Hi All,

I'll be moving to a suburb (Varsity Lakes) near Gold Coast next month on a 457 visa. The sponsoring company has arranged for me to stay with one of the employees until I find a place. I've done some research but still have some doubts as to how much money (cash) I should bring with me. I will always have my Mastercard and should be able to transfer in additional funds if needed once I've opened a bank account in Australia.

I've being looking at house sharing (I'm single and think I can make do with a house share or a studio apartment for the time being) posts in Gumtree and it looks like I can get something decent for around 200/week (so the deposit would be around 800?).

Given all the above information do you think it's enough for me to bring about 4000AUD in cash? I don't want to withdraw too much money and carry it with me because it's risky. But I don't want to run out of cash either.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

I must admit I am not sure if you literally mean how much cash should you carry or if you mean how much money should you have at your disposal.

If you mean at your disposal, then yes for a single person moving over and straight into a job, I would think your $4k is plenty to help you get set up.

If you mean you are thinking of literally carrying this much cash then of course this is completely idiotic. Why would anyone carry more than a few hundred in cash ever? Australia has ATMs and you can access your money very readily as and when you need it, regardless of whether you have an Australian bank account.

I feel stupid for asking this question now . Yes I meant how much cash I should carry as in physical money in dollar bills

I was a bit worried about the exchange rate (SGD to AUD) if I withdraw a lot of cash via a ATM

But I guess that's a fair price to pay for not having to carry a bundle of cash in my pocket.

Thanks for the reply!

Apologies, I did not mean to make you feel stupid. In that case, no don't carry physical money. Absolutely it is a fair price to pay for mitigating the risk of carrying a bundle of cash. I am a big traveller very fond of my holidays and the exchange rate I get at ATMs or through paying via visa card is nothing that concerns me versus exchanging at an airport in advance.

No worries, thanks for the quick reply. I guess I just needed someone to tell this to me, what was I thinking

if you need to know anything about varsity give us a shout we lived there for a while before moving onto the other side of the M1 which is still only 10k away

regards steve

Carry the equivalent amount of cash that you would carry at home i always carry enough cash for a cab ride home from wherever i am, for instance.
If you don't normally carry any cash, don't carry any

I travelled over with about $2000 in cash to tide me over until my wages had entered my bank account.

Although you can open an account from the UK with NAB (and other banks) and arrange to collect cards from a branch once you arrive. You could deposit any carried cash then..

Ooooor also deposit money in to your new account from the UK which is ready to be verified to use upon your arrival.

You must go in to a branch upon arrival to verify your account. You cannot get cards posted out to you before arrival.

You can get cards posted before arrival if you open an account with some banks who have branches in London, and you do security checks in London. We had our cards sent to us from Westpac before we left the UK, but we have PR and had time to open accounts, and wait for cards before making the move. Cards took around 2 weeks, although mine got lost on first post and had to be resent. Pin numbers sent separately as in UK. If you lose your pin, you can go to a branch and reset it by proving ID - and also change your pin regardless if you choose.

Just carry enough cash for the small purchases in places that don't have card facilities (which are few and far between these days), or where the purchase cost is below the trader's minimum for card use. All the taxis will accept credit cards, although there is a 10% extra charge for using them. I rarely have more than $200 in my wallet, which I top up when it drops to below $50. Only time I might need more than that is if we go to the open air markets.

I got embarrassed in Japan once: caught a cab from Yokohama out to the airport (7000 yen fare) and offered my card to the driver only to discover he didn't have a card facility! He ended up accepting the cash I had, which came to just under 5000 yen, and went off in a huff. The previous cab from the airport to the city had been done on the card so it never occurred to me that not all cabs accepted them.