one year visa emailed me to and in her words "warn" me, same sh*t diff country, expensive, etc etc

 

We have decided on Adeaide btw.

 

Just wanted some positive things from people who are out there now instead of negative.

 

cheers,

 

Hi There,

Congrats on your visa!

We haven´t moved out yet, but we have a job offer and a sponsor, but are still waiting for our visa to be finalised. I am really excited about moving out there, we are going to Queensland and to be honest it just can´t come quick enough.

 

We have lived in Spain since 2007 and have toyed with the idea of moving back to the UK as things have become really expensive here, plus there is absolutely no work, and for us work is our main priority and coming in a close second is quality of life, and unless I have been getting my wires crossed OZ is all about quality of life, where we are we have very little quality of life, just can´t afford to do the things we used to do, such as shopping and eating out. The shops are naff here and the fashion is almost Victorian!

 

We still have property in the UK so it would be easy for us to move back there, but I ask myself why?

 

One of the most gut wrenching things for me to do was to leave my family behind but I have somehow come to terms with that, maybe if I still had Mum & Dad then my decision to move so far away would be completely different, but my Dad told me years ago to do what was best for me.

 

I just know that we are doing the right thing and I would be gutted if our visa was denied, which I doubt, but because of all the rubbish I have had to deal with in Spain my confidence has taken a huge kick.

 

I have a friend who is from New Zealand and she has been to visit us recently and she has told me on more than one occasion that I will love it, you won´t want to leave, and you are doing the right thing, and that I will make loads of friends, which I just have not managed to do here, for numerous reasons (PM me if you want to know why).

 

All the people on this wonderful site who are living in OZ all appear to be happy, wonderful and grounded people, and that is what I like about the vibe I get, I want to wake up in the morning and feel that I once again have a purpose in life, even if it is killing 8ft Pythons! I feel already as if I am part of the OZ life, I have made more friends on this forum in the space of 3 weeks than I have in my 4 years in Spain.

 

Only you can make the decision, if I had done what I did a few weeks ago (logged onto this forum) and logged onto a Spanish forum I am certain that I would not have sold up, packed up my belongings and two cars and headed out for Spain, and spent my life´s savings but with Australia I KNOW that I am doing something that has a really good chance of working out, and I am hoping that we can recoup our losses and start to save up again to buy a house.

 

A couple of weeks ago I went back to the UK and spent some time with my eldest son who commented on how tired and old I looked (nice of him and very diplomatic) but he was saying what I already know, yes I am tired, I look old and I am so stressed out, the latter is down to applying for sponsorship´s and visa´s but the former is simply down to making one of the worst mistakes of my life.

 

I am too old to make any more mistakes and we both see OZ as an opportunity to start living again, and already I can feel myself embracing life as it should be.

 

I know that this may not really be any use to you, but I just had to get part of my Spanish nightmare off my chest.

Good luck.

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Guest guest57545

We've just moved to Sydney from the UK and we've found lots of positive things, I've joined some clubs which have been extremely welcoming and we are both enjoying our jobs and the area we live (Manly). I haven't ever been to Adelaide but we are thinking of a trip as we try to see the whole country!?

 

I tried to move here 3 years ago and it lasted only a few months, I think its worked out better this time because of having realistic expectations of what its like here. I would advise anyone who's coming here to research everyday things first so that things don't come as so much of a shock. For example:

 

- We are paying more to rent here than the UK but we live in a prime part of sydney and used to live in non descript part of Southampton - you can't compare the costs (a better comparison would be zone 2 london near the tube to manly)

- Big forum discussion I saw on TV yesterday - yes its very bad find something else to do

- Food prices seem to cost slightly more of our take home cash but then petrol is half the price

- You still have to move further out of the city to afford a bigger place and commute in just like the UK and everywhere else in the western world

- It does rain and some days are washouts but when they aren't you can sit on the beach and drive there unlike bournemouth beach on a bank holiday!!!!!

- Bureaucracy can be annoying I had to take a day off work to weight, safety inspect, register my boat trailer because it was "imported" from another state, be prepared for lots more of these type of things than UK

- We think it would be a great place for young kids - lots of activities to do compared to UK, we've often thought older kids might prefer europe for culture and weekends away etc???

 

I have found it easier to think of moving here as semi-permanent rather than 'forever' i know people who have made the move years ago and they found it easier to take that approach (less pressure). I know thats a contributing factor to why i went home before and why i'm still here this time.

 

hope thats a help!

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If you are reading the "moving back to the UK" forum you are bound to be getting some negative feedback. The people who post on there have generally, not had a good experience and for whatever reason will have a bit of a downer on Oz.

We've been in Perth for 20 years and it's been everything that we hoped it would be. Admittedly it's a lot harder to move now with the exchange rates, prices of houses here increased. I don't think the "expensive" argument stacks up though. It's all relative to what you earn and it's so hard to work out what percentage of income goes out on food for instance.

 

What I do know is the lifestyle that's available here (we're in Perth but Adelaide wouldn't be too differrent) is simply not available in the UK. Sure, we could have moved down to Bournmouth or somewhere on the South coast and been near the sea but the weather here is consistently better, the sea warmer and cleaner, beaches aren't packed, even on glorious days (which there are many) and as another poster pointed out, we can take our car to any beach along the coast here and park right on the beach with free parking. There are added costs to just abut everything in the UK and you can do so much here to have a good time that is absolutely free.

 

Good luck, if you want to read more positive stuff about Oz just browse back through my posts, not a negative one in site.

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I used this site a lot in 2007/08 when we were applying & moving over and it was a great help. Following our move, I continued to use the site to either impart any experience I’d acquired or just to join in the banter.

However, the negativity did get me down after a while and even made me start to question whether I was lucky or living in cloud-cuckoo land or something completely different. Consequently, I have to take the site in spells now. It had got to the point where people were telling me my opinion of my own daily life was wrong, that I lived in a terrible suburb, that I’d made a mistake, that Aussies hated Poms, that crime and drugs were worse where I lived now than back in the NW of England (yeah, right) etc.

 

I wasn’t encountering any of this in my real life in Australia, just on PIO. And it gets to you after a while.

 

It’s worth bearing in mind, for those people who use PIO, and whose life is tickety-boo on arrival in Australia, I suspect most don’t revisit the site. Some do, I would imagine most don’t. Job done, finished. Those who have bad experiences are a lot more likely to return to the site to tell you; even if it’s just to vent.

This is not to decry the assistance and help of some great individuals on here or the usefulness of the site itself; it is a great tool for anyone embarking on this journey. Of course, there are some people for whom things don’t work out for one reason or another, there are no hard and fast rules to this type of thing; everyone is different and has a potentially different viewpoint. But, just to reassure the OP here, for us, and the vast majority of people we know in the same boat as us, the positives massively outweigh the negatives.

It’s just sometimes some people shout louder than others.

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If you want to make it work, you will. Simple as that. If you migrate with your eyes wide open, and the right attitude you will be fine. It isn't easy, but then nothing worth doing in life is easy. It is hard work, it costs money, it is draining emotionally and physically. You are effectively starting your life again in a new and strange place, and that is not a small task, especially with children.

 

We came over to Sydney almost three years ago, and I would definitely say that we are one of the success stories. We have settled, hubby loves his job, children (5 and 3) are settled and turning in to wonderful little people, I have started my own business and we are happy, which I think is the most important thing wherever you are in the world. It is tough at times, being away from family, but you have to accept the bad with the good.

 

If you are the sort of people who get on with life and go out there and make things happen, there is no reason why you can't make a successful migration.

 

Good luck!

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Guest The Pom Queen

There are plenty of positives but in life we always tend to dwell on the negatives, it's human nature. If you went to a party and 99% of the people there liked you but 1% didn't you would spend most of the night worrying about the 1%.

Colin has made a very good point in that the ones who move over and love Aus don't tend to come back on the forum, they are to busy enjoying their new life. The ones who aren't happy come back for support. Most of the families I have helped have been PIO members and I can say 98% are too busy enjoying their life that they don't have time to come back on. I was speaking to a family yesterday who had the same concerns as you, they said they love it here, they also said yes the price of things is more expensive but the wages here compensate.

personally I love everything about Australia and could never imagine going back to the UK not even for a holiday

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We had a wobble before we moved out here, its understandable, such a big change. We have been here in Canberra now for just over 2 months and can quite honestly say we are feeling quite settled. My OH is working and I have our 2 children to look after. I keep busy, go to playgroups, swimming lessons, meeting other mums at playgroups and other PIO mums and the weeks are flying by. I do miss my family & friends (that bit is hard but it does get easier) and have had 2 down days but the good days are far outweighing the bad days.

 

We worried about cost of living, but you learn to shop around and although some things are expensive, others things are cheaper. So I think it balances itself out. I go to a few playgroups ran by the ACT family & child services and they are all free.

 

We went to a Community Christmas Party last Saturday in our suburb. It was all free, including the entertainment, sausage sizzle, beers, entertainment by Bob the Builder, Father Christmas presents, train rides, merry go rounds, jumping castles, etc. Had a great day out,kids loved it and we spent nothing.

 

Everyone has different experiences but I stopped reading the Going back to the UK posts and just concentrated on our family and what we wanted to get out of it.

 

Congrats on the visa and good luck with the move.

Claire

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There are plenty of positives but in life we always tend to dwell on the negatives, it's human nature. If you went to a party and 99% of the people there liked you but 1% didn't you would spend most of the night worrying about the 1%.

Colin has made a very good point in that the ones who move over and love Aus don't tend to come back on the forum, they are to busy enjoying their new life. The ones who aren't happy come back for support. Most of the families I have helped have been PIO members and I can say 98% are too busy enjoying their life that they don't have time to come back on. I was speaking to a family yesterday who had the same concerns as you, they said they love it here, they also said yes the price of things is more expensive but the wages here compensate.

personally I love everything about Australia and could never imagine going back to the UK not even for a holiday

 

I totally agree with the red bit up there. I also think that there are those who, if they have a problem, sit around waiting for someone to solve it for them and make things better. Other people (like me) are better able to deal with negative things/problems in life and will actively find a solution. Hubby and I are both pretty positive people anyway, which I think does help.

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What tint are your glasses? :wink::tongue:

 

Didn't need any at all mate. We'd never been to Aus before, did lots of reading and research at the now non-existant Australian Embassy in Manchester, was advised to go to Sydney or Melbourne as there weren't many jobs in Perth at the time. We bit the bullet and came to Perth just because it was cheaper housing and everything we read about the place was what we were looking for, climate included.

We had to rent for about a year but loved the place from the first day we got here and it's all turned out great for us. We both love sport, sunny weather, beach, swimming in the ocean, feeling of not being too many people. Now if you don't like the same things, there are plenty that don't, I realise that from some of the posts I see, then you might not like it here. For us it's close to paradise.

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I used this site a lot in 2007/08 when we were applying & moving over and it was a great help. Following our move, I continued to use the site to either impart any experience I’d acquired or just to join in the banter.

However, the negativity did get me down after a while and even made me start to question whether I was lucky or living in cloud-cuckoo land or something completely different. Consequently, I have to take the site in spells now. It had got to the point where people were telling me my opinion of my own daily life was wrong, that I lived in a terrible suburb, that I’d made a mistake, that Aussies hated Poms, that crime and drugs were worse where I lived now than back in the NW of England (yeah, right) etc.

 

I wasn’t encountering any of this in my real life in Australia, just on PIO. And it gets to you after a while.

 

It’s worth bearing in mind, for those people who use PIO, and whose life is tickety-boo on arrival in Australia, I suspect most don’t revisit the site. Some do, I would imagine most don’t. Job done, finished. Those who have bad experiences are a lot more likely to return to the site to tell you; even if it’s just to vent.

This is not to decry the assistance and help of some great individuals on here or the usefulness of the site itself; it is a great tool for anyone embarking on this journey. Of course, there are some people for whom things don’t work out for one reason or another, there are no hard and fast rules to this type of thing; everyone is different and has a potentially different viewpoint. But, just to reassure the OP here, for us, and the vast majority of people we know in the same boat as us, the positives massively outweigh the negatives.

It’s just sometimes some people shout louder than others.

 

There are times I've felt exactly the same as gpo. Posted about what happened to us, our life here, what it's like, what we do for enjoyment only to be told on here I must be wrong and I'm still wearing rose tinted glasses. As gpo says I give the site a miss for a few weeks every now and then as I get fed up with a lot of the negative stuff I see and start thinking "is it really so good". I have a couple of weeks away from it and realise it's still as good as ever.

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I'm with the positives of the other posters.............barring one thing that many returnees have difficulty with.........socialising.

 

I never actively sought the company of others. I'm a stay at home dad and have been since coming here 17 yrs ago. I didn't need playgroups or the company of others. I threw myself wholheartedly into findng things to do around the home/garden and walked everywhere with the kids in the buggy............even if it was 10k's away. I found the cheapest/best shops.............the hidden gems of parks/scenery etc and interacted constantly with my kids.

 

A lot of people don't seem able or willing to be totally involved with their own family life and seek others for fulfillment. I'm not knocking them............it's me that's weird. What I'm trying to say is that if you find your own way, and don't succumb to what you think, (or others think) you should be doing, you'll be fine. Those going back seem to dwell a lot on costs (IMHO). That's never bothered me..............if all's well with the family, if we're living life how we want it to be, I'm happy with beans or scrambled eggs on toast 2 or 3 times a week...............others like to eat out, so if they're in a similar financial situation to how we were on arrival, they won't be as fulfilled because they won't be able to do what they want to do. Can they wait, like we had to or do they want it all now? It was easy for us as we never were well off in the UK and were on the up the moment we got here. That said, we would have taken a step backwards to eventually get to where we wanted to be, but many aren't prepared to do that and will be in conflict with Oz from day one because they'll feel that they have lost out on what they had. We never think of what we had, or have lost, but only of what we do have and can have later.

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I'm with the positives of the other posters.............barring one thing that many returnees have difficulty with.........socialising.

 

I never actively sought the company of others. I'm a stay at home dad and have been since coming here 17 yrs ago. I didn't need playgroups or the company of others. I threw myself wholheartedly into findng things to do around the home/garden and walked everywhere with the kids in the buggy............even if it was 10k's away. I found the cheapest/best shops.............the hidden gems of parks/scenery etc and interacted constantly with my kids.

 

A lot of people don't seem able or willing to be totally involved with their own family life and seek others for fulfillment. I'm not knocking them............it's me that's weird. What I'm trying to say is that if you find your own way, and don't succumb to what you think, (or others think) you should be doing, you'll be fine. Those going back seem to dwell a lot on costs (IMHO). That's never bothered me..............if all's well with the family, if we're living life how we want it to be, I'm happy with beans or scrambled eggs on toast 2 or 3 times a week...............others like to eat out, so if they're in a similar financial situation to how we were on arrival, they won't be as fulfilled because they won't be able to do what they want to do. Can they wait, like we had to or do they want it all now? It was easy for us as we never were well off in the UK and were on the up the moment we got here. That said, we would have taken a step backwards to eventually get to where we wanted to be, but many aren't prepared to do that and will be in conflict with Oz from day one because they'll feel that they have lost out on what they had. We never think of what we had, or have lost, but only of what we do have and can have later.

 

Pretty much the same as us. We are worse off financially here because hubby took a 50% cut in his pay because he stepped back in his career by five years. This has meant making lots of sacrifices, and things have been extremely tight, but we looked at the bigger picture and could see that eventually we would be in a better position.

 

I am a stay at home mum/I work from home, and to start with I felt a huge pressure to make friends and socialise with all and sundry. It was only after I stopped listening to family members back at home who were constantly telling me I needed to make friends, and became comfortable with being on my own with the kids during the day, that I started to make what I would call true friends. There was no pressure to actively seek friends, and over time deeper friendships developed.

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What you also have to remember about the 'Returning to the UK' thread is that it represents a tiny proportion of the total threads on PIO. Don't take my word for it. Just add them up on any given day. The Brits/Irish & all the other nationalities I come into contact with are all unfailingly positive about Australia. I always ask them why they came here, do they like it, do they want to go home? I have not found a single one yet.

 

Think positively, forget about Tesco & Asda, British sausages, British TV, British pubs, etc. etc. and you'll have a ball!

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A forum such as this is always skewed to the negative because most people who are happily settling in to a new life don't have the time nor need to visit it - apart from a few charitable souls who are well settled here but just want to be helpful! :biggrin:

So what you mostly see are people with problems and issues who come to the forum for help and advice.

 

At the 2006 census there were over a million British born people living in Oz: most of them aren't on this forum and most of them aren't stampeding to return to the UK!

 

After reading posts for the last 2 years my advice would be:

 

(1) Research as much as you can about the place where you will be living - and, goodness knows, there's so much available on the internet nowadays. Don't forget that Australia in area compares with the distance from Morocco to Norway south to north and London to Moscow west to east so your location in Oz is going to be very different from many other places in Oz.

 

(2) Don't expect problems to magically disappear...it's not a tropical luxury resort. Australia shares many of the same problems as any developed country in the 21st century.

 

(3) Don't expect it to be the UK with warmer weather. It has a different history, geography, topography and climate and they all shape a completely different country. Granted the language is vaguely similar, but even that can be incomprehensible at times!:biggrin:

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Guest Guest31881
Don't forget the wine ...

 

 

How can you forget the wine, a few on here whine all day......... Ohhh sorry you mean wine to drink...... Oh yes dont forget the wine:laugh:

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