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Submitted by: Denise McManus
When you initially become an expat, in most cases you move with a company that provides you with a house, transport, perhaps a furniture or removal allowance and they help you to settle into your new environment. When you return back home, some expats are lucky enough to perhaps move with the same company or have bought a house during their time away and can settle in quite quickly and comfortably. Even if you do have these advantages, there will always challenges that you did not count on encountering.
These Top Eleven tips should help you along your path home.
1. Who is picking you up from the airport and how much luggage did you bring with you? We arrived back at home with six huge suitcases, a box, 4 hand luggage cases and 5 laptops. We needed help! Arriving back on 4 January did not help our move, family and most friends were still on holiday. We were lucky to have one close friend still in the area who kindly brought their 44 and with our hire car we managed to transport the luggage to our destination. You WILL need help unless you are arriving back with minimal luggage.
2. Where will you stay on arrival, until you are settled? Do you have friends or family that you could stay with until you find something more permanent? If you are moving back with your company, will they have accommodation for you? Ensure you have an interim. We stayed with family for the first three weeks and found a house to buy in that time period, however it was going to take another six weeks before we could move into our new home. The estate agents found us a self-catering unit at a reasonable. It was not ideal, but served our purposes and we are all still speaking to each other.
3. Find a home and school? You can start looking for a home before you leave your host country there are some fantastic property search websites that can be found in nearly every country. When searching for a home take into consideration the proximity of your new home to school/s and work. Few people buy online, but it will give you a good idea of prices, area, proximity and size.
4. Register your kids into a school? This goes hand in hand with your new job and hopefully finding a home close by. Government run schools are a little easier to get your children into if you live in an area that has to enroll your child into a school in the district. Private schools are more difficult and you will have to register your children and they may well go onto waiting lists. Be patient you will find a school and don’t compromise, places do become available as the list shortens with children going to other schools.
5. How will you get around? Did you keep your old car stored away for the period that you were an expat or will you need to hire a car? How long will you need the car for and do you need to buy new one/s? Start looking online for pricing and dealerships or second hand offers. We kept our hire car for three months and bought one car after being back at home for a week. After three months we found the second car and were back to a two-car family.
6. Do you have bank accounts? Did you keep your old bank accounts functioning? If so you should not have a problem with obtaining loans or a mortgage. If you haven’t you need to get a bank account set up asap. We did keep our bank accounts and a mortgage account, which we did not owe a lot of money to, just in case we needed the extra cash for deposits on the new home or cars, etc. It did help but we battled with the legalities of proving we were resident in the country and not still expats as we did not have a house which would give us a Water and Lights bill. However, as we were known by the bank we eventually managed to prove permanent residency to ensure our new mortgage was approved.
7. Insurance? Why this question, well unless you have kept up your insurance policies such as personal insurance of you laptops, jewelry, etc, you may want to ensure that you are insured. We were expats in a country where crime did not exist, you could walk out of a shop without your mobile phone and a shop assistant would find you in the mall to return it to you. Our home country is the complete opposite it was vital that we were insured before we landed.
8. Have you kept your host or home country mobile phones? Do you have Internet connection? Host country mobile connectivity is going to cost. When you land in your home country there are always shops around to buy a new sim card or top up your old one. We arrived with children who needed new sim cards for the BlackBerries, my old home sim had gone missing in the move and my husband had cancelled his old one before we left. We needed new sim cards and connectivity to ensure we could work, within 30 minutes we all had new mobile numbers and were connected.
9. When will your container arrive? This will determine how long to rent or rely on the kindness of others, as well as when your container can be delivered and unpacked. When we moved to our host country it took three and a half months for our container to arrive, we therefore sent our container ahead by half a month when returning home, in the hope that we could find a house within the three months we expected it to take to arrive on home soil. Our container arrived within one and a half months of departing the host shores. We had to organize storage for the period it would take us to move into our new home. Beware of these incidents that may seem small but can become a headache.
10. If you have transported your Pets, when do they arrive back home and how long will they have to be in quarantine? This can be very traumatic for the animals and owners, be prepared for long quarantine periods in certain countries and find out where and when you can visit to keep contact with your hairy friends.
11. Unpacking, this is all dependent on buying or renting a home, when the container arrives and can be delivered. Help is always required because it is chaotic, find some helping hands who can look after children and who are willing to drop a hot meal off. Find that box with the linen and towels for those first few nights.
12. Medical Insurance. Finally, when we left our home country as expats we cancelled our medical insurance as this was provided by our host company. The insurance was different to the one we had been on for 20 years. When returning home and having being expats for 5 years our original medical insurance company wanted to charge extra fees (on a monthly basis that were exorbitant almost double what we were originally paying) as a penalty for not remaining with them during our expat assignment. Before you leave to become an expat, find out what your medical insurance company policy is (unless you remain with the same company for your assignment) and if it is to penalize you for resigning from the medical aid, then remain on the insurance at a minimal cost to ensure you are covered when you return.
You cannot plan for every eventuality but you certainly can try.
Good luck and enjoy your new job, home and being back on familiar ground.
About the Author: Denise is an Expat and Marketing Manager at
Xpatulator.com
a website that provides cost of living index information and calculates what you need to earn in a different location to compensate for cost of living, hardship, and exchange rate differences.
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isnare.com
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