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.