Settling Down In Australia – Part II

I bet all of you were waiting for this post (^^)  As most of you are wondering, how the hell did we pay a trip to one of the most expensive countries in the world and settle down here while we just travelled around for almost a year. We can’t keep it a secret anymore, but we actually are Millionaires…  Sike! We wish this was true. It all just came down to having a strategical plan for saving up and hard work! Soon we’ll write a blog and reveal our financial plan of how to save up for a wedding, 10 months of traveling and still having enough money to settle down in another country. But first, let’s get back to our struggles in Australia.

Running out of money and the job hunt

We had 8000 Australian dollars left (about 6000 Euro) when we came to Australia on a Working Holiday Visa. And we went through that money really fast! First of all, the darn rooms with shared facilities (bathroom, toilet, kitchen) costed us about 1500 dollars a month (for that money you could have a luxurious apartment in the centre of Amsterdam). Since the kitchen was mostly too filthy to cook in, we had to eat outside a lot, which costed us also about $1500 a month. So basically it came down to the fact that we only had money to survive for less than 3 months. Finding a job was just plain pain in the ass; we were just graduated with zero working experience in our fields and I didn’t make a chance to work as a psychologist, because my Dutch Psychology diploma isn’t acknowledged here in Australia (Psychology has a 6 years-program here while Holland has a 4-years program) and I wouldn’t have the required registrations, etc. Though there are many basic hospitality jobs for which you’d get payed around $20 an hour, we wanted to find something that would help us gain working experience in our professional fields. Finding a decent job with a Working Holiday Visa is like asking for real meat at the McDonalds. The Working Holiday has a dodgy name in Oz because of all the backpackers who just come for all sorts of not-so-serious-temporary jobs and leave quickly again. The endless online job applying wasn’t really working out, but Farhang worked out a way which was eventually more successful.

Light at the end of the tunnel

As we learned out quite quickly Australia is an expensive country to live in, but if you have a decent job you’ll easily get payed enough to live comfortably. Eventually Farhang found a great job at a start-up which is a spin-off of Deakin University. He went to a couple of Meet-ups regarding Entrepreneurship and Healthcare and via networking he found out about this job and applied successfully. This gave us a financial boost so we could have a place of our own. Thank god! The next couple of weeks was all about inspections, applying for apartments, going through all the paperwork, home-shopping and getting appliances fixed up at our apartment. We chose for the inner-city suburb called South Yarra, which is supposed to be the most liveable neighbourhood of Melbourne which itself is the most liveable city of the world! So yeah, great place to live in we thought, until we saw the prices for an apartment! After doubting for a while we chose to settle down there anyway. I mean, we came all the way from the other side of the world to live here, why not also make it count by  experiencing the ‘big city life’ instead of living far away so we can save up more. Oh and by the way, I also found a nice job, but it’s more like a temporary thing until I find something which is more related to Psychology. Right now, we can manage to pay the rent and everything, but as soon as I find a job in my own field we would be able to live more comfortably and save up more money. The whole part of finding an apartment and moving into it was also a huge struggle as nothing seems to work out easily in Australia. But we are going to spare you the details and conclude that at this very moment we have landed on both our feet and we’re enjoying everything as much as possible.

What to expect in the future?

How long are we going to stay in Australia? That’s totally uncertain and depends of our Visa which expires in September 2016. And we have the apartment until December 2016. If we wish to stay longer and get our second Working Holiday Visa, we’d have to work on farms for 3 months which we’re not looking forward to since it pays shit for physically challenging work. Instead, we’re crossing our fingers that Farhang gets sponsorship from his employer so that we can enjoy life in Australia a bit longer and save money to complete our AWESOME WORLDTRIP!

✨About last couple of weeks…✨ #moving #newapartment #newadventures #lifeinaustralia

Een video die is geplaatst door Farhang & Mursal (@awesome_worldtrip) op 4 Dec 2015 om 9:37 PST