Continental Shift

The last few weeks, we’ve talked about the steps you need to plan for in finalising your connections in your home country. We focused on selling your house first, but what about all those other little things – mail, voting arrangements, and so on?

Mail
Just as if you were moving across town and wanted your mail forwarded, you can have your mail forwarded to you overseas, using the same kind of commercial postal services to do so. It simply costs a little more.

Sometimes the mail forwarding service is time limited, for example, for three, six or twelve months. You can choose to re-new the service when it is due to expire. If your move is permanent, or you do not intend to return to the same address, you should instead try to update your details with the senders as you receive forwarded mail from them.

Often the mail forwarding service provider also offers a new address notification service and can automatically do this for you. However, you should also note who you are receiving mail from via the forwarding service, and let them know your new address yourself to catch any that are missed. Eventually you should be able to dispense with the service.

You may also choose to keep an address in your home country. This is particularly useful for being able to keep a home country bank account or credit card or to order certain goods. Some postal companies will be able to supply you with a mailbox with a street address (as many companies do not accept a PO Box as an address) and forward mail from it to you.

In the same way, you might want to keep a phone or fax number in your home country, and there are services, such as JFAX, which can provide this (they forward the phone call or fax to you as an email attachment).

You could arrange for family or friends to be your home country address and phone number. Ensure you reimburse them for all costs and that it does not become onerous, or it will be unfair to them and they may begin to resent you and/or refuse to do it any longer – and it can be more difficult to set up these things from overseas than it is from the home country (though the internet, if you have access to it, has improved matters greatly).

If applicable, the home office of your company may agree to forward on local mail to your expat location, and therefore the company will provide your home country address.

This was the case for us. It was very useful, but it was also very important to get the address exact: it had to have both my partner’s name and the word ‘Libya’ in the address for the company to know where to send it.

I found over and over again that some organisations or services would cheerfully drop off one or both of these elements from my mail, perhaps because it was too long to fit their database fields. If you have a particularly long or multi-part address, be sure to specify that the address cannot be abbreviated and must be recorded exactly as supplied (be fair and try to condense the address as much as possible, perhaps with initials and so on).

Voting
Another area you will need to consider is whether you wish to continue voting in your home country’s elections. If you do, you will need to check a) whether it’s possible and b) how you can do this, e.g. through postal voting or embassy visit.

For example, voting in Australia is compulsory, but not if you have moved overseas – you can have yourself removed from the electoral roll by using forms obtainable via the state and federal electoral websites. If you do wish to continue voting, you can fill out a different form which requests that a postal voting form be sent to you. You can also vote by going to your nearest Australian embassy. However, if you are staying overseas for more than one year, you will not be eligible to vote in state elections. You can vote in federal elections for up to six years.

Driver’s licence
If you already drive, you will probably want to continue to drive in your new country. However, in most cases, the bit of plastic your home country issued you will not be recognised as valid in a different country.

Obtaining an international driving permit will allow you to drive in your new country for up to one year (as long as your domestic licence does not expire or get revoked in the meantime), if it is one of the countries who agreed to recognise it way back in 1949. These countries include Australia and New Zealand, most of Europe, Africa, South and North America, and parts of the Middle East and Asia, but not China.

Some of these countries, for example Canada, also time limit the permit to less than one year. Check with your automobile association or the relevant embassy website to see if your new country recognises the permit and for how long.

If you plan to only stay in your new country for a limited number of years, you could simply renew the international driving permit whenever it expires, as long as your driver’s licence from your home country remains current or valid. If you intend to stay longer, you should find out the requirements for getting a driver’s licence in your new country.

Be aware also that even if the country does officially recognise the international driving permit, it doesn’t mean the police in the field have any idea what it is, especially if the permit is written in, say, English, and the dominant written language is, say, Arabic (yes, I do speak from personal experience). Therefore you may wish to get the proper licence even for a relatively short stay of a few years.

You can get the international driving permit before you leave through your local automobile association or motoring organisation. You will need to show your domestic driving licence and give them a passport-sized photograph (here’s a tip: many, many forms need passport-sized photos – get a lot).

If you forgot to get your permit or it has expired, you can send an application form, a copy of your domestic licence, the passport photo, and payment, through the mail and have the permit mailed back to you in your new country.

I will add here the warning issued by the Australian government in its Hints for Australian travellers booklet – “do not get a driving permit via the internet – they are illegal”. This is different from getting one from your automobile association online, however.

Insurance
Health and travel insurance are important and are talked about in other parts of this section; you will also need to make sure that all your goods being moved or stored are insured – this is dealt with more in the last section.

If you were just moving house, you would generally cancel the house insurance but keep the contents insurance, since the contents are coming with you. In this case, you might cancel the contents insurance (since it will be covered in the move and storage separately), but keep the house insurance if you have chosen to rent the house. Or you might need to cancel all home insurance policies if you are selling.

Remember also to cancel or modify the insurance on other big-ticket items like cars, boats or caravans if applicable.

Safety deposit box
If you plan to return to your home country, you might wish to safely hold certain valuable documents, like your birth certificate, mortgages, will, and so on, which you don’t want to take with you but don’t want to just leave in storage or with family either.

Banks can provide you with a secure deposit box. Some banks offer this as a free service for their customers but most charge a yearly fee for it. Be warned, it will cost you every time you access the box, so be sure about what you’re putting in there (both that you won’t need the items again till you come home, and that you have included everything you want to include on the first go rather than adding stuff to it piecemeal).

Last will and testament
You should have a valid and up-to-date will anyway, to make sure your assets are distributed how you want rather than how the impersonal law decides, and also if you don’t want your assets frittered away by family quarrels and lawyer fees (not that you’ll know about it, which is some comfort, I’m sure).

While life is generally not any riskier living in some other country than your original one (depending where you are moving to, of course), one of the ticks you should be able to make is that you have completed a will. This will help tidy up your affairs as you leave the country and give you and your family peace of mind. Regulations for wills differ, but you most likely need an independent witness to sign that they’ve watched you sign it.

You will probably want to store a copy of your will in both your home and new countries; you can use a safety deposit box with your bank for this and other important paperwork, as mentioned above. Ensure someone knows where you have stored your will and that they can gain access to it if it becomes tragically necessary.

CASE STUDY
We started by deciding to rent our home, which then resulted in a lot of maintenance work and replacing dodgy bits and pieces we had been living with for some time (amazing what you’ll put up with but wouldn’t dare subject other people to).

We organised a safety deposit box with our bank and learnt the hard way about not accessing it too often. We finally got around to getting our wills properly signed off on after leaving them sitting around in draft (non-binding) form for months.

I chose to keep my voting options open, whereas my partner removed himself off the rolls completely – we’ll see how much hassle I have voting when the election finally comes around later… [a lot! I ended up off the rolls.]

ACTIVITY
Start thinking about what you’re going to do with your house, if you own it, and about other detritus of your life like voting and wills and so on.

Make a list of all the little long-term things you will need to go and find forms for and deal with soon.

This stage may be time-consuming, but will be onerous only if you are going to sell your house, which will mean a bit of work in getting the house presentable, organising an agent, home opens etc.

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