jmh

Amusing take on the subject in Toby Manhire's piece:

Toby Manhire: Welcome, Brexpats, to our COOL country - Opinion - NZ Herald News

BEVS

Love the humour & style of that piece.

Thanks for sharing that.

Snap Shot

I've quoted this from the article as it made me smile:

As you know, life operates at a slower pace down here. Try to leave a decent pause between each word.

LittleGreyCat

" In New Zealand, you can soon expect to complete most of your doctory needs at home, simply by logging on to the Community for Online Clinical Health. You'd be amazed what can you can fix with the internet, whisky and a cutlery drawer."

Good old "can do" mentality.

paddy234

I didn't know Britain was doing so bad, obviously Brexit seems to have affected it's people much more than i thought

BEVS

No. I thought you would have had my Mother's humour about you but clearly not.

Where one goes , others follow.

jayandbill

I don't believe it is. It was just scaremongering and blind panic. Not a reason to up sticks and move to a country you know little about without doing a lot of research.

Damson

When I was stood in a massive queue yesterday at Harry Potter World waiting for us and our kids to have contents of our bags emptied onto a table and examined and uniformed men passing hand held body scanners over us I whistfully thought of NZ. Then I remembered having to check our bags in mueums there, so nowhere is safe from threat. I was however considerably less aware of it there than here.

As for Brexit, literally the ONLY thing that I've noticed as a result of it is the plummeting exchange rate. I don't know of anyone who has been affected.

jayandbill

We only need one security incident here and we will have the same problem with security issues. I like to think it won't happen here but why should NZ be any different.
On the Brexit issue it has badly affected our uk pension, which is paid into a uk bank and we bring money out as we need it, so we're at the mercy of the falling exchange rate. Hopefully it will improve in time. Some immigrants choose to have the NZ pension in lieu of their uk pension.

Kotare

Changing to a NZ state pension is easy, it is a higher rate than the uk one and obviously unaffected by exchange rate fluctuations. Assuming you are declaring your uk pensions for nz tax you would be a couple of thousand dollars better off, even if you are still on a tax holiday I think you would at a minimum break even.

jayandbill

We did look into switching but decided we personally wouldn't benefit. My husband has a military pension and a private pension in uk so it's complicated. We of course do have to declare the uk income and consequently miss out on the 10,500 GBP tax free allowance. There's no such allowance here.

Kotare

I understood there was a 4 year nz tax holiday for new migrants (not sure if that applies to you).

I have a uk military pension and my wife a private uk pension but that has no effect on us drawing NZ super.

jayandbill

We did benefit from the 4 yr tax holiday. Can I ask how is your military pension paid to you. Ours goes into our uk bank, as does the private pension.

Kotare

Same, but certainly the military one can be paid straight into your nz account if wished (I feel I can get a better rate - but might be wrong).

inkedneonurse

How easy was it to transfer your military pension?