Week Beginning 25th June

This week has been a really busy week.

At work I have been asked if would be interested in the Team Leaders role. This would be a permanent role and would therefore mean IBM sponsoring me for permanent residency. On course I said yes and Deborah said she was glad as she had already spoken to the Line 2 manager Bevan about it. I have been told to expect Bevan to speak to me about it... we wait and see.

On Tuesday night I decided to transfer the money from the sale of the house and the remains of the redundancy and share sale over from our UK HSBC account to our Australian HSBC account. We setup these accounts so transferring the money would be easier and cheaper. We would also get a preferential exchange rate as were transferring a large amount of money. Oh boy what a pain in the you know what this turned out to be.

I called the phone banking on our uk account as you must initiate the transfer from the uk account. I got through to the Indian call centre. I told the lady what i wanted to do. Sorry sir you can only transfer a maximum of 10K. You must go into your branch to do this. I explained that I was in Australia and my branch was in the uk so this wasn't really practible. Could I be transferred to the branch please so I could sort it out. She was unable to connect me. So I then looked up the branch on the net to see if I could get a number. I called the number for the branch and got the call centre again. I explained to the man that I wanted to speak to my branch as he couldn't do the transaction I required as it involved a large amount of money. I was then told to pop into my branch. I explained again about being in Oz and the branch was in the uk. Well why don't you call every day and transfer 10K at a time he suggested. I was staggered to say the least. This would take a long time and cost me a fortune. I then was starting to lose my patience as we kept going round and round in circles. I eventually got his supervisor who suggested I pop into my branch and do the ransaction as they can only do 10K at a time. I exploded and demanded to be put through to the branch immediately. She did and within 5 minutes the whole transaction completed.

The money appeared in my Australian account the next day. We looked at houses to build (you can buy a plot of land and then tell the builder which type of house you want put on it here) and searched for land again.

We then had a call from Pickfords, the ship with our container has docked in Melbourne and all the paper work lodged with customs. I paid the duty on the 4 bottles of Champagne we brought over. Hopefully it should clear customs by the weekend ready for the quaranteen inspection next week. Hopefully the week after we may get our stuff. This lifted our spirits even more. Things again seemed to be falling into place.

HSBC in Australia called me...Hello sir we have noticed a large amount of money enetering your account today... I siezed the moment and asked them about a mortgage. Meeting booked for Monday :-). They didn't show much interest before when I enquired....funny that.

Anyway the weekend arrived and we had kept going back to the same house design so we decided to have a look at the show home of it. We decide that this is the type of house we wanted. We went round several devolpements in the area and settled on a plot of land in a place called Pakenham. The plot is 872 square meters and is on sale for $165,000 (around 70,000 pounds). We sort the details out and put a verbal hold on it until I speak to HSBC about the mortgage. I also have to go to the government to get permission to buy the land also as I am not a permanent resident yet. This is a process and should just go through. We add up the costs that night. Land $165,000, House to build $237,000 + extras and the swimming pool esimated at $35,000. All in all we will get a 4,300 Square feet of living area house with a large swimming pool and still have a garden for around $500,000 (200,000 pounds roughly). If all goes to plan this will almost half what our mortgage was in the uk.

We end the week pretty happy.....