rivingtonpike

Hi all

I have just read the Wiki on goods to follow and I wondered if anybody could give me an idea of their experience. Although "landing" next month, we are shipping our whole house and home office contents when we move permanently early next year. We have had quotes to ship a 40 feet container, but what I'm not sure of is how to quantify our possessions. We have approximately 1800 cubic feet of goods. However, while I know (ish) their monetary value, without doing a dry run of the pack, how do I guess how many boxes will be clothes? or kids' toys, books, DVDs? If I say "clothes - 10 boxes" and it turns out to be 20, for example, does this matter?

I would value anybody's personal experience.

Many thanks

Conal

snoopster

You need to list all the possessions that you are bringing and give them an approximate value. This is time consuming and it isn't easy to value some things, but it has to be done. Everything should be listed individually, but it should be okay for example to list your music CDs together - eg. 90 music CD's rather than list each individual title.
It took me 2 days to do my list. I went into each room and sat in the middle, looked around and wrote EVERYTHING that we were shipping. I organised the data on an Excel spreadsheet, room by room.
When you land, you hand them the list, and usually they take one quick glance at it (ours was 10 pages long) and if it looks detailed and professional then they'll just stamp it and Bob's your uncle.
I remember thinking....all that work and you're not even READING it! , but I can guarantee if I'd arrived with 2 or 3 crumpled handwritten notes, then they'd have gone through it with a fine toothed comb.

Aviator

Say 10 boxes, 2 boxes etc. won't cut it. You could aggregate clothes and lump together in one value, books another value, larger items individually.

jimmydean

Conal

I know there have been a wide variety of experiences detailed on here about 'landing' and then coming back to UK before actually moving your goods out to Canada.

I 'landed' last week at Halifax Airport and arrived at Customs with the large and detailed list of all my property...about 8 spreadsheet pages ......the guy asked me when I was actually coming to live here and I said next year.........he told me to hand the list in then (when I eventually moved to Canada) after filling out the declaration card as you would do normally (ticking yes to Shipping Goods).....having read a few posts on here I asked him directly if this would cause me problems in the future and he stated categorically NO. He actually stated he wouldn't be doing his job properly if he accepted a list that was at best 'guessed at'.

Not sure if it exactly answers your question but that was my personal recent experience.

rivingtonpike

Thanks for the reply. I understand not to list every individual item, it is more a case of anticipating volumes of things. For example: trousers - 10 pairs or 2 boxes. What I'm not sure of is whether the number of boxes of a particular "thing" (i.e. clothes) has to be the same as the number of boxes we might put on the original Goods to Follow list. Would it matter if we had twice as many boxes of clothes than we originally stated? Same with kitchen stuff. Until the packers actually pack it all, I have no idea how many boxes it's going to fill!

nativenewyorker

Hi
Instead of number of boxes, we put "collection of womens clothing", "collection of kitchen utensils" etc, with an approximate value and they were happy with this.

Hope this helps

marimac

Have you had quotes from any shipping companies? We had 3 quotes done, and each company then provided an approx inventory. For our Goods to Follow list, I then used the quotes to get a number of boxes and then added a few for good measure - so if they said 10 boxes of clothing, I put down 15 boxes, for example. I figured it was better to be over, then under.

Remember for the value, it is the value of your items second-hand, which may be quite low for some things (like CDs, books, etc).

rivingtonpike

Thanks for this. I was under the impression for the inventory the value was supposed to be the value of buying a new one of whatever it is (this seemed to be the inference from the wiki article). Is this just, perhaps, for insurance purposes?

Bonestable

I typed up a list including all the furniture and expensive items and then categories like "children's clothes", "kitchen equipment" etc. I estimated valuations bearing in mind how much I was going to value it for insurance purposes. I wanted the value on our goods to follow list to tie in with the valuation of goods we would do when we shipped them later.

When we first landed they didn't look at the goods to follow list in detail, but they did stamp it.

When we finally shipped the goods I typed up a list of what was in each box (we packed it ourselves) and then summarized it as 7 boxes of clothes, 10 boxes of kitchen equipment, using the same categories as in the goods to follow list.

When our things arrived by truck we had to go to a customs office to get them cleared. The official took all of my paperwork and looked through it then stamped it and off we went. I am not sure if I did too much detail, but I think giving the impression of great detail and organization is important - if your records look sketchy they might get scrutinized more carefully.

Stonedog

We might have been on the same flight, I flew to Halifax from Gatwick on the 26th

We originally landed in Vancouver last April and when I went through immigration the guy didn't even want to see my goods list as we were returning to the UK. I was gutted at the time as I'd spent ages putting it together, but he was adamant that it didn't need to be done.

When I arrived in Halifax last week the woman asked if I had the stamped goods form from when we landed and I explained what had happened at Vancouver and she said that should not have happened and the immigration guy was probably being very lazy. She referred me through to immigration and the guy there said much the same, he asked more than once why I was arriving with an unstamped form and even went to check with his boss, lots of tutting and comments about how Vancouver weren't doing their job properly, but I left the airport quite quickly with the goods form stamped

jimmydean

Hi Stonedog we were on the Heathrow flight on 26th !!! Yes I thought they should have stamped it but I can stand a bit of tutting.....

marimac

Goods to follow is the second-hand value - the list for insuance is the as-new replacement value.

I made up a spreadsheet with 2 columns - second-hand and new - then when I printed out the Goods-to-follow, I hid the new value column.

fowler71

This is because you were landing as a tourist not an immigrant.
This link should clear up your questions
http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/publicati...87-eng.html#s3

jimmydean

Thanks for the link but I was not landing as a tourist. I and all my family activated our PR visas at the immigration desk at Halifax Airport on that date we were given our COPR slips....I had in my possession a Goods Accompanying List and Goods to Follow list. The Immigration Officer finished dealing with me and directed me to the customs section.....the Customs Officer checked our COPR and visa ...and he asked if we had more than $10K in cash and then told us that we could hand over our lists when we actually return back to Canada next year to live permanently next year.

I think he is wrong but he didn't.... so I will have to argue the point next year....I took his name and number and who knows he might even be on duty .........

fowler71

What address did you use to receive your PR card?
If the follow up goods list is stamped then no probs.