Note from the Editor:
This article was kindly written for the SDC by member @Doctor Alan.

Australia is a wonderful country—not just ‘lucky’ but blessed with amazing scenery (if a little sunburnt!) and LOTS of space! Unlike the normally quite insular people in England, where I was born, many of us really don’t want to stay in the same place all our lives, living a sort of ‘Coronation Street’ existence. There are new places to experience and lots of friendly people to meet.

We left England when I was in my 20s and made a huge move to Australia for £10, and never looked back. (I’d been here before as an 11-year-old, and my family moved back to England after about 3 years – enough for me to have some wonderful memories of the place).

I lived with my wife and son in NSW for about 20 years, during which time we’d increased our family to include a lovely daughter.

I regard ‘20’ as being our ‘itchy feet’ number, because it seems that our destiny is to move after that time.



Our first move was to WA. We’d fallen in love with Perth when I was over there on a business trip with my wife, and we liked it so much, we couldn’t wait to put our house on the market when we got back to Sydney.

I think it was one of those ‘meant-to-be’ decisions – we wouldn’t have wanted to move if my wife hadn’t flown to Perth with me and shared my liking for the place. The newly created Compass Airlines was offering discounted airfares that included accommodation in Perth, and I was able to save the company a fair bit of money.



Planning:

Unless you’re a Bezos or a Musk, you can’t simply ‘up-sticks’ and move – a certain amount of planning has to take place.

Questions like: ‘Can I afford to resign from my job if they can’t place me interstate?’, ‘When should I put my house on the market?’, ‘Do I need to “downsize”?’, ‘Should I take all my furniture?’, and so on. It’s a BIG decision!

Your job: If you’re like I was, you may really want to consider a completely new start, especially if the company for which you work is not able to offer you employment where you’re going. What you must remember, though, is not to advertise the fact of your impending departure until you’re just about leaving the state! You’ll probably want to check out the employment section for your new location at this stage, and if you’re lucky, you may find that you can walk straight into a brilliant new career!

Selling your house: You should probably put your house on the market as soon as possible. It can take quite a while to sell a house, unless you accept some stupidly low offer.

Of course, you’ll need to research the area where you propose to live and make sure you can afford to move there! Sydney's house prices are some of the highest in Australia, so you may find it a financially sensible decision to move to another state.



Down-sizing: We should all do this as a regular procedure every few years. If you haven’t touched something for five years, and it’s just gathering dust in the loft, perhaps you wouldn’t miss it!

I made up ‘garage sale’ signs from old real estate advertising boards I found at the local tip. I folded them into a triangle, painted ‘Garage Sale’ and the address on them, and placed them at roundabouts and local road junctions, with the sign being held down by a brick. It was easier, cheaper and more effective than advertising in the local rag. I put these signs out most weekends until all our ‘junk’ was sold. (Of course, I lived in the country, and it may not be possible to do this where you live.).

You can also sell more valuable items on eBay or similar, but you’ll need to get moving on that, from the day you put your house on the market or before.

Furniture: You may want to start afresh with furniture – we did – and the amount of money you might lose on this is offset by the reduced removal cost. It’s a good idea to try to sell it to the new owners of your house when they become ‘unconditional’. A fridge, for instance, is a very large object to cart across the country.

My wife wrote a list of all our furniture, and next to each piece, she put the asking price. Another column was left for the prospective buyer to indicate how much they were willing to offer.



Interstate Removals: We ‘shopped around’ for the best price for an interstate removalist, which included storage in WA until we’d got settled. Interstate removalists, if you get a good one, will help you pack any ‘last minute’ items into boxes they generally have with them.

Our experience:

Selling a house is a bit of a lottery, really – sometimes it takes an age, and other times, just the right person comes along. We thought we had plenty of time. We needed to ‘downsize’ quite drastically, and we started organising regular garage sales and offloaded quite a bit of ‘stuff’ to family and op-shops. Quite surprisingly, our house sold very quickly (you can be lucky sometimes!) and I resigned from my job (which included losing my company car!). We decided to take most of our furniture this time, but it would have been almost as economical to either offer it to the new buyers at a good price or to sell it on eBay or something similar.



The Other Side:

After a three-week leisurely drive from Sydney, making side-trips to a lot of places we’d only read about, we arrived in Perth and had to set those wheels in motion to join the rat race! No house, no job!

Bank: The first thing to do is get some sort of stability to the bank account, so that all that money from the sale of the house in NSW can have a place to accumulate interest. It’s worth shopping around for this because some banks have pretty good short-term rates. Presumably, you’ll have a Visa or Mastercard to dip into for the first few weeks, which is essential if the proceeds of your home have been delayed in any way.

Car: Your car will need to be re-registered in the new state. You should be able to secure a refund for the unused registration of your car, and you should organise your new licence in the first couple of weeks.

Hotel and accommodation: As soon as you arrive, you’ll book into a hotel or motel for a night or two, while you find rental accommodation, and you start looking for something more permanent. In our case, we asked a lot of questions and got some idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ areas to live in, and this had a marked effect on the price of a home. (You should have got some idea of this before leaving Sydney, of course).

In our case, we chose Armadale, and within days of being in Perth, we’d signed up to have a house built. We’d also signed a three-month lease for a small unit in Como and spent a fair bit of time putting the minimum amount of furniture in it while taking a few items out of storage, where our NSW furniture was.

Employment: This is probably one of the most important hurdles to jump. We’d arrived just as Paul Keating was announcing the ‘recession we had to have’, so it was a little hard to find employment. I wrote many, many job applications almost from the moment we’d arrived, before I finally found one. In hindsight, I should have made a move on this before we left Sydney, but I’d underestimated the difficulty. Of course, a regular income means a loan for the house could be secured (I hadn’t paid off my NSW mortgage at that stage), and we could relax a fair bit. Security is a wonderful thing!



Later moves:

Roughly 20 years later, after I’d retired, we started planning for our ‘final phase’. We decided to move to Queensland because the houses were a fair bit cheaper. After several moves in WA to different areas, ending up in a rural area (Gingin), we wanted to get back into ‘civilisation’! This included a decent internet service and close medical facilities, among other things that city folk take for granted.
Of course, as a retiree, a lot of the preceding information is superfluous – we moved into a ‘Retirement Resort’ and were able to pay cash for the house. The house we bought was a ‘show home’, so we didn’t have to wait for it to be built. We’d left most of our furniture in WA with the house and sold the rest, and still had enough cash to buy all new furniture in Queensland – much simpler!

I can’t say it’s a permanent home – we just may decide to relocate in the future, who knows? We are, however, getting to the point in our lives when it’s just nice to ‘put our feet up’ and relax!

From the Editor:
I've lived in Queensland, Canberra and now, New South Wales, but never outside Australia. How about you? Have you moved houses, states or even countries before? How was the experience? Let us know your best tips and tricks in the comments below.

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