It Was Bound to Happen

The first major screw up has now occurred. Our passports are currently in transit from the U.K. They had to go there to get our Permanent Residents visa stamped into them (God only knows why the embassy in Canada can't do that, but that's a rant for another day). The timing on this wasn't stellar, as they would return pretty much during our house sale closing and what not. Of course, given the sensitivity of these documents, they have been shipped Signature Required.

Of course, wouldn't you know it, our passports are still in transit, the mail redirection that we'd set up with Canada Post started a day early. So now we have passports that require our signature to accept somewhere between Ottawa, Mississauga (their last known location) and Montreal (where the mail is being redirected to). A problem. I've contacted my father to make sure someone is home at all times for the next two days because they could sign for them if they are home.

If they aren't home and that lovely little card is put in their mail box, life become... more difficult.

Canada Post requires the person to whom the package is addressed to pick up the parcel, with valid ID that shows their current address. I don't have a current address. I have ID that shows where the parcel was originally destined for as my address and my father has ID that show that he now lives where the parcel is ending up, but really, there's nothing but the better judgment of the person working the parcel pick up area to put those two things together. So I'll be at the mercy of a civil servant. There are worse fates I'm sure.

Unexpected Expenses

We've been cruising a million miles an hour as we get closer to our deadline, so there's been little action on the blog front. That's going to change.

There's been a couple of financial hickups in the last week that I feel I should document for those going through something similar:

• Beware cancelation fees on mortgages. These are fees that you get charged if you cancel your mortgage before the due date (our mortgage was a 5 year mortgage). Typically, this is waived / renegotiated when you sell then buy a new house, so we got screwed.
• Getting out of a car lease: What a right royal pain. There's the transfer fee, the agent fee if you use an agency to find a new taker for the lease, inspection fee, repairs that need to be made.
• General Cancellation fees: Cell phones, certain bills etc.
• Surprise car rentals: if you're getting out of a lease, every km counts so if you have some last minute visits renting is the only way to go.

Overall things are moving well so far, other then the passport debacle (that'll be the subject of a post in and of itself) we hope to be out of the house tonight and out of the country on the 4th of September with a quick stop over in NYC.

Shove me off the continent i'm ready to go

The silent partner here. It seems that on such a momentous point in the process i should at least post a few words...something meaningful...something grand.......
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HOLY SMOKES ITS HAPPENED, WE CAN FLY AWAY NOW!

but seriously. this has been a long (sometimes stressful time) for us. We started this way back in February/March but had been thinking about it so long before that. Some things went so smoothly for us: selling our house and finding a place to store all our stuff (thanks to an awesome family member for that one). Some stuff was really painful: having to struggle and worry about our two cats. I'd like to thank Aynn for taking them both in to her country home; if i was a cat i'd love living there. Some stuff is just bittersweet: trying to see all your family and friends who want to see you "just one more time" and knowing you can't reach them all before you leave. But in the end of this whole process all i can think about is that its happening. We can buy our one-way ticket and head to a place i've been dreaming about for the last 3 years; a place where a teacher is in high demand, where apple trees grow randomly on the side of the road where people threw out an apple core as they drove by, and where we can sea kayak, parasail and find hot springs to bathe in.

Thirty years old and heading out on an adventure...life is indeed amazing.

Approved in Principle!

This is it folks, this is really happening!

Our decision on your application:
I am pleased to tell you that we have approved in principle your application for a New Zealand residence visa.

Hazzah!

Allrighty now, let's warm up the credit cards and get ready to fly!

Thank the Freakin' Gods We Found a Home For the Cats

Just a quick update, thanks to my good friend Caroline, both cats will be living in the country with her aunt, together :)

We're dropping them off tonight so that they can get acclimatized and see if they play well with the other animals. We're also meeting their new mommy tonight so I'm sure it's going to be emotional.

That being said, it's still the best thing for them. The thought of having to put them through a 27 hour flight in a cold cargo container followed by 6 months of quarantine seems very cruel for our personal needs. Further, the financial costs of that is quite tremendous.

Thanks again for everyone who tried to find them homes, I'll keep you all in the loop if something goes wrong (crossing fingers)

Useful Tools and Other Ways to Make The Big Move Easier

Rather then get whiny again about how we still haven't heard back from the NZ immigration officer, I figured I'd mention a couple of sanity restoring tools we've used to keep track of everything going on.

Information Gathering:

• Official websites. NZ in particular has a lot of good info about immigration, their site is fairly easy to navigate and you can do quite a bit online, including filing your EOI
• Web Forums. We've hopped between a few, http://move2nz.com and http://emigratenz.org are our current favorites.
• Blogs of other immigrants. Not so much for a source of info as a glimpse into what life might be like over there. I found the ones that were demographically similar to us (young couple, no kids, no attachments) to be most interesting.
  

Tracking:

• Wiki: I put up a wiki very early in this process to figure out all the different things we needed to keep track of. I'm sure there are non-digital ways of doing all this but that concept is pretty foreign to me, so let's move on...
• reliable Email: This isn't much of a tool, but keeping EVERY email that had anything to do about NZ turned out to be essential. Google mail makes this easy, but anywhere can do it. We routinely went back as far as a year to find contacts, info etc. that we needed in hindsight.
• Budget: We'd been saving up for quite a bit to make this trip happen, but we were still stunned by our out of pocket expenses. tracking savings and expenditures for this project made us realize that we'd have to save more in order to avoid being in debt by the time we arrived, so we stepped up the automatic savings plans.
  

Planning the move:

• Starting Early: we started talking to movers VERY early (last year, before we'd submitted the EOI) had 7 companies come in to give us estimates. We shortlisted 3, dropped one and are now dealing with 2 companies, both very friendly and helpful, who I'm happy to say haven't objected to the scale down of our move
• Empty Boxes! at the beginning of the summer, with the selling of the house, we packed up a TON of our stuff for staging and put it into storage. This turned out to be critical to figuring out what we could live with out and what we wanted to bring. We made 2 piles, storage Canada and NZ. turns out we were right about the storage Canada and we figured out how to reduce what we wanted to bring to NZ by quite a bit. Essentially, once everything was packed, it was easy to figure out what from the NZ stuff we didn't need.
• Scanner: Carly ended up scanning all of her school notes to reduce the amount she needed to bring. I thought this was brilliant and it's going to save us quite a bit in the long run

The Traveling

• Airmiles: Turns out that we'd accumulated a whole bunch of airmiles without noticing. Since we didn't need them in NZ, we bought a pair of tickets to NYC to visit mom, got 350$ worth of gift certificates and still had enough for free movies. On top of that, other points collection systems have been reducing our costs. Aeroplan for 100$ of gift certificates, free meals from Pho Mi Bo Ga and Subway along with other gift cards we hadn't used yet. No use holding on to them now!
• Vaccuum bags: nothing reduces the size of your clothes and other fabric items like these puppies. They are allowing us to bring our Canadian duvet and pillows on the plane with us.

What we could have done better:

• We really needed to get our timing down better. As is, we're cutting it VERY close. We may end up homeless before we've got our visas which may end up costing us quite a bit.
  
• We didn't take into account the amount of time it would take to find homes for the cats which is now causing a LOT of stress.
• We initially didn't realize that the ITA was an additional step. We had originally thought we'd be able to leave by July. We've been lucky though, the ITA process is hopefully almost done and it's been considerably faster then what's stated on the website.

There ya go, a productive post rather than more emo.