:) Hello Everyone,
after secretly indulging in the priceless info on the forum for months now, I finally feel worthy of having enough to say /offer and joining in!

I am a 38 year old teacher from Billingham, Teesside - married to Deb for 12 years with two children - Dan (16) and Caitlin (10).
We have friends in Wellington who moved to NZ from Singapore about a year ago.

At first, we were just going to visit for a 3 week holiday, but the more we thought about it, researched, listened to the tales of travellers and residents etc., we decided to 'just go for it!'. The reactions I get when I tell people this are highly amusing - we're either brilliantly mad, brave or lucky b#~!**$! No-one's said we're stupid yet (except us on occassion!).

Anyway, in July of last year we began the quest, submitting our EOI at the end of August 2005. We were selected from the pool with 135 points on the 14th of Sept' and invited to apply for Permanent Residency.

The 'fun' duly started, with EOI Registration (?108), Residence Application Fee / Skilled Migrant Category (?585), Police Checks (?20), Medicals (?685), NZ Teachers Council Application Fee (?41), NZ Qualifications Authority (?173 + ?20 for University certified transcript), postage so far (?45) (Running Total = ?1632). Still to come Migrant Levies (?450 - hopefully!) and the cost of getting us and all our worldly goods to NZ. God I hope we're accepted. On the other hand, I'd have only spent it on Beer and watching Sunderland!

Our Application was received by NZIS on the 16th of January 2006. They duly thanked us and said there was a four month waiting list for those without job offers for a case worker to go through our application.

This time has been spent researching and job hunting via friends, books, magazines, TV and the Internet.

Low and behold, today - 3 months and 5 days on I received a call from London from our caseworker to arrange an interview. (Friday May 19th - 9.00am). Now it seems really real. I hope they've got 5 hours to spend in order for me to tell them everything I've learnt about the country, it's people, schools, residential areas, salaries, geography, wildlife, jobs, recreation, wines and beers etc etc. I'm just bursting to get it out of my system and impress them enough to accept us!

So, in a nutshell that's us. Loads more to say / contribute - but I reckon by now most of you will have had enough. So, thanks again for all the advice and the warmth the comarardery of this forum brings with it.

Belly & Family.
;D 8-) ::) ;)