One of Those Facts They Don't Tell You About Immigration...

Your immune sickness stays in your country of origin. Really. I've been sick more often in New Zealand in the last 9 months than I had been in the last 3 years of Canadian living. Thinking of it logically, it makes sense. The germs that we have in NZ are different strains from the North American ones, our bodies aren't used to the new climate, there's different pollens etc. in the air. It doesn't help that we have a drafty, potentially moldy house, but really, I believe it's the lack of immunity that's been doing me in...

I think Carly has a definite advantage as she's exposed to a seething petri dish of illness. Ahhh elementary school, it's definitely got its ups and downs :) She's probably contracted and recovered from more colds without noticing than I can remember having in my life.

So yes, I'm sick. I'm at home right now recovering from another very minor cold. Official rules at work state that if you are displaying symptoms that might be attributed to Swine Flu (I won't go down that rat hole... ) so I worked from home yesterday but today wasn't able to get any work done.

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.

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.

You Always Read The Instructions After the Fact.

Carly and I have now submitted our ITA to the NZ government. Of course, after we sent it out, we realized we'd sent the wrong type of birth certificate for Carly, but thankfully, our VERY nice and helpful contacts at NZ immigration have told us they will process the rest of our application so long as we Fed-Ex the right one out ASAP.

So now we're back to waiting. This time though, I'm considerably more up-beat about the whole situation. In fact, the only thing really stressing me out is that we won't have enough time to finish up all our "fun" stuff before we go on our grand adventure. Here's the list of what we want to do before we head out:

• Trip to Toronto including Geeky.Net User BBQ
• Trip to NYC to visit my mom
• Trip to Halifax to visit Carly's parents
• Trip(s) to Montreal
• Camping with friends x 2 at least

Maybe I should just resign early :) I'm sure I'm missing at least one major trip on that list, but it's a good start. I think we might try and get a multistage plane ticket when we fly to NZ, so that we can make stops in Vancouver and Calgary before heading over there (also, that would guaranty we don't fly into the States, which I'm not crazy about doing)

Immigration is like Driving...

When I was first learning to drive, my instructor, who had a penchant for the overly dramatic, harped on the concept of making sure you look ahead to find your "Point of No Return". Essentially, the point when crossing a traffic light where if it suddenly turns red, you will no long be able to safely stop in time. I think he was subconsciously teaching me how to run yellow lights, but regardless, I think we just found our immigration Point of No Return.

Looking through the documentation for the ITA, there's a ton of "official" paperwork that needs to be provided:

• Certified copies of passports
• Medical examination results
• Criminal background check (including fingerprints!)
• Proof of employment for all the jobs we put do
• Proof of qualifications, including transcripts
• Proof of marriage, both the certificate and some sort of proof that it's legit (photos are allowed so long as they are dated... wtf?)

and...

• A check for 685£ for the application fee. That's approximately 1336.45 $.

Given that we've already dropped over 500$ on the paperwork above plus 400+ $CDN for the EOI form and there's more to come, we're now at the point where we're "putting our money where our mouths are". Other then the actual buying of the plane tickets, this would appear to be the biggest expense so far.

I think I'll put up a table of all costs incurred at the end of this little adventure.

What's strange is that it now feels real for the first time. I don't know why exactly it takes attaching a price tag to this for my mind to clue in, but it probably says something about the way I'm wired.

It's a terrifying feeling all of a sudden.

Just Found: Flowchart Explaining What We're Going Through.

I'm not 100% certain everything on this is accurate (it says we'd get an interview before our ITA, but that didn't happen) but overall it's a very good explanation of the system:
In fact, the page it comes from has some good stuff on it. We've decided not to go with Immigration consultants, but I sometimes wonder if that wouldn't have been simpler.

http://www.proteapacific.co.nz/new_zealand/nz_detail.asp?id=12&bhcp=1

ARGH.

Rereading the London Branch's information on the amount of time we're likely to end up waiting... Some very disconcerting information popped up:

Your Expression of Interest (EOI) will be assessed within three months of being selected from the pool. We will then contact you, either inviting you to apply for residence or requesting further information. [...]

Once the pre-populated application form is returned to the London branch it should be allocated to a visa officer within four months. [...]

After your application has been allocated to an officer they will generally take between one and three months to make a final decision on your application.[...]

If you find yourself in this situation please be patient – we aim to finalise your application within nine months of receiving it.

I'm really hoping we don't fall into those categories...

Should It Stay or Should It Go.

(Humming The Clash)

In my line of work, it's critical that you look at all the risks involved, figure out what level of risk you can live with and mitigate all others to a point where you can live with them. Applying this mindset to the move has brought up some scary "what if" scenarios:

What if we hate it and want to head back in 6 months?

I like having backup plans. I like knowing that I can salvage something from a situation that doesn't work out as I expected.

With the move, there's a lot of what I'd consider sunk costs. That is money that I will be spending on this thing, regardless of the outcome. Plane tickets, costs associated to selling the house, hotels once there all fall into this category. Usually, you would add "cost to ship all our worldly possessions over" to that list, but lately I've been concocting a plan that would avoid / delay that. See, my current hypothesis is that we'll either really like the change within the first year or we'll be ready to give up and come back. The packing / shipping is the single largest cost associated to the move (in the 10000$ range) and that's not an amount of money I'm willing to throw away. Combine that with the loss we'd take selling all our stuff over there so as not to have to move it back and we're easily looking at 20000$ for the whole transaction. Not life altering by any chance, but it'll definitely put a big dent in our budgets for years to come.

So my current plan is to split all our stuff into 4 categories, depending on when we'd like to have access to them again:

1. Essential stuff comes with us on the plane, in 1 or 2 extra suitcases.
   
2. Close at Hand stuff would be stored with trusted people in Canada that could send it to us if need be later (6-8 week surface shipping)
3. To be Stored stuff would only come over once we've decided we're staying long term
4. Junk is just that, crud we've accumulated that we can easily live without.
   

I figure if I have to spend 2000$ in storage fees and another 1000$ shipping stuff from categories 1 and 2 over for the first year to avoid losing 20000$ that's a pretty wise investment.

Of course, all plans have downsides:

• We'll be living w/o many of our creature comforts we've grown accustomed to.
  
• Storage may damage many of our things.
• There's going to be some unplanned costs (insurance, inconvenience etc)
  
• How much of our stuff are we going to have to buy short term to go about our day to day in NZ?

I can't really tell where this leaves us to be honest... I'll have to talk to family and friends for opinions...

First Steps

Wow, these bullet point posts sure are exciting!

So here's where we're currently at. The decisions (see previous post) were definitely the most difficult part. The more we plan, the easier it'll be to execute, right? (that's what they always say about software, though I don't quite buy it)

• Expression of Interest form: New Zealand, like Canada, is a very welcoming country for potential immigrants. Basically, you fill out a form for your family and if you qualify (e.g. have enough points in their form calculator) you're invited to immigrate. What your status is when you arrive isn't 100% clear to me yet, but i do know that you're allowed to work like a Kiwi, buy property, etc. without any restrictions. I'll have to look into this more. This form was sent in last week, my understanding is that we'll be hearing from an Immigration Officer soon to walk us through the rest of the process.
  
• House Prep: We're in a constant state of renovation, but now we actually have a goal and a deadline. So we're finishing up all the projects we started, patching, repainting, tidying etc.
  
• The Purge: This has to be one of the most difficult and necessary steps. Because we need to sell the house and bring only what we actually need with us, we're going room by room to toss all that accumulated cruft that's been cluttering up our lives. Gone are the heirlooms, the dish sets, the computer bits for computers long gone, the vintage and / or so cool to own but not actually use toys, the tools you have 3 of etc. I can see why the TLC shows are so popular.
  
• The Sell Off: Anything we can't bring (120v appliances) or don't need anymore (2 desktop computers, a small laptop, a bunch of networking gear) is being sold off. This is an ongoing process that so far is going pretty well.
  

Doesn't seem like much so far, but it's all we can do until some of the key steps like selling the house, picking a moving company etc are taken care of.

Some of the Defining Decisions

So where are we up to? It's absolutely amazing the number of decisions that need to be made when you're planning something this size. Some of them are entirely practical, others philosophical but all of them will end up having an impact. Most also require a ton of research to make sure you're not getting yourself into a jam. Here's some of the things that have been tossed around and preliminary decisions reached:

• Where: Wellington was picked for a few reasons. We'd really liked it when we were there, it's the hub of IT and Government work in New Zealand (jobs for me!). It's central, so we can go from one place to the next fairly easily. It's also the city we found that had the most metropolitan feel to it. Auckland struck us as very Toronto, Christchurch was a little more... British then we were looking for. Wellington had a great Montreal'esque vibe to it (will make sense to anyone who has been to Montreal).
• When: July 2008. Gives us (just) enough time to get everything going, let's us extend if required and takes care of all of our obligations here in Ottawa (weddings, graduation etc.) This is probably the most flexible bit so far.
• Rent or Sell: The house that is. We looked into the various options quite in depth, but in the end, the fear of having to pay mortgage in Canada + expenses while living in NZ were the biggest factor. We'd end up losing a fair amount of money by renting anyway, as our mortgage payments were greater then the max we could get for rent without taking in to account the costs of property management.
  
• The Car: Hopefully we'll be able to find someone to take over our lease. Leasing was probably a mistake, but I was blinded by the promise of low low payments. Won't be doing that again.
• The Cats: Definitely the hardest decision so far, we have two wonderful cats, one about 7 the other 14, who have grown rather accustomed to us and to each other. We need to find them a home, hopefully together, maybe apart. Moving them to NZ would cost an exorbitant amount (3000+), the airline wouldn't guaranty their safety during the flight and they'd have to spend a long time in quarantine. It just doesn't seem to be fair to them at this point, and I wouldn't be able to live with the idea of only bringing one.
  
• Bring it all or sell it here: Bringing it all, be it furniture, bicycles, electronics that are 120/220 compatible, computers etc. Basically, given that everything is more expensive over there and that there's a thriving second hand market, we're better off bringing everything we might need, and getting rid of it over there if necessary. This requires a larger investment in the move, but it should save us some cash in the long run.
• Jobs: It's looking very difficult to arrange jobs in advance from Canada. For a variety of reasons, this is just a fact to be accepted if you're planning a voluntary move to New Zealand. So we've planned on two to three months of job hunting (worst case scenario) once we get on the ground there. Setting up as many contacts before the fact is going to be key here.

We've been using a wiki to track all the information about the move, phone numbers, todo lists etc. It's been invaluable so far. I think that's key to setting up a project of this size: put some project management into it. Get some sort of organizational system together, and the discipline to properly close every issue as it comes up.