NZ Update – Off, Off And Away!
So it’s fixed. Flights are booked for 25th September 2018. Container will probably leave start of the month. Woohoo!
Concerning the visa
After some communication with the EOI officers at immigration New Zealand it turned out I was eligible for a permanent resident visa. So we got that and then a visitor visas for the rest of the family. Once in NZ we’ll directly go for residence visas. Along the way we made quite a few mistakes (assuming we didn’t need the NZQA for the EOI and no medical exams for the kids for the visitor visas) so we lost a lot of time, nerves and digital medium of exchange (aka. money). Long story short: If you ever try this, do consider paying a little more and getting a professional adviser or be ready to spend a lot of time researching and throughly studying the application guidelines.
Concerning the flights
This one is pretty straight forward. Book flights as you usually would. One-Way this time. I’ll do another post one some tips concerning international flights with three lively kids. Spoiler: no sedating knock out medicine. Sorry.
Concerning the container
This one isn’t over yet it will be quite tricky because biosecurity in New Zealand is (rightfully) very careful. Any organic material, be it a little dirt under hiking shoes, may result in biosecurity fumigating your entire container. I don’t want that. More medium of exchange I’d prefer to keep and not that kind of stuff I’d like to have im my blankets. I’ll most definitely do a post on this one and link it here. Depending on whether you’ll be flighting economy class or not this one will probably be the most expensive single transaction you’ll do for this story of resettling. If you have a future employer to covers this. . . good for you!
That’s it for now. See you guys on the other side!
Image by Mantas Hesthaven
2 Responses
Hi,
regarding your latest YouTube Video on IKEA shoping. I have no youtube account.
I have read that you have to pay tax for bringing new things with you in your container(items younger then 2 years). Have you any futher information on that topic? On the Other hand you could get back the german tax(MwSt) when you exporting things as far as i know. Did you try that?
I am just at the beginning of the journey to move to NZ and the information that you provide did help me a lot. 🙂
Good Luck!
Hello Robert, thanks for the comment and thanks for watching the youtube channel. There will be a video about loading the container soon! Because we’re moving to NZ as a family and I am a holder of a permanent resident visa we’re allowed to bring household goods and personal effects duty free. However that is only true for used items (hence those two years), not for the newly bought items from IKEA. We decided to declare our entire IKEA shopping trip (note that more than half of our items were for family members here Germany so we didn’t have to declare that much in the end). Currently I’m hoping for NZ customs to let us in without paying most of the tax. After all, we’re 5 people and we’re bringing “only” a 20′ container with items for own use only. Will definitely post whether that worked. I haven’t tried to get the MwSt back and didn’t know of that option to be honest. Thanks for pointing that out.!Not sure whether the work is worth those couple of Euros we would get back though… Will keep you posted! The container will arrive in NZ in the beginning of November and I’ll post how things worked out and what would have been the best strategy. – Oliver