Muzzman

Can anyone already in Oz advise if you totally start again from scratch or if there is any benefit in taking old bank statements, mortgage statements, insurance stuff, utility bills etc. and if it is how many. Most of our stuff has already gone and this is before I throw it all away.

Muzzman
(only 5 more weeks to go :scared: )

Rudy

If you are going to rent a house you will need your mortgage statement & or bank statement showing that you paid regularly. We also had to provide our council tax bill.

We transferred funds to the Commonwealth bank before we left, they have been absolutely excellent! Our cards etc were waiting for us at the Queen street branch when we arrived in Brisbane. They gave us a credit card immediately and have just given us finance for a property, and we only arrived in the middle of March, so I think they are pretty good.

Just have to add, we also brought our no claims bonus certificate from our insurers and we have been awarded a full no claims discount.

Hazel

soapy©

we brought 3 months worth of stuff. its not too heavy and worth bringing for renting

rob&lucy

If you can bring the stuff with you then bring it. the rental agencies tend to work on the 100 point sytem. Your passport, Birth Certificate and drivers licence score the highest points along with a medicare card. We then used bills from the uk as well as a reference from our last rental agency and one from the bank. This went down fine. However they check references so get someone in the UK to stand by to get an email from the rental agency and reply asap. This process can take up to 48 hours and is really frustrating as when this process is going on you still don't know if you will be accepted or not so apply for a few that you like. Be careful of Commonwealth. The bank cards they said would be ready weren't and had to be posted to us 1 week later. Also their credit card rate is appalling, well they all are really. However Virgin is one of the cheapest and you can apply when you get here. Check out other banks on Yahoo.com.au under finance. We moved to Credit Union Australian who are much more efficient.

HiddenPaw

After I went to Oz, I had problems with One-Tel sending me mail (to my old address), sending out bailiffs and court summons. To cut a long story short, it was their error - I needed all the old bills to prove that I had paid everything up before I left and that I didn't owe them anything. They eventually admitted it was their error but if I hadn't had all the bills and bank statements to hand in Oz, I wouldn't really have had the stuff I needed to prove them worng.

The same thing then happened when I came back to the UK - I closed my broadband account but Telstra kept trying to bill me for 4 months afterwards. I needed statements, etc to prove I had paid them a final amount.

In summary, I would keep hold of things for future ref. You never know when you might need them!

Good luck