The decision, the visas and the clean up

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  Foxboro, Massachusetts, United States
Friday, July 4, 2008

It was decided but there was still the issue of the visas and cleaning up our affairs in Massachusetts. We had very comfortable lives. We had cars, a property we were renting next to a state forest (great for my mountain biking), I owned a house and we both had good paying jobs. As has been said to me now and in the past why would you want to give all that up? Well for those who know me well that's easy, a comfortable life in the suburbs or moving to a new place in the world for a new adventure - there is really no choice!

Cleaning up ones affairs after living somewhere for 10 years is quite a chore, below are details of some of our easier and more difficult tasks.

Believe it or not selling the cars was probably our easiest task! I sold mine site unseen to a friend who was relocating from NY to California and wanted to buy a car on the east coast that he could drive to the west. We went through all the negotiations on the phone and via email and arranged a pickup date that should have been 4 days before we flew out! The whole transaction was closed over a beer. I had a Honda Civic and with a highway EPA MPG of 38 and with gas prices over $4 per gallon in the USA these cars were in hot demand. Erica had a 6 year old Golf, but with only 50,000 miles even the dealership in the posh Wellesley suburb offered us 6800 cash - we sold it for a good amount more than that to a nice older gentleman, the first and only person we contacted from our Craigslist advert. This transaction worked out particularly well as he allowed us keep it right up to a couple of days before we left. I think it's experiences like these in the past and hopefully in the future that have lead people to call me a lucky bastard - long may it continue!

We had movers who would come and pack up our belongings, put them on a 20 foot container and unload them in Darwin. We figured this wouldn't be too difficult but it turned out to be one of the tasks that took us the longest. It started with us having to create an inventory of absolutely everything we were taking and putting a value to each item. This happened about 2 months before we left and also meant we had to decide what we were going to put in our suitcases, what we were going to get rid of and what we thought would fit in a 20 foot container! Anyone have any ideas about what you can fit in a 20 foot container? We could only guess! Once this was done we had to create new inventories for insurance purposes and then yet another inventory for the customs people! The other inventories had to be hand written and were categorized differently so unfortunately it wasn't just a case of writing stuff down and copying it. I'll be happy to never have to write a house inventory ever again. We were surprised when we filled in our insurance sheet for Australia; our total insured value for new replacements came to about $40,000 - how much had we picked up over the years! The 2 days the movers came went relatively smoothly - it was a scorcher and it must have been like hells kitchen in our un-A/C house. Everything was wrapped in bubble wrap and the corners were taped and padded on top of that. The nice new $1000 42' plasma TV was put in a wooden crate (my sister had already told us that her TV was broken in transit when they moved over), hopefully ours would arrive safely. There have been some stories recently about those big container ships losing those containers overboard so we're keeping our fingers crossed that our container would be somewhere in the middle of the ship and not one of those that was stacked up about 20 high on the outside of the ship. It was also hurricane season in the northern hemisphere and we hoped our ship didn't encounter any before it got down to the Panama Canal. We were told our container would take about 10 weeks to arrive - it left 2 weeks before us, we would be in a hotel for 2 weeks when we first arrived in Darwin so we would also have 6 weeks in Darwin without our furniture.

Electrical items were another issue with the move. Australia is 240V where the USA is 110V. Simple we thought, buy a few transformers. Well it turns out if you want a transformer that is on for long periods of time a 500 watt one weighs 4lb, and if you think that sounds big (we bought 2), if you want one that goes up to 750 watt then the weight increases to 14lb! We decided to sell or give away any appliances we had over 500 watts. This required going around the whole house and checking the rating on all our electrical goods. Some items don't even give wattage and in some cases we had to call the manufacturers! The microwave, the deep fat fryer, the bread maker, the kettle and some of the cheaper items such as desk and floor lamps were items that it was not worth getting transformers for had to go. Luckily many items such as computers nowadays work from 100-240w.

We are still not sure if our TV will work or not. The USA uses a different picture system to the rest of the world (Europe and Australia use PAL and the USA uses NTSC). From what we understand our TV will not work if we attach it to cable or an antenna. It should work if we attach it up through a VCR system though. We are still not 100% sure and could end up with a $1000 black box that won't do anything in Australia.

The last hassle of moving was getting rid of both good and bad things. We used a combination of Craigslist, Yahoo freecycle, goodwill and friends. Some things such as a spare TV went immediately; other things such as the bread machine had to be given to goodwill. In the end we filled up 8 trashcans with crap on our last 2 weeks and had 2 car loads full of things we didn't want that went to goodwill.

It really made us think about how much crapola we had picked up and how much of it was really that useful!

As many of you know I've quit my job of 10 years twice in the past to do 6 month traveling stints through South America and Africa. I keep going back - this time I thought it was the real thing! We had actually accepted the job back in March, but I hadn't told anyone at all who I work with or even many people I knew from outside work, if I thought they knew people back at my company. My company had had layoffs in the past and I was sure if they found out my intentions of leaving, my head would be first on the chopping block. Let me tell you it's a pretty difficult task keeping a huge life changing secret from friends and work colleagues for 4 months when your whole life outside of work revolves around these changes! After I gave notice questions kept popping up from work colleagues about the possibility of working remotely. I vaguely brushed them off, after all part of the plan of going to Darwin was to have a long break and perhaps look into doing something a little different. When I was finally asked by the higher ups if I'd be interested we had decided it would be the sensible thing to do if possible! There were still things to sort out such as who would I pay tax to, the Aussies or the Americans? Whether it was legal? The logistics? Well after some discussions with the lawyers it was determined it was legal and there are some people looking into the tax implications. At the moment I've no idea on how all this will work and am interested to see! Even before accepting to continue to work for a company in the USA we had looked into tax issues and given that we still had a house and investments in the USA we were sure we'd be hiring the services of a tax specialist anyhow. I had also heard that because I was a US resident (through my Green Card) I'd still have to pay Massachusetts income tax on anything I earned in Australia. One more reason it's called Taxachusetts!

In the end the visas didn't come through as quickly as we had hoped, we also wanted to leave exactly two weeks after the visas arrived as Erica had to get her work started before the wet season came. It turned into a waiting game, checking the visa status online every day knowing I would be giving my notice right after the visas got approved. Three days after we had expected the visa to come we got an email saying we needed proof of our relationship. I was going over as a de facto partner on Erica's visa. This is basically the same as common law marriage. Why we hadn't realized this request was coming is beyond me! We had been told earlier that we would have to show we had been living together for 6 months. It turned out we had to show 12 months proof. Our current lease had been active for only 10 months and although we had spent time living together at the house I owned for a time before that, we had no joint bills or documents proving this, just some correspondence! It turned out to be a very stressful weekend getting together as much evidence as possible - in the end we put together the following documents

· Photographic evidence - We had taken vacations together going back 5 years

· We had joint memberships in a number of organizations such as the Mass Audubon, AAA, AMC and MOS and joint mail from these organizations.

· Old mail - I wanted to send some old love letters Erica had sent me but she wouldn't allow it :-)

· Joint bank statements

· A letter from our friend Eli - in which Erica pointed out she seemed to remember more details than me about our relationship :-)

Also letters from Erica's parents

· Notarised lease

· Joint travel tickets and passport visas from shared trips

We crossed our fingers and emailed it all Sunday night. We had decided to go up to Maine with some good friends of ours the following Tuesday. That morning to our huge relief we got an email stating we had provided more than enough evidence! So much for all that stress! I decided it was probably not a good idea to give notice and then head out for a 3 day vacation so we decided to wait until the following Monday. Our departure date was now July 18th. The 5 day weekend up on the Maine coast was just what the doctor ordered. A bit of R&R at a cottage provided by some friends of Michelle. We didn't do too much apart from head down to Port Clyde harbour for seafood lunches and go to visit a small town 4th July parade and fireworks in the nearby town of Thomaston. Living in Boston with all its affluence and hurriedness I often forget that much of the US population live in these friendly little places where people had the time of day, everyone seems to know one another and the pace of life is slightly different!