Saturday, February 28, 2009

Move to Australia Details

(Nat)I'll start a few months back. A co-worker(Bruce)of mine went on vacation to Australia. Bruce is a long time employee of Caterpillar and use to provide training to dealers worldwide. While he was in Australia he met up with some old contacts he had with a Caterpillar dealer Hastings Deering (in Brisbane). While talking, the dealer mentioned that they needed someone to fill a role with a job very similiar to what Bruce and I do. Bruce gave them my name as he knew that I enjoyed traveling and had told him that I would love to work in a dealer environment some day. Well a few days later I got an email from the dealer basically asking if I would be interested in hearing about the job. At that time I didn't think anything of it, but told him I would be interested in communicating more. This was around the beginning of January.
Fast forward 2 months we communicated some more about the opportunity and at the start of this week they came to me with an offer for a job. The offer was very similar financially to what I am making now, but Chrissi and I felt that if we were going to move all the way around the world we would need a little bit more. So we counter-offered. Thursday night around 2AM they came back with everything I had asked for in my counter offer.
Chrissi and I have been talking about the job and felt that the timing was perfect for us and that it was just to great an opportunity to turn down, so we accepted the job. So as of right now we are working on getting our visa's and preparing a relocation - which the dealer is going to pay for everything. We are a bit of a daze right now because it seems to have happened very fast.
The timing for all of this just seems so unreal. If this offer would have come 6 months ago while we were living in Peoria we never would have been able to do this.
Our move from Peoria to Cincy opened the door for this opportunity to happen. Also the bad economy has allowed us to have someone rent our house for at least 2 years. We had originally signed a 1 year lease with them, but they had plans of building a new house this year - but because of the economy they are going to wait another year before they start. Hopefully that will allow the housing market to recover so we can sell our house at that time or if the job doesn't work out we will have a place to return to if needed. Though I honestly don't see this happening instead will find us selling our house in a few years.
We are extremely excited about this move, though like I said earlier we are in a daze that this happened so fast. We are expecting to move in Mid-May/Early June. We are basically selling everything we own to make that trip cheaper. So if you anyone interested in a '07 Honda Accord for around $15,000/OBO or desks, tables, stereo equipment, kitchen appliances...lots of DVDS and Books...let us know!!
Thank you all for your prayers and support. We are truly blessed to have family that allows us to be adventurous and seemingly crazy but loves us all the same.
Hope that fills in the blanks some.
Nat and Chrissi