bandrui

When I sold my condo and went travelling, I just gave my friend's address as the forwarding address for final bills and left her the money to pay them. Not a big problem . You can probably get final, or close to final, amounts over the phone before you go.

cheers

I always think that in England you don't drive as many miles as we do so it may balance out. A general statement I know.

Mummy in the foothills

I think that is so true.
My mom was worried about a used car she was buying, she said "I don't know it's 5 years old and has 50,000 miles" Mine had more than double that by 5 years

jasper123

My Mums car is 14 years old and she still has only 42,000 miles on the clock my car in Vegas that I sold just before coming home was 6 years old and had the same milage as my Mums car does.

jemima55

Update- Its now five days and they still havent put a "Coming soon" board up outside our house. The boards were delivered yesterday, but we have to wait for another guy to come and hammer them in! Keeps employment up I suppose. I spent yesterday clearing out the basement. What a job!
I need to be more ruthless about what we`re not taking back.
Getting a quote for the outside of the house today, power washing the guk off the gutters and putting down mulch. I`m drawing the line somewhere at how much heavy work I`m prepared to do.

jasper123

Yes cheers your right the State Im from NEVADA does not have State income Tax,
so people in that State and quite a few more States do not pay any State Tax on there income, ----- only Federal Income tax is paid from there income, plus medicare and S/S deductions like everyone else,
Of course we have the Sales Tax on everything you buy except food like everyone else.

J.JsOH

Keeping a US bank account in North Carolina hasn't been a problem for us re: State Residency and Tax.

It is one of the things that NC could use if considering if we were still NC resident or not, but having sold our house, sold cars and returned the plates, de-listed from the voting register, returned driving licenses and cut every connection we could think of apart from the Bank Account they had no concerns that I was not going to be a resident when I called and asked.

Keeping the bank account has been useful for $$ to pay / deposit Fed tax and maybe in the future for passing through proceeds from investments I still have over there and don't want to sell yet

sallysimmons

Regarding our conversation about Internet speeds in the UK, I found this handy map showing the speeds that can be achieved.

Green means over 16MB downloads, yellow means between 4MB and 16MB and red means forget about trying to do anything online without a lot of stress and frustration. No color at all means no Internet access. More of the map will turn green over the next few years as BT rolls out Infinity, but many of the red spots (and the 'no spots') will stay as they are.

Jerseygirl

I think to embed YouTube links you have to hit the quote tab...if you use the quick reply tab it doesn't embed.

Lorac05

Not sure that is correct as it has a red spot right over me and blanks all round and I have no problems with the downloading from or accessing the internet!! And a few of those red dots are in the middle of fields with no houses anywhere close!!!

sallysimmons

Yes, the red dots are not meant to be houses necessarily. I don't think it's precise in terms of where the blobs fall, but I've found it generally to be a very good guideline in terms of locations that are out for me (i.e almost all of Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales). To get more specific, you can put a postcode into this site http://www.uswitch.com/broadband/ and you can see both what services are sold, and what the actual speeds received are. For example, I was looking at a house today that has access to 24MB services, but it actually gets 2MB I've found USwitch to be pretty accurate although it does sometimes under-estimate for specific houses (for example, the street may usually only get 2MB but certain houses may get a little more).

For non-cable broadband speed is also dictated by how many other people are using the service at the same time, so speeds can be faster at non-peak periods and these sites can't pick up all those fluctuations.

jasper123

Hi Sally, I have had BT Broadband since Ive been home, I phoned up BT today and they said that BT Infinity fiber optic service comes to my area next month march 31 and they said I can upgrade to that and the monthly cost will be exactly the same as Im paying now £18 per month, with up to
40 MB download speed, RIGHT NOW I ONLY GET 4 MB download speed and I get more crashes then Ive ever had in my life with this regular BT broadband, ------ the only reason I stayed with them all this time is Im under a 18 month contract,
Anyway they told me today that I will not have to go into another 18 month contract when I upgrade to Infinity its Just an upgrade, so Im happy about that, Ohhh there is a one time fee of £25 that they charge for an engineer to come around to the house and set everything up, that includes the new modem that is needed with the new infinity, so thats not bad Huh.

Mummy in the foothills

That was interesting the whole village where mum is was red, then I scroll in and there are lots of yellow dots (on houses I assume) I know when we visited she had fast enough internet, her dot was yellow and it was fast enough for Ds to watch movies online, but we did notice it was slower on weekends and after about 6pm.

sallysimmons

As an example, 3MB would be fast enough for one person to watch a movie, but then if another person in the house tried to do something that also uses a lot of bandwidth, both would struggle.

Rodney, that's great! We only get 20MB here in New York so you will be rocking it once you switch to Infinity!

jasper123

Hi Sally,
As I said I only get 4mb now, actually its 3.7 mb to be precise, and its plenty to download a 2 hour movie and also watch it too, so what you say is right, but if there were two computers in the house like you say it would be hard for both people using at the same time,
I did ask BT yesterday about the crashes that I get now with the regular broadband, and they said that with the infinity I will get no more crashes or any slow downloads anymore, --------- I hope they are right Sally, if so I will be a happy camper