Planning your move

Moving to New Zealand - plan your move with NZ Ready

Hi my name is Nick, I am from Norwich, England and I now live in Auckland with my wife and two children. So, I thought that New Zealand would be much like the UK, almost identical to London. How wrong could I be!

The hardest thing to plan for the move is just the sheer enormity of what you need to do – there are so many things you need to think about and it can be quite overwhelming when you stop and consider just how much needs to get done before you can go.

You need a visa, you need to get your medical records, you need to sort out education for your kids. You’ve got to get your possessions from your house to the other side of the world. You’ve got to research shipping companies and costs and insurance and get all your travel insurance sorted out so it literally is a never-ending list of things to do. Google is a great source of information to start that journey. You’ve got to be careful with what is on the internet, some of the stuff that is on there is not there is not necessarily accurate, so you’ve got to be discerning about where you choose to take your information from.

Fortunately I discovered NZ Ready – which has built in to it a tool, like a checklist and you can go through a check off each of the items to make certain that you don’t forget anything. The tool is so easy to use, it’s almost idiot proof. So when you login to the tool for the first time it asks you to put some pretty basic information about who you are, where you want to live in New Zealand, your personal circumstances – if you’ve got kids and so on and so forth. Then it really directs the information that you need to see to you and it will only display stuff that is relevant for your situation. The tool allows you to save your progress as you go through and I found myself every single night throughout the process of getting my visa, about getting the planning, sitting on the tool and working through what was next on my to-do list and it became something I relied on.

The tool made it stress free, it was totally simple for me to use, and what better source of information is there than the government themselves? Moving to New Zealand has far exceeded my expectations. I thought it would be brilliant but I didn’t expect it to be just this good.