tweetweet

Swapped smoky London for clean green NZ.

We left good jobs in smoky old London (along with the two annual international holidays, unlimited healthcare, dental care, no worries about bills or grocery shopping etc) to come live the kiwi dream, fresh air, clean water, settled in one area, got shanghaid into buying a house, the eventual being forced out of a good job ('when are you leaving pom'etc etc) ended up on menial tasks,(university educated) we cant even afford to go to Auckland! (cant afford doctor or dentist either) we use cloves for toothache and baking soda to clean our teeth, salt and water for any medical complaints, op shop for clothes, furniture etc. wear layers to keep warm and save on the bills, grow as much as we can, olive oil for face care, but there are the walks on the beach, up the hills, on the plains, (save up for petrol to get there), when people talk about going on holiday, our idea is up the coast with a tent.
its called living the dream!


to all the foreigners thinking of coming to NZ.
make sure that you have $1,000,000 'back up fund', because you really can be in the financial **** once you move here.

concretepump

hi so tell me why dont you move back then and start again

mickey_d

Hmmm, the classic reply

concretepump

Hmmm then tell me how else would you answer this question??????
instead of giving a dumb reply why don't you suggest some thing

luvwelly

I sighed as I read 'living the dream' but that's okay as I now see your intent was ironic. I am sorry it has gone so badly for you. I am surprised as I had you down as a 'happy clapper' in my mind from other posts.

Your story is not that unusual and all one can do is sympathise. It is good of you to warn others. I am glad we were just temporarily posted here. I can see what a big expensive deal it is to fully relocate at your own expense. This is likely what makes your early return difficult and surely concretepump could guess this even if still in UK reading the Daily Mail daily.
It is all too easy to trap yourself in NZ in the low wage economy. The exchange rate for going back is in your favour though. Good luck.

mickey_d

Sorry, I don't sea "question" in the OPs post, just venting of frustration from their experience.

concretepump

i see, did you not think that they think they are stuck in nz and cant get back to where they started, there is always help to pay for a plane ticket and try and move on with the rest of there lives????????????????

mickey_d

Yes I did & there are many more in the same position. If I was in the position of wanting to move back but couldn't afford to I'd get pretty annoyed with people telling me to do it.
It is something you can't really advise on, to move back you need cash, what else can you say.
I meet & have a good chat with loads of Brits with my weekend job in a Museum & a lot of them in a similar position, especially those who came 4 to 6 years ago & are lumbered with huge mortgages, finding themselves in a position of negative equity. I've even had them bursting into tears when talking about it.

Anyway, good luck to the OP & I hope the future gets better for you.

concretepump

the op sounds a bit more desperate then those strapped up with a mortgage people in a foreign country can go to the british embassy to get a loan to come home nobody has to stay where they don't want to

what is this forum a nz versus uk

Assanah

Well, I don't know about the OP, but I think it is always hard to accept a steep drop in your living standards. And to beg for a loan from the embassy just to get back to the UK might not be what people are dreaming of either. Don't you think it is kind of scary that this actually could happen to people who are well-educated, speak English and have work experience?

dfjordan

While I don´t want to appear callous, it´s difficult to feel sorry for those who uproot and move to anywhere without having done their homework properly. There really is no excuse. As I think we all know, if NZ were such a dream place to live why is that the NZ government finds it impossible to keep its younger population from leaving? I can recall meeting NZ youngsters working in South Africa 40 years ago, who told me all about why people didn´t stay there.

Bo-Jangles

Harsh yes indeed, but that's very true of today, I would agree to a greater extent with so much information (perhaps too much) at everyone's fingertips. Things have moved on a lot in a very few years and there's barely any stones left unturned regarding what you can find out online

When we were first started doing research seven to eight years back there was no British Expats NZ Forum and information availability and boots on the ground experiences were very hard to come by. All the research in the world looking at pictures and statistics and maps and reading cannot and never will fill the gap between what one thinks it might be like and what it IS actually like in real life.

Nobody can even begin to imagine what life is like 12000 miles away from everyone that they hold dear, no amount of research can prepare you for that. No amount of research can help you cope with emotions and feelings or gut instincts, personal tastes, likes and dislikes, culture shock and everything else that comes along to test your strength; neither can it help you cope with living on less income / staying in cold damp housing / with jobs that go wrong / or the general arses that we meet along the way.

It is a BIG ask to expect things to fall into place for a couple, let alone a whole family and what suits one may very well not suit the other; we all have the dream, but there's no prescription and we don't necessarily get the better job, a nicer boss, the money we think we're worth, the perfect house in the perfect street, with nice neighbours, a good school and everyone loving it here and living happily ever after.

Parts of life suck; likely chances your boss will still be an arse and not everyone will be happy with their new lot. There's bound to be one that doesn't settle and someone who is gonna be unhappy at some point, or even all of the time. It's just life and life as we all actually know it; same life with different shite in a different country. I therefore reserve anyone's right to whine and whinge about it, just as much as anyone else on here that wants to whine and whinge about how much life in the UK sucks, because there will always be a flipside and a difference of opinion.

dfjordan

Bo jangles- I agree with you to a great extent, but what I meant by "doing homework" wasn´t that this entailed finding out everything you can one way or another from the internet. What I meant was going there, and not just for a couple of weeks holiday, but say a month and checking out all the kind of things which to each individual is important. No amount of written information or expat comments are going to replace on the spot foot slogging. I did it a few times in my life and foudn it worth every penny that I had to spend.
My daughter and her husband, who have been happily living in NZ for about 5 years, did the same, but in two visits of 3 weeks each. They scrimped and scraped to get the money to pay for the trips, and got answers to everything they needed, before they made their decisiion. They moved out there, started a business which ( fortunately) has proved to be very successful, and have no regrets at all. I´ve read so many sad stories on this website of people being fed up with the UK, seeing some nice publicity from the NZ immigration department, and based on that plus reading a few comments on this expat webpage, sell up, drag wife and kids all the way to NZ, and find very quickly that life is nothing like what they expected. It´s a shame but some folks will never learn except the hard way. Fortunately from experiences of other expats on this webpage, it would seem that more survive than not, so the rsik can be worth taking but only after a lot of hard digging.

BEVS

Of course, the 'homework' & recce (s) you do at the time are only good for then. Circumstances / issues can change & not by choice . Some of those circumstances/issues will be out of a persons control.

dfjordan

Sounds like a pretty weak excuse for having mad such an insufficiently planned major decision. The circumstances we are talking about don´t change overnight, eg salaries don´t become too low to live on over say a one year period, or at least not in stable economies like NZ, neither do housing, schooling, food costs change dramatically. Ok it´s possible that you move to NZ to what sounds a nice job but subsequently it´s found not to be so good, but that applies everywhere, and it´s not as if there´s only one job suitable for each person. Too many UK expats shoot off to places like NZ, the arab states, and even more so , Spain, having based their decisions on "dreams". Reality is somewhat different. If you find you´ve made the wrong decision, then rather accept it and start again, this time with your eyes wide open, and don´t look for excuses as you were the one who made the decision; nobody forced you onto a plane.