Working abroad in Australia, what is involved financially and administratively?
If you think there is no complication in your application and you can easily satisfy all criteria you can do the process yourself without using any agent and save few thousand dollars. I have done myself. Another cost Chris forgot to mention is the medical examination cost which is mandatory. If your certificates and docs are non-English translation fees are quite high as well.  The immigration process is very bureaucratic and requires lot of supporting documents. As for living in Australia, Rent, Car and living expenses are high compared to US. But in Sydney and Melbourne you can rent near public transport, which isn't too bad (well not like Europe ). So having a car is not essential. Rent for a decent flat in these cities will be $300 - $350 p/w and you may have to pay 4-6 weeks as advance. You can get a lot of information from the dept. of immingration website. "We don't seem to have (m)any expats or Australians on the site yet, but I'll share what I have learned.  I'm taking advantage of your profile information listing you as a software developer.   A friend of mine is currently doing a study of national IT professional societies for his MBA project. One of his goals is to understand which funding models are effective in the absence of mandatory licensing.  (Consider: Most developers don't need to be a member of an organization in order to practice.) Such organizations you or others may be familiar with are the British Computer Society (BCS), the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS), or in the U.S. the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS). To the point: My friend told me recently that the Australian Computer Society (ACS) makes money by assisting the Australian government in determining immigration eligibility.  So I went to the ACS site and started digging:  ""The Australian Computer Society (ACS)   is the designated professional   assessing authority for persons   seeking to apply for Skilled Migration   as IT (Computing) Professionals [...]"" See ACS's Pre-application Skills Assessment (PASA) page.  That page also links out to the Australian Government's Department of Immigration and Citizenship, in particular to a document titled General Skilled Migration (PDF).  Here are some interesting points I discovered, relating just to fees: The government recommends if you do want professional help to use a registered migration agent.  There will be fees for such an agent.  See MARA - What does it cost to use an Agent?  Currently: AUD1500 - AUD4000, or ~ £850 - ~ £2270. There will be a fee for the immigration application process itself. See Professionals and other Skilled Migrants visa charges - outside Australia.  Currently: total of AUD 6035, or ~ £3420. Also: ""You also need to have your skills   assessed by the relevant assessing   authority as suitable for working in   your nominated occupation.""  (page 7) ... and you need to do that before you even apply.  The ACS Costs and Charges page shows a cost of AUD 400, or ~ £225, for the PASA (General) application. So, I think the answer is yes, you'd certainly want to have ample savings to cover the red tape stuff; perhaps ~ £6000 judging from the above alone.  Add your travel, moving, and living expenses, etc. Best of luck!  Australia sounds exciting.  (Have you considered Canada? ;-)"
no insult, Detroit was to cars what Glasgow was to ships... it happened all over the west during the last 30 years.  Ayrshire is funny though, I live in a small town really a few miles out of Kilmarnock, Glasgow is technically more accessible to me (to the north).  Glasgow has been pretty much rebuilt from it's tenements and shipbuilding fame.  Still issues, but they are getting there - Detroit will too.  In ayrshire (south west) we had a MASSIVE industry of lace and mining once.  Some of the best in the world apparently - that all disappeared to the far east during the 50s. during the 80s/90s we had a massive Fullerton plant, beacham Glaxosmithklein and even DEC had production here.  Guess what? as those could be automated - that was all offshored too.  Further North we had 'Silicon Glen' I believe the pun was intended.  IBM had a massive site of many thousand workers, Lenovo took them over and within a few years that was all gone too.  The original IBM workers had great benefits... they originally sold the site and weaned off the staff and then re-leased the site and took all the staff back on via an agency.  The only difference being all the benefits of working for IBM were gone.  That went on for a few years or so and then Lenovo took over IBMs consumer hardware side.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_glen  This being the funnier side of things, InverKip Powerstation, built for Silicon glen and then hardly used:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverkip_power_station  To be fair there is still a huge GlaxoSmithKline site at Irvine and we are supposedly getting another 3k workers back ( a bit like the CAT story )  This area will be very grateful for the work, just like your Southern states.  The trend I interpreted is that, as soon as things could be automated that was when things went away and when margins started to fall out of electronics, that was just the excuse they needed.  In theory a production line that had 100 staff might be doable with just 10 these days - maybe with all the horrific horror stories of abroad, companies are now being able to justify 10 plebs over here?  It starts to sound like I'm being slightly anti-globalist here - I've no problem with globalism, but the same thing that helps companies should allow me to buy shit from abroad at the cost I can find rather than being forced to buy region locked or extortionate crap.  If it costs you £5 to make a shirt in india, you should be selling it to me for £15, not £35!  What you talk of does represent more what happened across Europe rather than just the UK (Poland and the previous eastern bloc being your southern states)  Thatcher, for (good or bad) tore the unions in the UK a new one when she was in power (hence the only 1 time the natural gas powered plant was fired up)  We have rights in the uk that are now being legislated from Europe but to be honest they hardly seem worth the paper they are written on, the unions - like yours just don't have the smite anymore.  On thinking about it - do you think the Earthquake had anything to do with the migration of that CAT site back to the US? A self-directed IRA could be a good solution for you and all IRAs are qualified IRAs the administrator must allow for alternative assets. However, if you're looking to do the ROBS (Roll Over Business Start-up) system, there are not very many administrators that can facilitate that. There is also a checkbook IRA (aka single member LLC) that more administrators are able to work with, but the rules are different from a ROBS plan. Check with your financial adviser, CPA, tax guru and ask which method would work best for what you're looking to accomplish. I faced something similar for travel or work reasons, and as for me I preferred wire transfer over credit card withdrawals because my bank has huge fees. My thoughts so far are: the fee can vary a lot for credit card. As for me, I can expect 5% fees on foreign withdrawals. But I considered changing bank and I think a Gold (or premium) card might be a good idea as well. The idea is you pay a big subscription (100 euros or so) but have no fee. The total of withdrawal fees could easily (if you stay long abroad) reach this amount. There are also banks like HSBC that offer low fees on withdrawals abroad, you can ask them. The problem is that you cannot really withdraw huge amounts to lower the fee (since you carry this cash in the street). for wire transfers the total fee is usually $50 or more (I had a fee from distant bank, a fee for change and a fee in my home bank). But the amount is unlimited (or high enough to be of little matter) and I needed to do this once per year or so. So I guess it could be interesting if you have enough savings to only transfer money every couple of months or so. I think Western Union is also involved this profitable business. I never used it because the fees are pretty high, but maybe it is useful for not too big amounts frequently transfered. Actually, have you considered a loan? It's a very random idea but maybe you can use a loan as a swap and then transfer money when you have enough to reimburse it all. But the question is very interesting, I think the business is pretty huge due to globalization. It is expensive because some people can make a lot of money out of it. Get the perfect team  to inspect the home before buying,  it is a big investment to buy the house in a better place. In that case, we will help you. Now, no need to go anywhere in Australia. The Assured Building Inspections have wonderful experience of the inspection the building, now we are expert in this work. Always, we provide the affordable service for our clients.  It is a mandatory procedure for each homeowner, we are a good protection organization inside the Australia. There is lots of inspection service company in Australia, however, they may be not proper certified in this work. It is one among most inspector and trustable corporation. We are specializing the most problems in property inspections and reports. Our impartial opinions, provide our clients with the self assurance and peace of thoughts they need to do properly knowledgeable. "I'll assume that you would work as a regular (part-time) employee. In this case, you are technically a Grenzgänger. You will need a specific kind of Swiss permit (""Grenzgängerbewilligung"") allowing you to work in Switzerland. Your employer typically takes care of this - they have more experience than you. You being non-EU might make matters a bit more complicated. Your employer will withhold 4.5% of your gross income as source taxes (""Quellensteuer""). When you do your tax declaration, your entire income will be taxed in Germany, since this is where you live. This will happen after your first year of work. Be prepared for a large tax bill (or think of this as an interest-free loan from Germany to you). However, due to the Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen (DBA), the 4.5% you already paid to Switzerland will be deducted from the taxes you are due in Germany. Judging from my experience, the tax authorities in Germany are not fluent in the DBA - particularly in areas far away from the Swiss border. I had to gently remind them to deduct the source taxes, explicitly referring to the DBA. The bill was revised without problems, but I strongly recommend making sure that your source taxes are correctly deducted from your German tax liability. Once your local German tax office understands your situation, you will be asked to make quarterly prepayments, which will be calculated in a way to minimize your later overall tax liability. Budget for these. You didn't ask, but I'll tell you anyway: social security will normally be handled by Switzerland as the country of employment - not the country of residence. Your employer will automatically deduct old age, unemployment and accident insurance and contribute to a pension plan, all in Switzerland. However... ... if you do a lot of your work in Germany (>25%), which certainly applies if you plan on mostly working remotely, your social security will be handled by your country of residence. This is a major pain for your employer, because now your Swiss employer needs to understand the German social security system, how much and to whom to co-pay and so forth. This is a major area of study, and your employer may not want to spend all this effort. My employer has looked at this and requires anyone living outside of Switzerland to limit working from home to less than 25%, because by extension, they would some day also need to do the same for employees living in France, Italy, Austria... or even the UK. They don't want to dig through half the EU states' social security regulations. Therefore, you would not be able to work remotely from Germany for my employer. This is actually a fairly recent development that only entered in force at the beginning of 2015 (before that, this was all a bit of a gray area). Your prospective employer may not be aware of all details. So you will need to think about whether you actively want to point them at this (possibly ruining your plans of working remotely), or not (and possibly getting major problems and post-payments years later). Finally, I think you can choose whether you want to have your health insurance in Switzerland or in Germany (unless your Swiss obligation to be insured is waived because of your part-time status). Some Swiss health insurers offer plans where they cooperate with German health insurers, so you can go to German doctors just like a German resident. Source: I have been a Grenzgänger from Germany into Switzerland off and on for over ten years now. I can't say anything about whether your German visa restricts you from working in Switzerland. You may want to ask about this at Expatriates.SE, but I'd much rather ask your local German authorities than random strangers on the internet." To some degree, it affects every organization that wants a foreign worker.  Is *that* why you don't get interviews? No. There are plenty if reasons, which are probably your résumé and cover letter, and/or how you present your skills and experience Credit is important for many reasons. Establishing credit is an important step and should be no challenge for someone who already has good habits.  The same lessons and advice that you would find for a student to establish credit would be applicable to your case as well. Factors that influence credit score, Since you are already established in your home country (Australia), you probably have a credit card (and references) that you can provide for the first few challenges (renting a car, renting an apartment). Here are the steps, Your credit score should improve quickly as the first couple of credit cards and the installment loan show good payment history, low utilization, and gain some age. After 1-2 years, you should have a good score. "is there anything I can do now to protect this currency advantage from future volatility? Generally not much. There are Fx hedges available, however these are for specialist like FI's and Large Corporates, traders. I've considered simply moving my funds to an Australian bank to ""lock-in"" the current rate, but I worry that this will put me at risk of a substantial loss (due to exchange rates, transfer fees, etc) when I move my funds back into the US in 6 months. If you know for sure you are going to spend 6 months in Australia. It would be wise to money certain amount of money that you need. So this way, there is no need to move back funds from Australia to US. Again whether this will be beneficial or not is speculative and to an extent can't be predicted."