And we're done! (Finally!)

Well, after much anguish and gnashing of teeth, we finally have pretty much all of the important things sorted out over here. Things have lurched from the sublime to the ridiculous and from simple to utterly incomprehensible!

Everything started off well last week. Within three days of arriving in England, we had successfully set up bank accounts with HSBC (usually quite difficult, according to rumour), put a deposit on a reasonable ’98 VW Golf TDi, put a deposit on a nice flat (just barely in our price range – if you DON’T include council tax!) and after some difficulty (it seems the NAB will only let you transfer $2500 per day – not $15000 – thank goodness for BPay and OzForex’s flexibility!) order our money transfer. All seemed to be going swimmingly!

I had hoped that our transfer (supposed to take 3 working days) would be through by Monday (only two days – wishful thinking I know), but alas this was not to be, so another £50 was passed over to Jane at Caprice Guest house, who thankfully was able to fit us in for another night at short notice.

It was also about this time that I started chasing quotes for car insurance for the Golf – I needed to have it organised by Wednesday, which was when we had arranged to pick the car up. This was the first in a coming series of shocks. We went into my new school where Maria, one of the lab assistants, had kindly offered us the use of her phone and internet for organising such things. After a few lengthy and frustrating attempts, I gave up on online quotes, which do not cater well for those with non-UK drivers licenses etc. So I started calling insurance firms.

This was where the rot really set in – one of my first quotes was for ~£1600 (over $3800 for a year!), with an excess of £450. This meant that with one claim, we would pay more than the total value of our car (£1995) in insurance – I was not happy! After more frantic ringing around, I encountered my next frustration with the UK insurance industry: while some (but NOT all) insurers will use an overseas no-claims bonus, you can only use your bonus on ONE car at a time. This means that because my car and bike are still insured back in Oz, I can’t use my no-claims bonus over here! Very strange, but as it turns out, having little impact on the insurance we eventually got. Eventually, on Wednesday morning, I got our car insurance with Virgin Insurance for just under £500 – after removing all of the optional extras – and Virgin don’t use non-UK no-claims bonuses at all. Meanwhile there were far more urgent disasters in progress…

On Tuesday morning, we went into HSBC to check if our transfers had come through yet… still not there! Feeling somewhat concerned, but hoping the money might come through later that day, we headed off to our internet café (actually a laptop servicing shop) to check what the status of the OzForex order was – and to check emails and blogs and uni stuff and so forth. According to our account, our transfer had been “Remitted”, meaning they had received our money and initiated the transfer – so all was good there. Not really knowing what to do except wait, we walked up to the County Mall shopping centre and indulged in some retail therapy. After a bit of shopping and wandering around, I decided to call OzForex UK and see what the story was. This is where the really bad news hit. According to OzForex UK, it would take THREE WORKING DAYS to transfer the money from their UK accounts to ours AFTER the funds had been remitted (we found out later from HSBC that inter-bank transfers in the UK always take three days – as opposed to usually overnight in Oz – but that this can often be sped up to one day for an additional fee!). This meant that we would not get our money until at least Friday!

This was a disaster. Not only did we need the money to pay for our flat and get moved in, instead of continuing our pleasant but expensive stay at the Caprice Guest House, we absolutely needed money TOMORROW to pay for our car. The guy selling the car (with the unusual name of Mantas), was on a work trip Monday and Tuesday, back to sell the car on Wednesday, and off on holidays almost immediately after. At minimum we needed to have £1895 (almost $5000) in cash the next day, for the car. We went through all of our accounts and options and figured that with all the cards we could draw UK money from (anything to do with VISA), given a card limit of about £250 per day, we MIGHT be able to get £1500 by Wednesday (3 cards x £250 x 2 days), depending on whether the “days” were counted in local time or Australian time – but still not enough either way, and definitely no way of being able to move into our flat as well. This would mean either spending another £150 at Caprice, or taking Trev and Sharon up on their offer for three nights instead of just one, which seemed a bit rude. After racking our brains for a while, we came to the conclusion that the only option we had was to go and see HSBC and see if we could get some kind of advance on our incoming funds. So back to HSBC we tramped.

Not really knowing what to ask for at HSBC, we just told the lady at the service counter that we wanted to talk to someone about arranging some kind of cash advance (for about £4000 – to cover car and flat). We then waited for someone to be free for about 15 minutes, before Cind, the lady who originally set up our accounts, took us down to the “Mortgage Area” down the back of the bank. We explained our dilemma to Cind, including the fact that we would have about £6500 coming into our accounts on Friday, but that we really needed some of that right away. This is where we hit our first hurdle. The accounts that we had set up last week were “Basic” accounts, which are free and require less address confirmation than normal accounts (a letter from an employer is all that is needed) to set up. Unfortunately, customers who only have Basic accounts are not eligible for ANY kind of Credit product from HSBC at all. No cash advances, no bridging loans, no credit cards, not even normal debit (EFTPOS) cards – cash cards only.

We enquired about changing from our Basic accounts to the fee charging “Passport” account, which is designed especially for new arrivals – and while this was possible, there was still no access to credit with a Passport account. It seems that to get any kind of credit, one needed to have a normal (“Current”) account. However, to get a current account you need proper proof of address – utility bill, tenancy agreement or similar. This would be somewhat difficult for us, given that we did not yet have a proper address to have proof of, and could not get one until we got access to our money!! There was a copy of our tenancy agreement at the Estate agents, but as we hadn’t yet paid, nothing was signed and sealed. However, Cind mentioned that the only part of a tenancy agreement she needed was a page showing our names, the name of the landlord/agency and the address of the flat. If we could get this to her, she could upgrade us to a Current account. First hurdle in sight, if not yet overcome!

Before getting too excited, we thought we’d better find out what credit options would be available to us if we did manage to get our account upgraded, and whether any of them would be fast enough to get our money right then! Most of the options (bridging loan etc.) would take a few days, but as I also had proof of employment they could offer me a credit card with a high enough limit to cover our initial expenses. This was a start, but we needed access to either cash or a bank draft (like a bank cheque – cost: £15). After a lot more fiddling about, Cind worked out that she would be able to put through a cash advance on the credit card (if we got it), instantly transferring £4000 to our new Current account, from which we could access cash. So, with these possibilities in mind we hurried off to the Swan Property Management to see if we could get the all-important part of the tenancy agreement.

From there things went surprisingly smoothly. Donna at Swan gave us copies of all our paperwork, along with her card in case there were problems, and back to HSBC we dashed (in the pouring rain mind you!). Cind was still available at the bank so we walked straight in to see her. Within 15 minutes, we had new Current accounts, in 30 minutes I had a new Mastercard account, and suddenly we had money – finally! To try to save us walking back to Swan with nearly £2000 in cash, Cind rang Donna to see if we could do an electronic transfer instead. Unfortunately Swan did not bank with HSBC, so it would have been another UK/three-day inter-bank transfer, and we needed the money to clear immediately so we could move into our new home straight away! So £30 and two bank drafts later, we were on our way back to Swan again.

Just a few minutes later all was signed, sealed and paid. We just had to wait until 5:30pm to meet up with our inspection agent before we could move in – more on that later. In the little bit of time we had until then, I decided to investigate options for internet connections at the flat – Virgin had some good deals, so we went to the Virgin store up at County Mall to find our how long it would take to get online. Anna almost fainted when the guy told us that it usually took a week to ten days to get a connection up and running – it seemed we would be spending some more time at the laptop shop yet.

At 5:30pm we went through a gruelling inspection of our nice new flat with Scott, the inspection guy – a great way to see everything that is bad about a new home! After Scott was finished, we went back to our local fisho (see Anna’s previous entry), but this time ate in the car as it was still pouring rain! Then it was off to the local ASDA 24-hour shop to buy the necessities for our first night in the flat – the time was 8:30pm. By the time we left ASDA it was 10:30pm and we were both footsore and exhausted. Just enough energy when we got home to put the milk in the fridge and make up the SPARE bed with our new linen! It seems the bed in the main bedroom here is NOT a double bed as we were told, but actually a queen-size (here they call it a king) – making double bed-sized linen (which is what we’d purchased) difficult to fit. At least we’re now organised for visitors!

Wednesday was pick-up-the-car day. It was also the day our hire car (a fairly awful, though quite economical old Ford Fiesta) was due back. This was the other reason we really needed to pick up the Golf on Wednesday. The Fiesta was originally due back at the hire place at 10:30am. However, there was no way we were getting to London and back by that time. Thankfully the guy at Scarletts Hire let us extend to 2pm, free of charge, on the proviso that we got back as soon as possible. After an hour drive back into Plaistow in East London (somewhere near the West Ham United football ground) and a little bit of paperwork, we had a new car – but now came the hard part. Because insurance only covered me as a driver of the hire car, Anna drove the Golf back to Crawley. This was her first experience driving in another country and started with an utterly unfamiliar car in the middle of London – she did surprisingly well considering (well mostly anyway!). Anna decided that I should lead the way with TomTom, so she really only had one thing to do at a time. So off we went…

Anna managed to get left behind after just over half a block. I found out later that this was because she managed to stall the Golf at our first intersection – about 80m from where we started! To try and get her caught up, I pulled into a side street and manoeuvred myself around the two inch wide gap, ready to pull out when Anna came along. A short while later she came zooming past, with no idea where to go, forcing me to duck out chasing after her. We eventually managed to get ourselves sorted out and continued on our way. The way was not made easier by the fact that my lovely wife insisted on leaving at least enough room for 3 cars between us – she later informed that this was because it would have been very embarrassing to run into the back of me, damaging both our cars within the first hour! This being England however, that three car gap was almost instantly filled with three or four cars, a situation which does not make for easy leading. Not only that, but I noticed that despite her difficulty in staying close while driving in hectic London traffic, Anna was, however, managing to take photos as she drove.
To make matters worse, I was eventually told that she was actually recording and narrating video as well! When we actually did reach the motorway, we were mostly 10 -20 mph slower than the traffic around us, because of my wife’s stubborn refusal to do the speed limit. Also, every time a lane change was required (fairly frequently), Anna forgot she was driving a European car and turned on her wipers. This meant she almost never used her indicators – she’s becoming more English by the day! Anyway, we did eventually make it back to Crawley (with another Golf stalling somewhere along the line), in time to drop off the Fiesta at 1:40pm – we were even early! At this point however, Anna was a stressed-out wreck so I took over the driving.

Having discovered the previous night that we already had a cable connection in the flat, we went back to Virgin to see how this would impact on install/connection times. Good news at last! Because the cable was already in, we could elect to “self-install” (say goodbye to £25 installation fee) and we would be up and running when our modem arrived – on Friday. Well it is now Friday, our modem turned up this morning, we have splurged on a new wireless router (which works all through the flat) and I am posting this from our dining room table! We’re done, we’re in, and we’re set – finally!