I never wrote a 6 months, 1 year or 18 months post as I felt very unsettled and didn’t think I could offer much apart from a whole mass of confusion and contradictions. I never wrote a 2 or 3 year post as, although more settled, I was constantly looking for something new and thought things would change any moment. And I never wrote a 4 year post as by that point emigrating seemed so far away I wasn’t sure which things to write about. But now that we’ve hit the 5 year point I feel like I should put a little something down.
I’m going to go with a ‘Top 10 helpful Tips’ format, although I must confess they are probably the Top 10 that spring to mind first, as opposed to the most important.
Top 10 Tips
1) Have an emergency fund, ideally to the value of 3 months wages and a flight home. You can’t put a price on the security that comes from knowing you don’t have to take the first job/rental you find, or being able to pop back when you feel homesick or a relative gets ill/gives birth…oh hold on you can…
2) Take advantage of stopovers on the flight out; first take a week somewhere relaxing to recover from the stress of packing up your home and leaving your friends and family behind. Then do a whistle stop tour of other possible places in NZ you might live/like. That way when things are tough and you think ‘maybe we should have moved to Christchurch instead of Auckland’…you’ll already have a feel for what that really means.
3) Flexibility will make settling easier…whether it is with job, area or state of mind….actually a flexible attitude is one of the most important things you can take on the plane with you.
4) Discuss what you will do if one of you wants to stay and the other doesn’t. This is not covered by ‘oh we’ll just agree to give it 2 years’….it needs to be a long thought out discussion involving much wine and ice cream. This is one of the saddest and commonest occurrences amongst expats and yet no one prepares for it, they all assume it will happen to someone else.
5) Choose your house with care; do not underestimate how much a cold, damp home can affect your mental health as well as your physical health.
6) If you’re in IT one of the best ways to get a pay rise is to change jobs, one of the best way to change jobs is to get to know others in IT. Network people, NZ is a small place – Network!
7) Travel is expensive, it will cost you several months’ wages – most of you will not have several months’ wages to spend. Most of you will not travel as much as you thought.
8) On arrival make friends with anyone and everyone, join clubs, go out, coffee mornings etc…..open your mind to meeting people and doing things you’ve never done before. Then work out who you can get on with in the long term and be choosier. Remember true friendships take time and require shared experiences, so that you can say things like, ‘remember when you tripped over that sheep?’, and all have a good laugh.
9) If you hate everything with a vengeance then you are probably suffering from culture shock/homesickness. This doesn’t mean you would love these things otherwise; they just wouldn’t stress you out quite so much. Not much you can do about this except recognise it for what it is.
10) Success is not only defined by moving out here, loving it and living the dream. Although this may be your initial intention, for many, NZ will just be a stage in their life, in this context success is enjoying your time, learning from it and having something worthwhile to look back on. For others NZ will simply be OK, finances and family may mean they have to stay, in which case a little extra effort may be needed to gain something from the experience but as long as you gain something you’re doing alright.
There will be plenty of people that didn’t follow most or all of these tips and are doing just fine. You don’t need these to make a life in NZ but they do help make the process a little easier.
I fall into the OK category and we will be going for citizenship as we’ve made a very nice little life for ourselves but I’ll still be hoping to win the lottery so that I can travel the world……..