the "dream" is in your head, heart and soul. IT shouldnt matter where you are !....Did i say that out loud??..i'll get mi coat

Nah - don't get your coat - you're right.

I think, to a lage degree you are absolutely correct.

I have lived in Australia for 27 of my 30 years - and loved it! The past three years I have been in the UK - and loved it!!

My uncle has ping-ponged between Australia and the UK no less than 6 times over the past decade - has lived everywhere from Adelaide to NSW Coast, to QLD. Lived in various parts of the UK, country and city. He is never happy!! He just arrrived in Australia (again) 6 weeks ago and is already moaning about how crap it is and that he's homesick!!!

In many ways its what you make it! Lets face it - houses are expensive on both sides of the world!

Me and my girlfriend seem to see the best in everywhere! Although I am SOOO looking forward to going home in 4 weeks there ar a lot of things I'll miss about the UK!!

I dont think its quite dead but definately terminally ill.

As most people know the property prices in OZ are just going ballistic at the moment and are getting worse every day (I mean going up by thousands on a week by week basis, plus the exchange rate is not good, unless you have a lot of money and are far more realistic about what you can afford you will have a very nasty shock. If property prices are really cheap in a certain areas it is for a reason i.e miles away from anywhere or bad area. The bargains are not here anymore.

I believe that most of the problems are stemming from real estate agents, what they are doing is selling on to their mates and relatives anything that is good value or a good rental prospect before it hits the market. They are ridiculously rich and own many many properties.

I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory but honestly the rental properties are all owned by real estate agent principles. The amount of times I have looked at a property and heard from the Realtor "yes we looked at this one but, needed to much work."

Wages here are not the same as the UK, and another nugget of advice is to stop converting pounds to AUD, what I mean by that is I continually read things like "wow that house is only 240,000 pounds". When you are earning Ozzie dollars things get tough. We earn as a couple around 100,000 dollars a year and dont have the same disposable income that we had in the UK.

My advice for what it is worth is If you are doing well in the UK, buy a house in portugal or similar and commute. Be prepaired to go back a few years here financially. Dont ship your stuff or choose where to live on demagraphics and peoples opinions, come here for yourself on a holiday and fact find for real. This will cost a bit short term but will probably save you thousands.

here endeth the sermon

Good advice, but all this presumes people only move somewhere to get richer.

I've never heard of anyone setting out to make themselves poorer?

Of course not. But that is not to say that moving somewhere has to be all about the money and a bigger house and higher wages and more more more. The important things cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Unfotunately, money is very important you cant feed your family on ideals.

thats true unfortunately. But what do you REALLY need ? not that much. Everything else, you are "sold" on the premis it will enhance your life, and it never does!

Sat outside my my deck drinking a cheap bottle of plonk, chatting and laughing..i am a millionaire.

What are the elusive important things then?

Why couldn't we get them in the UK?

Why did we come half way round the world to seek them?

There seems to be a general missing-of-the-point here. To expand on my original statement, I would say that contemporary conveniences such as flight and electronic money transfers expedite the immigration process, but this is to the detriment of wider issues.

When we reduce the experience to dollars and cents and a bigger house, we marginalise important parts of the process that are easily lost. When we emigrate to a new country, we are no different from those that went out on clippers seeking a better material world. But even if the process costs us materially, we gain more than we lose in other spheres.

All the talk of mortgages and interest rates and jobs and all the whinging about the house prices completely murders the spirit of the pioneering immigrant who basically is a chancer. On the clippers, they understood that failure was more likely than not, yet they still went, and those were the people that built Australia. Today, interest rates go up a quarter point and everyone wets their pants and decides to stay in Hull.

If you want to be an immigrant then you need to understand the chances are high that you will fail and come home.

But ultimately, if you want to, or can only, see the wider process as a zero sum game of gains and losses, then that's the end of it.

We came half way round the world for a warmer climate (my husband has bad circulation), a better way of life, and because we fell in love with the place and the people.

We lived in Herts (still within the M25), and my husband spent 2 - 4 hours sitting in traffic every day. When we saw each other it was to discuss business rather than have any fun.

Maybe we didn't need to go half way round the world, but we chose to do it anyway. We researched on the internet where to live too, and worked out how much we were willing to spend on a place. We discounted parts of Adelaide as too expensive. We wanted an area that my husband felt was town like but had all the amenities for a city girl (me). We travelled around a bit while on holiday and realised we had passed through Mt Gambier several times without thinking about it. They have a cinema, theatre (we're assuning we'll have time for those things ), and a classic car club (we bought our Mustang over with us). We bought a 4 bedroom home with separate ground floor annex for $285,000. Do we have a sea view? Not this time, but we are on the Mount and have a fantastic view over the city. I always assumed I'd stay in bed late when I had the chance, but I love to get up and watch the sunrise over the city - it's beautiful. We are thinking of naming the house Altantic view though!

Moving here is what you make of it. We are still working on our dream, but a lot of dreams have come true by moving here. We can also walk home late at night which we couldn't do where we lived in the UK.

Maybe people need to decide what they want for their lives and then think about houses, because it always the house that makes the dream come true.

Now I'm off because my husband has just cooked me dinner - a regular occurance here but not back in the UK - he'd still be stuck in traffic at this time!

Karen

Did they? Did those people really go through all that knowing there was more chance they'd fail than succeed? I doubt it. I suspect they had a dream and believed in Australia they could acheive it. For most of them I imagine that dream included somewhere to live that was better than they had in their country of origin.

----------------

I wanted many things out of our move to NZ, but one of them was to afford a home for my family that I couldn't acheive in the UK. I didn't sell up in the UK to buy here, we couldn't afford to buy there at all but have bought somewhere beautiful here. That's a dream for us. Maybe it wouldn't have been if we'd owned something pleasant in the UK. Maybe then I could have sneered at the 'materialism' of less well off folks who felt buying a family home was part of a life dream :curse:

I'd go along with some of the sentiments of all you - but I liked this bit.

I think some people have done well here and are not counting dollars but recent arrivals will find it hard - especially in Perth.

Presuming your final sentence is an insult to me, I would be interested to know who showed you my bank books. Making (incorrect) judgements about someone's finances and disseminating them on public talkbards just because they state that not everything in this world has to be about material gain is a bit off, frankly.

But, que sera sera. Like I said earlier, if to some people immigration is just a zero sum game of gains and losses, there's nothing I can do to change that sad misperception.