If you're new here, you may be interested to know that you can receive all of our latest articles directly to your inbox. Click Here for more info. We promise to keep your email safe and will use it for only this purpose
Ok, for starters (and because I didn’t start this site until we actually received our Visa’s. I thought it might be a little useful to give a little background about how and why we ended up getting to the stage where we are now
Please also keep in mind; I’m a pretty typical bloke with an average education. I may not necessarily have the literally talents of Shakespeare or J. K. Rowling so please stick with me through the typo’s. Please also keep in mind that we’ve done a lot before we got here. As a result, some of these earlier sections may be a little long but I’ll type as fast as I can to try and get up to date 
Anyhow, I won’t get to heavily involved in the specifics about how we did this, how we did that. However as the site matures I’ll make sure that all these areas are covered and will link to and from certain sections of this article to help you guys navigate around the site.
I guess it all started in the summer of 2004. I took voluntary redundancy from the company I was currently working for at the time. My wife and I had been to Australia (Sydney) in 2002 to catch up with my brother-in-law who has lived and worked in Sydney as a permanent resident for over 7 years.
We fell in love with the place, the weather was fantastic, the sky was blue and probably most strikingly, the friendliness of the people and the Australian culture as a whole took our breath away.
It struck me that why should I restrict my job-hunting to the UK when there was a mass of other opportunities a few thousand miles away on the other side of the world. Although the missus was working at the time, I was, up to that point the main ‘bread winner’ in the house so (in my mind) it seemed logical that we should be able to pack up one job if I was able to secure a similar or better job in a country with a lower cost of living.
We also had a 2 year old baby son to think of and out of all the reasons for moving to Australia, he was probably the main driver. I love the UK and am proud of my country. However, living in the UK (West Yorkshire) can, at times be extremely depressing. Its not just the crappy weather but the direction our country seems to be heading in.
Immigration is high, crime levels are high, you take your baby son to a park that is covered in graffiti and littered with broken ‘alcopop’ bottles. You spend hours sat in traffic, simply trying to get from A to B. There has to be a better life out there doesn’t there?
I guess having a baby did us a big favour; it gave us the focus we needed to get our head down and seriously look at the processes involved in getting permanent residency in Australia.
I say it gave us the focus because (although I think initially we didn’t fully appreciate it at the time) it gave us a relatively short timeline to work with.
We were conscious that we needed to apply and get our visas before we reached our 40’s due to the impact that being over 40 has on the number of points you require (we are early to mid 30’s at the moment). However, we wanted to get to Australia before Australian children start their first (grown up) School year, this being his 5th birthday.
Ultimately we wanted to get to Australia and (relatively) settled in time to get our son into the Australia schooling system from the start, not uproot him from a UK school and stick him in with a class full of kids, he’d never met, half way through a school year. This gave us a worst case, must be in Australia, what ever happens date of October 2007.
Article Popularity: 4%
