13 September to 29 November – I cannot tell
you how many times during the last month I thought to myself “what on earth are we thinking”. What seemed at first like
“heaps of time” quickly became “no time at all”. Compiling the enormous list of things we had
to get done to enable our departure was relatively easy. Of course Big A ‘assisted’ with his
professional project management skills to ensure the task list had a thorough
work breakdown structure and each task had a completion date, an assigned
resource and all dependencies identified.
So basically if a task was simply to paint the skirting boards in
order to rent the house, we needed to have already booked the cleaners,
removalist and storage, cleaned the house, moved our stuff to storage, bought
the paint, cleaned the walls and skirting boards and scheduled a date prior to
our departure date… and we had 94 of these!
Big A kept a vigilant eye on progress and
requested regular updates – but what the! I was supposed to be enjoying my
redundancy. I managed to get in a few
lunches (far less than planned and desired) and meanwhile the task list
gradually reduced with some sense of order, until the last 2 weeks.
It’s crazy to think of the things you need
to do to remove yourself from a house and country for a year. We might as well have gone for good as the
only difference is the fact that we stored instead of shipped a lot of stuff. One of the biggest challenges was trying to
get things done but not too far in advance of our departure dates as we needed
to have them available for as long as possible. There were some massively
important things that remained unresolved such as sorting out Big A’s job.
Would Big A need to resign, take extended leave or would he too be offered
redundancy? We agreed the least favorable outcome was for Big A to resign so
they needed to work through the options. What was his notice period and
obligations under his contract? What were the policies of his company in
relation to extended leave etc? What were the chances of redundancy and the
potential timings? And what was the drop dead date for a final decision about
this to be made?
Further, to convey the magnitude of effort,
some of the more critical tasks included: finding an agent and tenant to
rent the house, selling the two cars,
organizing storage and removalists, changing insurance policies, setting up direct debits for all remaining
bills (insurance, rates, water, mortgage repayments, body corporate, etc), organising access to
our funds across 3 different banks including international banking, cancelling all utilities, mobile, private
health, phone, foxtel and other bills, redirecting mail, setting up a PO Box,
collecting information for the girls for next year’s school work and so on and so on...
A few people said to me “no matter how
prepared you are the last couple of weeks will be chaos” and how right they
were. At times, the last 2 weeks were
enough for me to call the whole thing off.
I’d started the boxing-up process at the end of September and we’d also
started selling household items we didn’t want to store on eBay, Gumtree and
via a Garage Sale. Stuff we didn’t want
and couldn’t sell made it to the perfectly timed kerbside cleanup. This was great in theory but then for the last
month we were living like students, surrounded by boxes and missing key things
we’d sold like our dining suite, sofa and cars. On top of this there wasn’t the fulfillment
that I could just sit back because there was still a lot of packing to finish,
the completion of the task list, normal life like looking after the kids,
school commitments, tax, keeping house (something Big A and I both had to
adjust to – and this wasn’t all smooth sailing), paying bills, doctors, dentist
etc etc etc. There seemed no end in
sight and I was over it!
Thank goodness for the welcomed
distractions like the annual trip to Noosa for the vintage car racing that
doubled as a family Christmas event, lunches, afternoon drinks in the park with
close friends, weekend at Burleigh and dinner with our gorgeous neighbours who
took us out of our chaos in the last 2 weeks.
D-Day came and I’d booked a local storage
facility that regardless of the many discussions I had with the storage people
still turned out to be too small. It took Big A away for half the day while he
supervised the move and cost us nearly $800 in transportation to move our truck
load less than 2kms away because the guys had to unpack the small storage unit
and repack it in a larger one. At 4.30pm
on Tuesday 29th November we were out the door driving to my mum and
dad’s and I think it was about 10 minutes into the trip when I had my first
glimmer of the excitement everyone said I must be feeling.
Big A's perspective:
The move – a difficult time. The Child Bride had decided she wasn’t going to work for the couple of months before we left because she wanted a break…whilst we both viewed the redundancy as a real positive these things always make you question yourself. There were a few very lucrative offers put on the table for the Child Bride to do some short term roles but she felt these could compromise her ‘brand’ …she is exceptional at what she does and so I could understand this …..well somewhat anyway. And most importantly she wanted to spend
the time with the girls at school and focus on managing our ‘project’.……However,
I‘ll admit my first thought was wow…$20k of post-tax lost earnings…that would
come in handy on this trip!
But I figured we’d save money by not
needing our Nanny, our regular cleaner or outside hours school care so that
would ease the pain somewhat. Furthermore, it would be nice for the girls to
have their mummy take the to school and pick them up every day and to not have
to do the grocery shopping on a Saturday morning (in between rushing for ballet
classes). And finally, what joy to actually have clean properly ironed clothes…
our cleaner’s idea of ironing was to hang the clothes on a hanger and blow 3
times on them!... I was even prepared for the Child Bride’s need for the odd
coffee morning and lunch…… yeah…we could justify the $20k for that.
It didn’t exactly pan out that way however....
one of the big ticket items on the list was doing our tax return….now the tax
gent I had engaged for the previous 4 years to do both of our tax returns for
$300 in 2 hours (just gave him a box of papers to sort out) was replaced by a
tax accountant costing $1800 and taking 4 weeks at the Child Bride’s
request….for the accountant we also had to provide him a spreadsheet containing
the information rather than a box of papers…this would have cost even more!
Admittedly, the Child Bride had some complications regarding her deferred
shares and options but mine was very straightforward…so to say that I felt the
additional expense of the tax accountant was unwarranted was a bit of an
understatement…..and although it did get done, even the Child Bride will admit
that it was not an easy process for her to go through…..especially as our
accountant decided to go on holiday part way through!
The Child Bride also needed to spend quite
a bit of time ‘handing over’ her P&C treasurer responsibilities to the
incumbent (who just happened to be a qualified accountant but for some reason
still required a seemingly lengthy handover involving a number of ‘catch-ups’
with her and some ‘others’!) She also needed to attend a few catch-ups with
ex-work colleagues and attend a number of post-redundancy career coaching
sessions.
Furthermore she decided that ironing was no
longer required as our clothes were going into storage ….. now unbeknownst to
me at this point our cleaner was still coming in but was obviously now just
focusing on cleaning……further freeing the Child Bride up to focus on the
‘project’….notwithstanding I still needed clothes for work!
Speaking of my work, I’m not saying that my
job was taxing at this point…far from it…other than a few trips away I could definitely
afford to spend some time helping out on some of the ‘project’ activities on
the Child Brides list….but much to my frustration (given I am not the career-oriented
parent!) I still needed to leave my 3 girls and go into work each morning…..finally
finishing up 2 days before we flew out.
This is not to say that some ‘big-ticket’
items on the list weren’t assigned to me…..both cars needed to be sold and were,
insurance for the 2 properties needed to be obtained and was, the Noosa trip needed
to be organized and was and my work needed to be sorted out one way or the
other and was…after 2 months of silence and apparent inactivity I was approved
to take extended leave without pay…although the length of leave was less than I
had hoped for, it would provide some breathing space…..things were definitely
coming together!
The moving and storage was a pain….but
always is and the under-estimation of storage space required is not uncommon
given the storage capacity is provided in cubic meters……as long as your stuff
to be stored is short, thin and can be stacked very high you are ok…a lesson
learned!
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