Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

We’d quite a detailed timeline taking us right up to the point of clicking the submit button on the visa application. An

d, then we ran off the end of that and find ourselves with two blank months.

That’s not to say that we’ve nothing to do, just that we need to update our plan with all the kind of things that we need to do. Some are there in outline form, and others will need added.

Our initial investigation was how to get the dogs out there (Tasmania doesn’t seem to allow cats). There’s several specialist places that do it, most of which go from Heathrow which doesn’t suit us, and all of which finish up in Melbourne where they do all Australian quarantine (usually 10 days, but can be 30 days). Whoever has the dogs registered in their name is the person who needs to hand over the dogs to the transport company. Initial quote came out at £7000 for both dogs which isn’t that bad.

Next up is getting our stuff there. We’ll likely not be taking everything from our existing house, but thinking that a 20 foot container is the way to go and that seems to be about £10,000 or so, though we’ll be needing more detail on the quote as we want it packed on this end and stored over there ’til we have our house organised.

Very early days, but step one is to get the plan fleshed out a lot more.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

There’s been quite a gap since the last post because it takes a lot of time to gather together the evidence that I’d spoken about earlier and, of course, to link it all together.

The key things are the two relationship history together with the four pillars. In practice, I linked things like bank statements, photos, 888 forms and the like to my version of the relationship history. As you’ll find there’s a guys style and a girls style of writing these things and they are very different! They do need to be consistent, but it was definitely easier to link the documents to my version due to the different style of writing.

Once we’d all the evidence collected, we wrote a table of contents listing the document names and what they were. That will make both your task easier and the task of the immigration agent reading your application that little bit easier too. We actually uploaded all the documents to my application (38 in total for us). Both relationship histories ended up around six pages long which covered a 25 year relationship, so it will be shorter if you’ve not been together that long.

It took a couple of hours to get everything uploaded as the immi site isn’t the fastest, or at least not when you’re accessing it from the UK. Don’t rush this stage as you need to get it right.

And then you click submit. After that, you’ll be needing your credit card and chances are that it’ll be declined as mine was because it looks fraudulent and I’d to call the bank. Helpfully, my bank didn’t weigh in with a payment declined message so all I saw on the immi site was “check your card details”. It’s geared up for Australian addresses, so chances are that you’ll not be able to enter the bill holder’s address 100% correctly.

Once you do get the payment made, you can then move along with the Sponsor application which is reasonably short and we did that on the same day. Or thought we had because it turns out that in addition to all the documents we’d already uploaded to the main application, we needed Wendy’s birth certificate and photo. You can’t upload these, or indeed any, documents immediately but can do a day or two later under the other documents button, so we ran up another index and uploaded that plus her passport, birth certificate, two police clearances, photo, and proof of us being in a relationship.

The other thing that you can do when you hit the submit button is organise your medical. When you click on that button, you’ve a fairly short health questionnaire to fill in and you’ll get your HAP ID which you’ll need to book your medical. The medical needs to be done by a doctor on their approved list: there’s loads in Australia, not so many in the UK. It took us so long to gather the evidence (about 18 months) that a new place had opened in Belfast in that time!

The medical is no big deal. You need to bring your passport and they’ll take a photo of you on the day. There’s two blood samples that they need, and then the doctor runs through the questions that you’d answered previously. All told, it ended up taking about an hour of which most time was spent doing the usual banging on your chest and back, checking out that you had feeling in your limbs, and, on the whole, felt like an olden tymes visit to a GP, albeit one that cost £400.

That was Tuesday morning. Wednesday afternoon I got an email from the GP saying that she’d uploaded all the information and it says on the immi site that they’ve got it.

So, 18 months or so since we started, we have a decision ready application sitting with the immi people.

How long we’ll need to wait for a decision is an interesting question. On their website, the global timescale is saying 90% are decided in two years. However, that’s including people who get requests for additional information which seems to add months to the time. For couples who have been together for ages and who have uploaded all their documents at the time of the application, it can be a whole lot faster. In fact, I’ve seen two very similar couples to us who received their visa in about a month and others in a couple of months. But, who knows?

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

If the visa application form is anything to go by, proving that you’re in a relationship gets harder the longer you’ve been together! That said, once you’ve proved it, the visa itself is issued really quickly (normally in less than six months).

Central to the application from this point is a statement from each of you about your relationship, starting from the point when you first met and, crucially, going right up to the day before you submit the application. These two documents will form the structure around which you’ll be building the evidence that you’re actually a couple. In the next stage, you move on to evidence about specific aspects of your relationship in terms of your finances, how you run your household, social aspects, and, of course commitment to each other but the relationship histories underpin all these. And, yes, there’s a lot of duplication.

Obviously it’s going to be longer if you’ve been together longer so allow a fair bit of time for both of you to write it! It is two statements although obviously they need to be in agreement with each other: for example, if one says you met in Paris and the other in New York, that’s going to be a problem. They also need to be in agreement with reality because you’re going to get interviewed about them as are the witnesses to your relationship that you’ve used (more on that later).

We’ve both started on our statements and it’s surprising how different they are because one’s written from a male perspective whilst the other’s written from a female perspective. They’re not inconsistent, but they are different and that’s to be expected, so don’t worry about it.

You start off from the point when you first met. Don’t get too hung up on that though. If you met via a friendship group and barely noticed your future significant other initially you could count that as the first meeting or equally it could be at the point of your first date. They’re not going to insist on the relationship starting when you swiped on him/her but rather at the point where it’s starting to become a relationship (however you defined that with the benefit of hindsight).

What’s important is what comes next so the various significant events and how the relationship developed over time. So you’ll be wanting to include first kiss, first intimate moments, moving in, getting engaged, married, first child, etc. Don’t forget consistency between the two accounts. Exact dates aren’t that important e.g. if you met in June, you don’t need to have the exact date, and if you’ve been together for years chances are that you will have forgotten the exact date.

They’ll particularly want to have details about time that you’ve spent apart. That doesn’t mean for a few hours but rather weeks so, if they’ve gone on a long holiday without you, they will want to know about that and moreover they’ll want to know how you kept in contact when you were apart. There’s more in the evidence section coming later, but they suggest phone records although many people just don’t have those these days and indeed you’ll see on the official guidance a lot of things are suggested which don’t seem to exist e.g. evidence of living arrangements comes to mind here.

Although there’s specific evidence sections later, it’s useful to build up evidence as you go through your relationship histories and they will prompt things to you as well. For example, if you went on holiday to Australia, they’re going to like some evidence about that like a plane ticket, photos, etc. As it happens one of the very earliest pieces of evidence we have is a photo of us on the top of Sydney Harbour bridge which is perfect in that it both places us together and it identifies where we were. That’s the kind of evidence you should be keeping an eye out for.

On the evidence front, it’s useful to create a folder for it and to quote a reference to each specific piece of evidence so, for example, that photo in Sydney is 2000-12 Sydney in the folder and when I’m referring to it in the relationship history. Save everything because even if it’s not useful right now, you might find you need it later e.g. we have accommodation vouchers which only name me which doesn’t seem useful as evidence at the moment, but who knows later?

Two things to bear in mind if you’ve been together for decades as we have is that there is a limit of, currently, 60 documents and that no document can be more than, currently, 5MB in size. This means that it’s useful to combine documents in one so, for example, we’ll be appending the four evidence headings after our relationship history but we have also had to shrink all of the photos to get them in one document under that 5MB limit.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Step 1 is to create your Immi account, which you do at immi. With that done, you can start on your application. Even step 1 is a pain as they want rather a long password and they’ve recently added multifactor authentication, for which you’ll need an authentication app. Oh, and they’d like you to change your password every 180 days.

Once you’ve passed that hurdle, you can start entering the information for your visa application. In my case, that’s for a 309/100 partner visa but the 820/821 is just the same except that you apply for that one from inside Australia rather than outside Australia as you do with the 309/100 visa.

The first bits are fairly simple, starting off with your citizenship(s), where you were born, and what passports you hold and, of course, your relationship status: you’re obviously going to need to be in some kind of relationship with an Australian to apply for this particular visa. With that page filled in, the next one asks you to confirm the key information thus far i.e. your name, sex, and passport number.

Next up are your contact details, both at the time of applying and at the time of the second (permanent) visa (it might be a while before the visa is granted, so you could have moved). The next screen lets you appoint someone to deal with your application e.g. a migration agent.

Next up are your family members. It asks if any that aren’t Australian aren’t migrating with you (doesn’t apply for me), then it’s on to your parents, siblings, and children (living or dead in all cases). It doesn’t ask for any information for the Australians on this list.

And now it’s time for the same information for your sponsor (i.e. your partner) so their passport details, contact details, and details of their immediate family (parents, siblings, and children). After the domestic violence question, it’s on to details of the relationship with you (some of which you’ll have entered earlier).

And that’s where things get difficult as they’re wanting details of your relationship, including financial aspects, how your household works, social aspects, commitment, and a relationship history. So that’s what I’ll be going through in the coming weeks and indeed months as it all has to go right up to the day before you submit the application.

Fortunately, you can save the application at any point. You’ll need to as the four text boxes on the above screen require you to do things like write a relationship history from when you met, and to provide evidence that you have, for example, gone on holiday together, among many other things.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Although most people give this little thought, it’s potentially going to have a major impact on your life in Australia, depending on how close you are to retirement and what arrangements you have put in place ahead of that move.

Final salary pensions (technically called defined benefit pensions) are going to stay in the UK, because they can’t be moved. In some cases, you can have your company pay the pension directly into an Australian bank account, but check the charges before you do that: some may make the payment via Swift which could cost you £25 or more each month in charges, plus charges to exchange the pounds to Australian dollars. Much better it to have it paid into a UK bank account and do the transferring to Australia yourself e.g. if you have an HSBC UK account, you can transfer this instantly for almost no charges to an HSBC Australia account. Final salary pensions will almost always get the increases that you’d have received if you still lived in the UK.

The UK State Pension can’t be moved to Australia but they can pay it directly into an Australian bank account. As above, I’d be more inclined to get it into a UK bank account and do the transfer myself as you know what the charges are going to be. This pension will not increase after you move to Australia so no more triple lock or indeed any increase at all. Worth noting is that Reform are talking about eliminating state benefits for immigrants and they appear to include the state pension in that, therefore it would be prudent to get any non-UK nationals moving with you British citizenship before you move, which currently costs about £1600, but given that it could lock in the entitlement to a UK state pension of £10,000/year or more that seems like a good investment.

Defined contribution pensions, private pensions, SIPPs, and similar pensions generally can be moved to Australia. However, there are limitations applied by both HMRC and their Australian counterpart. HMRC requires any pension to move to a QROPS compliant pension scheme which means in practice for Australia a Self Managed Superannuation Fund (SMSF). This is similar to the UK SIPP scheme but with a lot more administrative overheads and therefore a lot more cost: typically the setup and annual fees run to around A$2000 or so. You can’t use an off the shelf SMSF due to the HMRC regulations, notably that no member of the scheme can be less than 55 (so you can’t transfer the pension until you are at least 55) and you will need to have the SMSF administrator create a scheme meeting those regulations. The other big limitation is that you can’t transfer more than A$120000 (about £60000) per year and can only do this up to age 75, which may mean that your SIPP can’t be transferred in one go and it may not be possible to transfer a larger SIPP in full even over a number of years e.g. a £600000 SIPP would likely take more than 15 years to transfer (not 10 because it will, one hopes, grow in value as time goes on). One way to accelerate the transfer is to transfer, say, £60000/year into your SMSF and simply withdraw another £60000/year, taking the Australian income tax hit on that second £60000, and just put it into an Australian investment account.

Australian state pension is means tested in two ways. The income test means that you get the maximum pension if you’re single and have less than A$109/week (£50), A$170/week (£75) for a couple and is reduced by 50c/25c for each dollar above those amounts, reaching zero when you’ve more than A$1287 (£643) single, A$1967 (£983 for a couple. Given that the UK state pension is currently £230/week, you’re not going to get the maximum Australian pension under the income test. They also have an asset test, so a single homeowner can have up to A$321500 (£160750), A$481500 (£240750) for a couple to get the maximum, reducing to zero when you reach A$714500 (£357250) or A$1074500 (£537250). The asset limits include everything except the home you’re living in, so notably it includes pension schemes of all types. Last, but not least, you need to have been an Australian resident for at least ten years, unless you’re Australian (in which case, you could pop your claim in as soon as you’ve arrived). Unfortunately, the UK no longer has a social security agreement with Australia (it did up to March 2001) so no exemptions from the ten year limit.

ISAs aren’t transferable and there doesn’t seem to be any Australian equivalent unfortunately. You can retain your ISAs but since Australia doesn’t recognise ISAs, they will be taxable; you can’t add any more money to them once you leave the UK. Australian tax law means that capital gains are taxed differently depending on how long you have held the asset, so it may be simpler to move the holdings from your ISA to a dealing account in Australia when you move. T212 operates in Australia in much the same way as it does in the UK, aside from the lack of an ISA and you seem to be able to transfer from a T212 UK account to an Australian one; it seems to be a lot cheaper than local Australian brokers.

And that’s it for pensions. You will need to get an adviser to set up an SMSF for you and the main banks have partnerships with companies that can do that (National Australian Bank seems the best offering).

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.