Rete

For the sake of correctness, the OP does not have a passport from Ireland (although her mother is/was Irish) nor does she current live or has ever lived in Ireland.

The OP is British with a UK Passport and a US Passport. She resides in the UK.

For the OP, just substitute UK for Ireland on this great advice.

King Gimp

Very correct. If you wish to stay in an engineering discipline of some kind I'd advise you to study in the US if possible. Once you get here with that UK diploma it is unlikely that it will really get you anywhere.

I say unlikely as I have the same qualifications roughly but I have done remarkably well so far, though I have a feeling my broad northern accent has opened more doors for me than any professional qualification I have..

Pulaski

Well the laws of physics are the same, but otherwise it depends what you mean by "vastly different". Based on your comment above, it appears that you unaware that all US homes receive a 240v supply, which is used to power things such as the cooker, clothes dryer, AC unit, and maybe a few other things, such as a well pump and some microwaves. The 120v supply inside the home is tapped off one of the two live wires feeding the house.

However that 240v supply comprises 2×120v, so wiring to the above listed appliances includes two live wires, plus a neutral, .... but not necessarily a ground wire!!! Prior to the mid 1990's clothes dryers used a three pin plug, comprising 2×120v live connections, and a neutral, and so US homes built prior to that time often still have a dryer connected with a three-pin plug, and no ground. At that point alone, you will see that US electrical supplies are quite different from those in the UK.

While the use of earth/ground wires is almost universal in wiring homes in the UK, in the US it is still fairly common to find circuits without a ground wire, and even sockets which don't have a hole for the ground pin - so Americans sometimes just snap the ground pin off the plug to make it fit! I fact I have an extension cable that my F-I-L gave me with the ground pin snapped off the plug. It is even possible to buy an adapter that you can plug a three pin plug into, which only has two pins, to facilitate the use of two pin sockets!!!

Bob

Didn't they lower the threshold down to $8k? I know they did for money transfers as part of the banking notification at least.

MidAtlantic

FBAR is still $10k. I am not aware that the banking notification of money transfers has changed to $8k.

durham_lad

I actually did my FBAR yesterday and the limit for reporting is still $10k. I don’t know about money transfers, today I just transferred $10k from the US to UK using Transferwise and answered the usual question “where is the money coming from?” I assume the transfer will be reported to the authorities.

GRZEB1S

Hi everybody, thank you once again for the great replies!

Pulaski - Wow, that system is WHOLLY different to ours! I did know about the widespread absence of a ground wire because I once asked my father why I always see tiny flashes from the sockets when I plug in appliances over there!! That's very interesting.

ddsrph - Air Force (they recruit from my county, Suffolk!) or Army (they recruit from Germany) was always my plan as a teenager. At 19 I developed a condition that I won't go in to (non life-threatening) but still a DQ. My dad is US military so that was always the dream, you're definitely right in that it would be the best way to get to the US!

jeepster - Yes! Well, what I do is a combination of the first two links you posted! The first link describes more the role of a control engineer than a dispatcher which is the next rung on the ladder, at my company anyway. But requires many years of experience and at least 3 - 5 years of part-time education. Or a degree of course. In my organisation a low voltage engineer would be more of an attainable goal for me than a high voltage engineer due to the systems used by the latter being much more complex (eg those that facilitate remote switching).

penguinsix - Thank you so much for the advice about Skype and a forwarding address for my resume, both excellent ideas that I will definitely utilise! I've really got my heart set on Arizona, but my family live in North Carolina however it's certainly still worth a try! I'm definitely not looking forward to catching up on filing taxes/FBAR fiasco. I wonder how much it would cost me to hire an attorney to help?😩

Rete - Thank you so much for the words of encouragement! I certainly hope I find, and earn, my place. I went through all my monthly outgoings to figure out where I can save money and have set myself a 2-year saving plan. I hope to move before I'm 27 and I turn 25 in April 😄 I have no inkling what I see myself doing in terms of studying and having a career. I just wound up in the electricity industry and I have grown extremely interested in the subject so I'd like to continue it if I have the aptitude. That's really good news about the tuition discount for community college! I suppose my current plan is to find a job similar to mine, dispatching for any company or the emergency services, until I can work my way back in to the electricity industry (office based NOT field based, just to clarify lol!) But if I want to do that I'll really need to figure out where in Arizona I should settle. As for healthcare, the only thing I haven't yet mentioned is that I do have a (non life-threatening) pre existing condition so I'm sure to encounter some big expenses there but I'm hoping I can't be penalised too heavily for it (it doesn't prevent me from working)

retzie

Please please please look into this. There is no 'can't be' anything in US healthcare

Bob

Apparently it came in the new year after being in the works a little while.

MsElui

think of the health insurance as like Bupa - private. There is no NHS to fall back on for the day to day. You only get the bupa equivalent if you (or your employer or both PAY)

Pulaski

And in most cases you pay a point-of-service fee even if you do have insurance. This is usually around $20-$25 to visit a GP, and around $50 for a specialist. But depending on your insurance you will usually have to pay a certain specified amount in medical fees and expenses each year before your medical insurance chips in anything. This is often $1,000, but increasingly commonly much higher - in our case about $3,000 each, with the quid pro quo being that our insurance premiums are very low - currently $186/mth aggregate for my wife, daughter, and me, tied to our employment.

The effect of this is that a visit to our GP, IIRC, costs us about $170*, plus the cost of any prescription, which, on the rare occasions I visit the doctor, usually surprises me how cheap basic antibiotics and other generic drugs are.

* Paying $170 to visit the doctor is tolerable because if we had "traditional" health insurance the cost of premiums to us would be around $1,000/mth, even subsidized by our employers. So the reality is that we could each go the doctor once a month @ $170, and still end up ahead compared to buying more generous insurance.

GRZEB1S

I was reading that the Affordable Care Act ensures those that have pre-existing conditions can still get healthcare - but that things could (or have, for all I know) change with Trumpcare. Does anyone know what the current situation is? 😕 It's a bit of a grey area.

durham_lad

You are correct, you will still be able to get insurance if you have a pre-existing condition. Pulaski was giving you an indication of what you can expect to pay if you are relatively healthy.

I am guessing that the ACA will stay until after this year’s elections in November. Multiple attempts to repeal and/or replace it failed last year so I don’t think there will be another attempt until then. However it will continue to be under attack such as repeal of the individual mandate making it more expensive.

GRZEB1S

Thank you! Looks like I'm going to have to just reevaluate when the time comes, depending on what changes are implemented.

I'm not a stranger to paying for my own private healthcare in the U.K. For some, the NHS is great but it's under humungous strain and I couldn't cope with the wait times anymore...or my referrals just 'disappearing' and then starting from square one. So it's certainly not a case of me transitioning from a care-free life of public healthcare!

Lion in Winter

Paying cash for your own healthcare in the US is not doable unless you are a billionaire.

I have health insurance through my employer, and it's considered a pretty good plan. It pays 80% of covered expenses (always read the list of things not covered) as long as I'm using a doc or hospital on their list. If not on the list then they only pay 60%. I pay $35 cash for a doc visit (which would be hundreds without insurance) and $10 for meds (cash price varies from cheap to exorbitant). I have a cap of $3,000 per individual per year on my plan (family of three) that I have to pay cash for. For this insurance plan I pay out of my paycheck something over $500 a month. You can get cheaper plans which cover less but of course you pay more for service and many things aren't covered at all. Many employer group plans accept pre-existing conditions, which is the point of group plans, but rules around that vary by state.

I know it's hard to believe these prices when you have grown up in Europe, but that's how it is.