Erin Richardson

Hi Everyone.

My husband has been offered a job, mostly home based with occasional travel into Auckland, maybe once or twice a week for meetings / site visits. I've been looking at the Orewa / Hatfields Beach areas as a location for our home. We've got 2 kids, 15 & 7 years old. Can anyone share any experience on living around this area? What are the schools like? We currently live in a small village just now with a 1 hour drive to the nearest big city so I'm not worried about being far away from Auckland.

My husbands salary offer is $100,000pa with a fully expensed company vehicle. We have about £120,000 in our bank when we come over but hoping to not have to dip into that too much so it can be used as a deposit for buying a property further down the line . I won't be working for the first couple of month until the kids get settled in school etc. Does that sound doable on my husbands salary alone for the first little while?

I work in property management/ lettings just now and would be hoping to do the same, is there many opportunities in and around that area for a similar job?

Thanks for taking the time to read this! 👍😁

Justcol

120k gbp is about $230k just about enough for a deposit on a family sized house in Orewa (20%)
Its a nice place, has a great beach and lots of events going on through the year.
There's some nice cafes and restaurants and enough stores either in town or close by for most things you'll need.
look on trademe and realestate.nz for property prices,
Orewa is expensive, you're not going to find much under $800k and $100k salary isnt a lot

Bo-Jangles

For the first little while yes it will be doable but you will definitely need to find some work to make ends meet in the longer term. Take home pay on $100k will be $6.2k per month and assuming you can get a house for $900k, you will need to put down minimum 20% deposit ($180k) and your mortgage will be about $3.5k per month. Groceries may be around $1k per month, if you're handy in the kitchen and the rest of bills such as internet, rates, insurances, a second car etc will no doubt leave you with too much month at the end of the money.

escapedtonz

An annual income of $100k isn't a huge amount to survive on in Auckland for a family, however because you also have some savings to use to set yourselves up you should be OK but you'll need to work part-time earlier rather than later to replenish those funds so you have sufficient for the 20% mortgage deposit.
What will be a huge advantage is the fully expensed company car. Luckily you don't get taxed on it as a benefit like you do in the UK. That benefit alone is worth around $15k per year assuming you'll have full private use of the vehicle........something you need to check up on as this additional benefit will cost the employer more as it is a fringe benefit so the company will have to pay the tax cost on that to IRD. Fully expensed may just mean it is fully expensed for use as a business tool only and may not actually allow you to use it outside of work. If it is usable outside of work it will save you thousands of $$$ per year and even if you need another vehicle you'll only need something that's economical, easily parked - a run around essentially as you can use the company vehicle for everything else.
As Bo-Jangles mentioned your net pay will be approx. $6200 per month. When considering the full deductions of income tax, ACC levy and Kiwisaver at 4% the monthly take home / net pay will be more like $5890 per month, or $1360 per week or $2720 per fortnight. Salaries are normally paid fortnightly in NZ.

Mortgage rates are pretty good here at the moment. Still way more than the UK, however by NZ standards they have just fallen rapidly over the years. We have just re-mortgaged with BNZ at 3.99% fixed for a year and 4.19% fixed for 2 years as we have 4 mortgage accounts after buying land and building a property and decided to keep them split so they mature in different markets. I wouldn't fix for any more than two years as the system is ever changing. The lowest rate available at the moment is with HSBC at 3.60% fixed for 2 years for a Premiere customer (which is pretty easy to achieve if you're borrowing more than $500k). I couldn't be bothered moving all our banking and investments over to HSBC and re-mortgaging with them, solicitors fees, house valuation and all that jazz just to save $200 per year in interest so stayed with BNZ. We owe around $653k over 27 years and currently pay $1501 per fortnight - equivalent to $3253 per month.

Also, in terms of the 120 000 GBP's you have in the UK. Transfer this cash the cheapest way possible. Use a proper international currency transfer company and not your bank so you get the best rate possible with the least fees/commission. Start monitoring the exchange rate GBP's to NZD and think about exchanging earlier rather than later to take advantage of any good rates as they are so volatile. With that amount of cash. a small change in the exchange rate can mean a difference in thousands of dollars this end. We used a company called Moneycorp and did 3 or 4 big money transfers through them and all went really well and easy.

Orewa is a pretty nice place to base yourself. We have friends on the Whangaparaoa peninsula so have visited quite a few times and stayed over at the camp site previously which is in an awesome spot on the beach.

Good luck with the move.

scrubbedexpat094

Orewa is quite expensive but a nice enough place to live. There's Millwater housing estate nearby which is all fairly new and most properties are above the $1 million mark. There are quite a few good cafes and restaurants in Orewa, there's a bit of a shopping centre in Silverdale, though we usually bypass it and head down to Albany for more choice.
Traffic into the city is pretty hideous these days. Loads of new houses built with little to no infrastructure, which you soon learn is the NZ way. OH tends to get the ferry from Gulf Harbour into the CBD when he has to go into the city. A lot less stress and you can have a snooze on the way!

Schools.....we don't have kids but I know quite a few of my friends don't want their kids to go to either Orewa College or Whangaparaoa College, both have problems with bullying from what I can gather. I think the former has a slightly better reputation. My friends are looking to get their children into Kingsway, boarding school or Wentworth College (private school). A friend's children are at Wentworth primary in Gulf Harbour. Primary schools seem to be of a good standard, it's the secondary schools were the issues seem to lie.

You'll definitely need two incomes, NZ is not a cheap place to live. Good luck.

Clappy

Orewa is not far away from Auckland - it is in the Auckland commuter belt.

There has been a lot of house-building around there in the eighteen years since I first visited it. That has brought an increase in services - bars, restaurants and shops.

Some of my work colleagues live on the Whangaparaoa peninsular and one of them was commenting recently that it is much easier for them to get takeaway pizza now than it used to be so was pleased about that.

I visited Orewa recently for the first time in ages and was quite pleased to see the range of cafe's and bars that have opened up in the town centre since the last time I was there. There did seem to be more English people there than I usually expect to see in any one place but it was a Saturday lunchtime so they could have come from anywhere.