Shipping household goods

[Maligso]

Hi everyone. We are flying out on 2 Feb 2015 to Coffs Harbour, NSW. I have a couple of questions/ thoughts that I would appreciate your views on:

We have a quote from Elliots - anyone used them and were you satisfied?

We are staying with my sister in law initially and will then be renting. If I can't find work in Coffs I will move up to Brisbane and my wife and three kids will follow once I have that all important job! At the moment we are thinking of storing all our household goods in SA with Elliots at R800pm, as we do not know when or where we will be living. we also do not know whether, when we do rent, the place will be furnished - are places normally furnished and with appliances too? Does this make sense to you guys or do you think storing in Oz is a good option. I think it will be too expensive to store and then to have delivered in Oz? If we do buy it would probably only be about 2 years down the line in which case we would send for our goods then - unless of course we find accommodation that is not furnished.

Another thing. I was advised on this forum to pay the R4,000 to have my CV rewritten into Aussie format but have also been advised on FB by SA immigrants that it is a waste! I know people always have conflicting ideas ... but give me your thoughts again!!

Thanks again for all the info - it is a real help chatting to people in the same boat!

Kind regards

Maligso

[Mara]

Renting in Australia, you will pay a hell of a lot of money if you plan on renting a furnished place for two years. Houses in Australia have ovens cooktops and window furnishings, that is standard. Then if you are lucky they also may have dishwashers. Bring your stuff and rent an unfurnished place. If you need to store it for a while in Australia, then there are lots of self storage places that you could use, where you could actually have access to your stuff. I have no idea of the cost, perhaps you can Google it.

As for paying to have your cv redone, good idea, and you want to be sure that you give yourself every advantage on the job hunting front. Unless of course you are in a field where the employers are going to fall over themselves to sign you up, then it will not matter!

[Orphan]

Hi Maligso,

We have used Elliott International on a number of occasions, but only around SA, and have always been happy with them. However, we chose Pickfords to move our stuff to Australia, because of price, and the fact that they have a sister company in Brisbane, meaning that we shall be dealing with one company from start to finish.

On the matter of storage, remember that your shipping price (which is the bulk of your transportation cost), is only determined when the goods disembark at port. Therefore, the longer you keep your goods in storage in SA, the more you will pay for final shipping, due to the depreciating Rand. Having said that, we have done an investigation into storage fees, and it costs about one third more to store goods in Australia than here.

Regarding CV's...personally I don't know what the problem is. There are a great many "Australian-type" CV templates on the internet, and these all appear to be similar to what South African CV's used to look like about 15-20 years ago. If you know how to write a CV, it shouldn't be very difficult to write it in the manner preferred by Australian companies.

[Tiermelk]

Another thing. I was advised on this forum to pay the R4,000 to have my CV rewritten into Aussie format but have also been advised on FB by SA immigrants that it is a waste! I know people always have conflicting ideas ... but give me your thoughts again!!

Firstly the "template" of the guy that charges R4,000 a CV is available on the forum if you search around (or drop me a PM). I think that template works very well - keeping it simple.

Secondly I would say it depends on your use or abuse of the English language - I am not very coherent with words, but likely I have a wife that can do magic with them.

I think "keywords" are very important (in the IT industry in any event) as sometimes CV`s are thinned electronically, looking for certain words - words that would usually be in the jobspec.

We used the template to make up my CV and I got positive feedback on my CV from more than one agent.