Lee and Tracy

I know this is a very open ended question as we all have our individual tastes and standards of living but we'd like to know how much money people aim to have in the bank when starting your new life down under?

The reason I ask is it's likely we will have around £20,000 and wonder if this will be enough to get us started with house rental, car, other costs etc when we finally (hopefully) arrive in South Australia.

I appreciate it all depends on how long it takes to get a job but was curious to know if people are taking more or less money to start their new lives.

BTW, we are a family of three, two adults in their 30's and a 15 month old son.

Racht70

Some go with as little as a few grand some take lots more...there was a post aaaaaaages ago about someone that went with very little..it was a struggle to begin with but they made it

darrellandsarah

we,ve just transfered £18,000.friends of ours are flying out sunday and have £5000.don,t know how there going to manage though as they have 12 boxes of belongings and nothing else and are going to buy all new when there settledthough they have found a cheap 4 bed rental in redcliffe

Racht70

Found that thread here ya go...Click

TillyG

Before we left the UK, we transferred £2000 into our ANZ account - worked out as about $4650 at the time. It was some of the money my brother had paid me for my car.

We used the bulk of it for setting up in our new rental - mainly the bond ($1980) and the first few weeks rent. We also spent about $500 getting ourselves mobile phones but then a lot on phone credit (as the serviced apartment work had provided had no phone line!).

We carried on using our UK credit cards for things like furniture etc and paid off the minimums each month (we were on 0% deals with them, handily enough) and then paid them off in full once our house sold 3 months later.

Edited to add: although we brought a lot of stuff with us, many of our white goods (fridge, freezer, washing machine) ended up with siblings. Was a bit miffed at the time that not one of them offered a penny towards them but at the time wasn't really thinking and hadn't really realised that getting rid of my UK fridge was one thing... but I would need money to buy a new one in Oz - d'oh!

Hutch

Did the same thing. Amongst other things I gave away a lovely 32" Sony TV to my father-in-law and to this day I have no idea why. I think we all go a bit mad during that emigration process.

TillyG

Phew, thought it was just me Our emigration was a bit of a whirlwind - we were out here less than 4 months after DH's mate phoned up to say "hey, fancy working in Sydney then?", none of this "let's plan and dream about it for 10 years first" for us LOL

Hutch

Yea, we didn't muck about much either. Think it was about six months from decision to arrival.

68MEVY

When we came over we were a family of 3 and we came with $2000 (which bought a car and not much else) debt in the UK, but thankfully we had relatives here that we stayed with when we landed.

Marie

Nu-Shooz

We came with the profits from the sale of our house. It was quite alot and it has all gone now. But we bought a house, 2 cars, furniture etc...i wish we hadn't done things this way thinking about it. The more you have, the more you spend.

lazerzxr

I went with a job lined up and as a single bloke. I brought 3k pounds with me and could have easily got by with 2k. You get paid here every 2 weeks instead of 4 which makes it easier

comet555

We get paid every 4, so it depends on the job

Mikeyc

Yep I have had jobs here and in Ireland that pay weekly, fortnightly and monthly, It all depends on how the company prefers to do it.

One of my mates in Ireland had a special contract where he got paid half yearly! No idea how he managed to live that way!

Thank god I’m on fortnightly now, the monthly one is horrible!

Mikey

TillyG

And some jobs pay twice-monthly, rather than fortnightly. My DH gets paid on the 15th and the last day of the month. But we pay rent fortnightly... so 24 x pay packets but 26 x rent - makes budgetting fun LOL

comet555

If you had enough money in the bank to start out with it'd be great. You'd have half a years pay earning interest.

I don't mind monthly at all. We always have enough to cover the next month in advance, so we usually earn a bit of interest from each deposit.