DH wants to move back to New Zealand

[Mightypen]

Trigger warning: we are OK off financially and I know this rationally so please do not read if moaning middle classes annoy you!

We both spent our formative years in NZ and DH was born there so has more of a pull… We moved over to the UK in our 20s.

DH thinks UK is in a dire economic and demographic position and the middle to well off will end up having to pay to bail us out from already taxed income. The rich have already left or have locked down their assets and protected themselves.

DH points out NZ has no stamp duty, virtually no capital gains tax, no inheritance tax. There is a reason millionaires are flocking there (we are not multi millionaires!). The NHS will be even more pressured as we reach old age and I wouldn’t be surprised if they stopped state pensions for anyone who owns a house worth over a certain amount or has, say, whatever the equivalent of £10k is in a savings account.

All dire predictions and catastrophising on my part has come true in recent years eg Brexit, Trump etc.

We (or our children) upon our demise will be handing over hundreds of thousands to the govt of already taxed income. Like many, the last few years have seen our standard of living drop. We are really lucky not to be anywhere near destitute or homeless. But there is no spare cash for any of the extras that made life fun. I can’t afford to pay more into my pension and I really should… there is no real scope to go beyond treading water.

The things that seemed realistic just a couple of years ago are out of reach now eg moving to our dream property.

I can see his point and agree we will be snookered here in old age. The main upside I can see of NZ is it beautiful, has great people and is further out of reach if we have nuclear war. BUT it’s dull and far away.

We have 2 DCs, a tween and early teen (years 6 and 8). They go to great schools which we are paying enormous sums for (sorry) and are getting the sort of opportunities we could only dream of in our youth. If we went back, we could send them to local schools where they at least have playing fields (we live in a city here). I don’t think private schools there offer the same value.

DH thinks we should cut our losses in the UK, sell up and resettle in NZ. He never used to feel like this and was always realistic about NZ’s strengths and weaknesses and the UK’s but he’s now very down on the UK.

The DC eulogise NZ as they have grown up with no close relatives here so think it must be amazing and they would live in sunshine forever more.

I remember it as boring, expensive with poor housing and a tad pretentious (in the circles I mixed in - prob as it was so small). Jobs and wealth were even more dependent on being connected whereas in the UK, if you have the skills, you can carve out a decent and interesting career.

Travel from NZ is expensive unless you want a trip
to Australia or the Pacific Islands. Asia is a short haul trip
and it’s at least 12 hours away…

I love European culture, food, history, architecture and nature. This continent has so much diversity and it’s just a short flight or even drive away. We would NEVER have access to this in NZ. I envisage my retirement as being filled with jaunts to the south of France in September, truffle gathering in Croatia in the autumn, long walks on Sardinian beaches in June, ambling through Seville during orange blossom season, island hopping in Greece in May, Christmas markets in Austria and Germany, summer trips to the Alps, short breaks to Budapest and Berlin…, revisiting the Hermitage in off season (if there is such a thing and if it is ever safe to go to Russia again).

Then there is the small matter of resettling DC. If we don’t go in the next year, it will be too late (and I doubt we can sell up by then). If we wait until DC have finished school, then we will
live on the other side of the world from them. Even if we move
them now, they will probably drift back to the UK for a few years at the very least in their 20s.

I’ve pointed all this out… what more can I say to convince DH this is a bad idea? Or am I wrong? Is there an alternative place I could propose to him? I don’t think anywhere is utopia. But is there anywhere better than here or NZ?

From reading mn and elsewhere, NZ doesn’t seem the utopia it once was. Gang culture, for example seems to be in the up, and cost of living has affected all.

i second moving out of London to leafy Surrey , or Hertfordshire or Tunbridge Wells.

Not everyone. I respect your choices and you don't have to apologise for paying school fees. Many of us have done so and plenty would like to.

I think England will weather the current economic crisis, we have in the past, and it is a great place to live.

You have to weigh up the pros and cons, nobody else can make your mind up for you. I'm sure your children will settle anywhere as long as they are with you. However I do think life is more interesting and varied here than NZ.

Not everyone is leaving and there are plenty of opportunities.

Good luck.

NZ?
I couldn't be bothered.
Fellow "upper middle class" person here.
I moved to the UK some 25 years ago.
If it wasn't for personal reasons (carer for my husband who had been a good one right through)
I would be back in what used to be Communist Czechoslovakia in a jiffy 😁
The apartments in Prague, the freedom, the abundance. You do need some money, who doesn't.
But you are basically left alone there to live your life in comfort.
(Threat of war aside).
For myself, no need to go that far to NZ, but at first opportunity I'll be out of the UK.

I think you need to open your eyes to the situation there, low taxes come at a cost, typically the people worst off are worse off of course. I know multiple people here who are either born in New Zealand or lived there for decades who have relocated back to the U.K. in their 50's because life wasn't great - we are all different of course but not everything is rosy. It's such a huge gamble with teens if they settle, if they don't it can literally mess their lives up. Personally I would leave relocation until the youngest reaches university

I visit NZ for work and have spent some months there in Aukland. I would think carefully. Firstly in my view it was not cheap or necessarily low tax. Net incomes and spending power I found quite constrained. It is isolated from the rest of the world. Education is okay, but tertiary options are limited and DCs will probably come back to the UK for work.

@timeforanewmoniker Last year 1.2 million people came to live in the UK and 532,000 left.

I don’t get the point of posts like this. Clearly every country has pros and cons, OP needs to decide which ones are most important to her and her family. Can’t really see how other people’s opinions are relevant. I do want to point out that some of the comments about NZ property prices are silly, I have family in Auckland and $3-4 million will get you a gorgeous house and much bigger than you’ll get in London for the same money, unless you’re dead set on living in Herne Bay.

We've just moved back to NZ after a few years in Australia. We originally moved here from the UK in 2012.

Houses: We live in a 30yr old house. We have a heat pump, thick thermal curtains on the windows/sliding doors, and extra blankets on the bed. Not much different to an older house in the UK minus central heating.
We do have an issue with condensation in one room, but we just open the window each morning for a couple hours to let it dry out. However more and more homes are being built with double glazing so don't have the same issues as older homes. It's pretty expensive. $700 a week for a small 3 bed.

Work: My husband gets amazing money for his job but he is contracting so he pays his own tax, ACC etc and we have the uncertainty of not knowing how long it'll be until a new contract comes up after this one has ended.
I've just got a job in a brand new industry (for me). It was the first job I applied for so no issues there, it's not particularly taxing but it's not particularly well paid either. My wage won't be enough to support a family on its own.

Food: Ridiculously expensive and there's very little competition for the supermarkets. To eat well, we spend between $300 & $350 a week for 4 of us. But that's using farmers markets and getting grass fed beef direct from the farm. It's possible to eat cheaper but still expensive.

Schools: My Dc were in a small private school in Australia, now they're in a 2000 student state school but we've found it brilliant, all the opportunities the school can offer and 10 minutes away from home so they can walk with their friends.

Crime: Definitely rising but I still feel really safe here, and I'm confident enough to allow the dc to hang out after school and head to the beach or skatepark, catch the bus to the city etc.

Healthcare: Obviously we pay to see the doctor but it does mean we get seen, generally speaking, within 48 hours. Prescriptions now have a $5 charge but both husband and I have had week long + hospital stays and didn't have to pay a cent.

I'm not bored here, and the dc definitely aren't bored. There's so much going on now compared to even just 10 years ago.

My children had an amazing childhood here (before we moved to aus) and now they're having an amazing "teenhood" I'm really happy we were able to move here and give them that.

There's pro's and con's to every country but If given a choice between living in the UK, Australia or New Zealand, I would choose NZ in a heartbeat every single time.

I've heard about the mess the UK is in, I wouldn't want to stick around to see how much worse it'll get. Take your husband's advice and give it a go.

Also and this surprised me, crime is very high.

I agree with the posters saying this is about your DH and his career fatigue/mid life crisis rather than where is actually better to lives .

Look at less dramatic changes that might help with those things instead. Change of career; sabbatical or reduce hours; move out of London; reduce outgoings and/or you earn more so he feels he can retire earlier even if you stay.

It’s probably also about disillusionment with the UK but frankly everywhere has its issues. I know nothing about NZ but sounds like it isn’t a utopia. If he really dislikes the UK then form a plan to retire somewhere else on a golden visa type programme instead.

A net worth of £4m would enable you to retire early in Auckland the same way it would in London.

A basic retirement with no frills. The house (like in London) would take up a massive chunk of that £4m. You'd realistically have about £2.5m after a decent but not spectacular house in a decent but not extraordinary area which is what I assume you'd want.

You'd be looking at not much more than £50k a year to live on. Which is absolutely fine as long as you don't want to visit the UK and Europe yearly, replace a nice car every 3 years, have a beach house etc.

A simple life yeah. It would be fine.

School is more pressure here for sure. Is that better? I don't know. Uni graduates from NZ are just as employable globally and perhaps not as mentally stressed.

There is more of a sense that young people have the time to be well rounded. You can get into most uni degrees with Bs and Cs in Auckland uni. Even medicine is easier as you do a foundation year which isn't that hard to get into then prove yourself to be accepted into med school. It's so much more balanced.

DH also thinks DC won’t get into good unis here as they will be judged to higher standards going to private school.

Between that and the taxes, he sounds unnecessarily paranoid - or else like he's using these as excuses simply because he wants to live in NZ anyway. Your kids are getting a great start and will clearly be okay so some fantasised uni judging them is really not an issue. Interesting that he's choosing to focus on that rather than, say, the instability of retiring and living on crypto investments. As a PP says, this very much sounds like 50s Man Panic and the last thing you should do is uproot your whole family and what sounds like a very nice life for it. Projecting into your retirement in this way and picturing a destitute old age in a collapsed NHS sounds like PR from Tory HQ (even though they created a lot of the issues) and is pretty ridiculous given that you could merely downsize a little and live well with private healthcare if it came to it. You even say he'd be tightening his belt in NZ so going there isn't going to take pressure off anyway. Plus the kids could move away and then you'd stuck in NZ without them - the secondary years go so fast, trust me. You've got somewhere you're happy and your DH's discomfort isn't really about living here or there, it's about dying if we want to look it in the face, but you can't base family decision on that angst. He needs to live life more in the moment and enjoy what he's got while he's got it.

Meanwhile, I rather like the TW. Perhaps all of Mumsnet should adopt it - TW: Middle Class Issues May Offend!

If you don’t want to go, he can’t take the DC if they are resident in UK.

If you do go back and hate it, or marriage breaks down, you will be stuck there.

His idea of not working would really worry me…

I just wonder...is this a variation on the 'we hate labour' threads..sorry, but it has all the ingredients..tax, inheritance tax, NHS even private school fees...maybe I am wrong. If you are seriously thinking of this - I genuinely do not think the grass is greener especially at 50 when you don't have the luxury of saying 'let's see how things go' as you can when you are younger.

Everyone I know who has moved to the UK from NZ says it’s like the 1950s there in terms of attitude. Will your UK raised kids appreciate that culture clash, or are they likely to move back?

Saying that if they are at private school they may not notice.

You’ve chosen to segregate your kids and it doesn’t sound like you believe in paying into the welfare state, so perhaps the U.K. doesn’t have the right ethos for you politically. If it’s more individualist there you may feel more at home. Maybe the USA would suit.

Everything I've read recently about NZ has been about the rise in gangs and exodus to Australia, for example this recent article (I think this is a share token) https://www.thetimes.com/world/australasia/article/gangs-wear-patches-to-scare-us-kiwis-so-well-jail-them-for-it-sdk9l8dpr

A NZ born friend who has lived in the UK for 20+ years and his family spent the summer holidays there recently visiting family - hadn't been home since before Covid and was surprised by how much the place had changed, and not for the better.

I really want to go on a NZ Lions tour though - it's top of my bucket list.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they stopped state pensions for anyone who owns a house worth over a certain amount or has, say, whatever the equivalent of £10k is in a savings account.

You're being as ridiculous over this, as your DH is about the uni situation. Everyone getting the state pension had paid into it for 40-50 years. The govt cannot take something away that people have paid for. Not would they if they could, because they know that the older generation swings politically right. Hence hanging on to the triple lock, which the country really can't afford (and I speak as a pensioner).

You're both kind of feeding into the prejudice that some have (and I don't, usually) of the top 1/2% being selfish and overblowing the risk to their very healthy finances. You are so paranoid about at least two things that really aren't going to affect you, that I wonder how much else you have out of perspective.

Giving up a job to move across the world with no prospect of further employment sounds totally bonkers.

I would stay for now and let the DCs go to uni here. Then I would go somewhere nice and friendly like Spain as you will be able to afford it and travel. Or even Germany, anywhere really that has functioning healthcare when you are old. Who wants to die on a trolley?

Spot on.

“Giving up a job to move across the world with no prospect of further employment sounds totally bonkers”

yes!

I think it's fine to want to go but honestly for your reasons you can choose somewhere closer to what you want than NZ

No doubt NZ is beautiful. For a long holiday. No doubt the wealthier will suffer in the UK whilst the hypocritical champagne socialists are in power.

Does this warrant moving to NZ, disrupting your children’s education, friendships etc; your job and life? Possibly not. It sounds like your husband is going through a mlc combined with real concerns about labour syphoning off your hard earned cash to pay the train drivers / politicians / anyone on benefits who really shouldn’t be etc / god knows who is next..

I hesitate to say it as not a huge fan of Australia (too far away from family and real culture, sexist, brash etc) but that could be a compromise? Unless he as a kiwi, wouldn’t do that on principle!

How about Italy? 🇮🇹

The notion that "gang culture" is affecting somewhere as remote and sparsely populated as NZ suggests that nowhere on the planet is immune from the cultural and economic rot that people like the OP's DH are trying to escape from.

Perhaps if NZ had done a North Korea and walled themselves off from the world in the 1950s, they could have avoided it. As it is, you're better off staying put and improving your lot in this country because there's no utopian paradise to flee to.

Move to e.g. Hampshire. The area around Winchester is lovely. (And if you find Hampshire too rural or provincial after living in London, you're sure as heck not going to like NZ.)