Continental Shift

When are you going? September 16, 2009

By now, you’ve chosen the country you want to move to. But when you should you move there? This decision will affect all your planning.

Electronic bells near the MCG, Melbourne

Whether you have been transferred by your company or are moving as a personal lifestyle choice, you will have to nominate a date of arrival.

You may be somewhat constricted in this date if you are doing a move for work, as the work program, deadlines, and company arrangements will affect when your supervisors expect you to be there. However…

Even if you are making a personal move and have no urgent need to be in-country by a certain time, you should still set a date for arrival. This makes your plans to move more concrete, more like an actual plan rather than pie-in-the-sky ‘one day’ talk. You may be surprised by how much more focused you are, and how much clearer your organisational requirements become, once you have a deadline. If you are the sort of person (like me) who needs more than a self-set deadline, consider booking your non-refundable one-way airline ticket.

The date should both take into account contractual things like rental leases and work contracts, and also allow you to accommodate all the necessary preparation work. The minimum time period may be dictated by time-sensitive requirements such as obtaining visas or getting vaccinations. The visa, in particular, may be the most important factor in setting your deadline (see Chapter 7 for more information).

You should allow at least three months to ensure such non-flexible time periods are accounted for, and also so that you do not stress yourself out by trying to get everything organised in too short a time period – remember you are not just packing for an overseas holiday but organising for a new life overseas while simultaneously tying up the loose ends of your old life. All this takes time. The rest of this book will help you see the extent of the requirements and therefore help you understand how much time it will take for you personally.

You should also consider carefully the timing of your arrival into the country. Will you be arriving in the heat of summer, when many of the other expats have taken their children away on their summer holiday and your own children will be hot and bored and stuck inside for a couple of months? Will you be arriving in the middle of a blizzardy winter making it difficult to trek around trying to find a home to rent or buy?

It’s not just the weather season you should think about. Will you be leaving home just before Christmas or your birthday, making your settling-in period a little bit lonelier than it really needs to be? Will you be arriving in the middle of a festival time in your new country, when a lot of businesses are closed and local people are too busy and distracted to welcome you properly? These are all considerations you might want to take into account.

CASE STUDY
My partner and I made the decision to go to Libya at the beginning of January. Our arrival date in country was set with my partner’s company as 1 March, early spring. That gave us just under three months to get ourselves organised, and ensured we arrived after the worst of the cold, but well before the worst of the heat.

ACTIVITY
Do you know the best time of year to go to your new country? Find out by talking to other expats or the embassy, and set the date of your move.

Now you know this, you can give yourself a deadline for all the other things you need to have done.

How to move overseas. That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll look at the type and sources of information you’ll need.

See past topics and what’s coming up next at the table of contents. Subscribe or check back for more content soon.

If you don’t want to wait, or you want the content in a nice, easy-to-read format, you can buy it in paperback from Amazon, or in paperback or electronically from Lulu.

If you’ve read it and have a spare moment, please review it at Amazon.