We are in the process of applying for our 405 visa and wonder if there are any other 405 applicants out there. I would also like to hear from successful 405 applicants who are now living in Australia. There doesn't seem to be very much communication from 405 visa applicants on any of the websites.

Hi there.

I obtained a 405 Investor Retirement Visa last year, and have been living in Mandurah, WA since October.

What are you interested in hearing about?

(The reason that there is not much communication from 405 applicants on any websites is that there are not many of us around!)

We have obtained sponsorship from SA. How long did the visa process take? We are in the process of selling up as we want to leave the UK in any event. I am assuming that 405ers can buy property in Australia. HOw did you sort out the medical side of things. Are prescriptions covered. I suppose I am just looking to make contact with other 405ers to hear their experiences. Do you have any regrets? Thanks for your reply and look forward to hearing about your experiences. Both my husband and I are civil servants and are retiring early.

Our total timetable was as follows:-

23 March - submitted request to WA for State Sponsorship.
29 March - documents received by WA office in Perth.
31 May - WA approved sponsorship (their web site had indicated 30 days, but they took 65 days)
5 June (11.00am) - received WA State sponsorship forms
5 June (12.15pm) - UPS collected visa application package for delivery to DIAC in Perth.
8 June - UPS tracking reported delivery to DIAC.
16 June - received official confirmation of receipt from DIAC, with Case Number etc
3 July - DIAC said financials etc OK, get health checks.
18 July - went for health checks in Birmingham (first available date when booking was made on 3 July)
7 August - Medical Centre despatched health check info to DIAC in Sydney (we had caused at least one week's delay in this because our
own GP practice had sent so many doctors on holiday at the same time that they refused to dig out some requested medical reports until
the doctors returned!)
17 August - e-mail from DIAC asking us to make our Designated Investment in WA State Treasury Bonds.
24 August - confirmation from WA that they had received the funds.
6 Sept - confirmation from WA that they had sent necessary paperwork to DIAC in Perth.
6 Sept - we sent signed Declaration document to DIAC.
11 Sept - paid Second Visa Application Charge ($8000 each) to DIAC by Debit Card.
11 Sept - DIAC sent e-mail stating visas had been granted.

So from DIAC initial appliaction receipt to DIAC granting visas was 3 months and 3 days. I have to say that DIAC themselves handled the process very smoothly and very quickly. A significant proportion of the time was in getting health checks completed (5 weeks to despatch) and in WA Treasury completing their documentation (2 weeks plus). The DIAC staff were very helpful and answered any queries without delay.

As you will see, DIAC notified us when it was time to get our medical examination. Some people do this earlier (known as 'front-loading') but remember that the medicals are only valid for 12 months so you need to be confident that everything else is in order if you want to pre-empt things.

As far as Health Insurance is concerned, we went to Medibank Private and took out their Essential Visitors Cover. One tip - they advised us to take out two separate single person covers rather than one joint cover, because the excess on the joint cover is double that on the single cover, and applies when either person makes a claim for which the excess is enforced.

You need to prove you have the cover at the time that you apply for your visa, and in practice Medibank will sign you up on payment of one month's premium, then will not take further payment until one month after you arrive in Australia.

Prescriptions (outside of hospital treatment) are covered for up to $600 per person per year. However, it is not a simple as that for anyone who has been used to the UK treatment of prescriptions. Firstly doctors can only prescribe one month's pills at a time (although they will give you a repeat prescription for say 6 months in advance). When you go to the pharmacy to get each month's pills, you pay the full cost of the pills, and then claim some back from Medibank. If the cost is less than about $30.70 you get nothing back, and if the cost is greater then you just get back the excess over the $30.70. So the cost of prescriptions is nowhere near covered in full.

There is also some controversy at the moment because some 410 people have found that if they need chemotherapy it is usually handled as a out-patient (or day patient) and so Medibank (and others) apply the $600 limit to these prescriptions - whereas the actual cost to the patient is far in excess of that and can run to many thousands of dollars. This subject is being taken up elsewhere, and we can only await the outcome.

One thing to remember when completing your visa documents - if you happen to have assets which total rather more than the amount required to prove compliance (for regional areas this is $500,000 for state sponsorship, plus $500,000 to set yourselves up here) you do not have to provide evidence of all your assets. You only have to prove you have the $1,000,000. So this makes it easier as it avoids the need to, for example, have the house valued if you can provide $1,000,000 without the house. We were in the fortunate position of being able to make do with just a small number of building society statements.

There is another significant factor in this - when you are eventually asked to send the 'designated investment' to your sponsoring State Treasury, DIAC will ask you to demonstrate that to do so you liquidated into cash some of the assets that you used to prove compliance - and they ask you to do this within 49 days of them asking you to do so. This means that if you needed to include the value of the house in order to get the $500,000 for the sponsorship, you will need to provide evidence that you have completed the sale of your house. DIAC will not issue you with a visa until you have provided the evidence.

Therefore it makes sense, if you are able, to use assets which are already liquid (e.g. building society deposits) or which are able to be readily turned into liquid form, for at least $500,000 of your declared assets.

Another thing to remember here is that if you are in a position where you don't need to prove your total assets, you don't have to include an indication of the excess on your 'statement of assets' in your DIAC application. We checked all this out with the DIAC office while we were compiling our documents, and they confirmed that, for example, we didn't even have to mention our house in the statement if we showed evidence of more than $1,000,000 assets from other sources.

The same argument applies to your statement of income. You only have to prove an income of $50,000 (regional) - so in our case we only had to send a copy of a letter quantifying my occupational pension, and did not have to quantify the interest payable from numerous savings accounts. Incidentally, the interest which will be paid on your 'designated investment' apparently qualifies if you need it to prove your income. It is a bit 'chicken and egg' because the State will not give you the exact interest rate until they receive your funds. In our case we are getting 5.9% per annum fixed rate for the four years of the investment, payable every six months.

I hope all this makes sense to you. Let me know if you need anything else.

Note also that if you hold a 405 visa you can avail yourself of the valuable tax exemptions that are available to "temporary tax residents" of Australia ...
http://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/content.asp?doc=/content/76537.htm

I have a factsheet on the subject - if you would like a copy please feel able to send me an email with the words Temporary Tax Resident Factsheet in the Subject Line.

Best regards.

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply at length. It is really very kind of you. We sent our application to DIAC last month and have had their written confirmation of receipt. Our house is under offer and we have given notice of intention to retire early. The bulk of our capital is tied up in our property so we submitted valuations etc. We probably submitted more documents than we needed but then I had not heard of this website so could not benefit from your advice. Once again thanks and if there is anything else you can think of I would appreciate your input. Did you use an agent. Many thanks

No, we did not use an agent. I am an avid reader of small print, and decided that using an agent was unnecessary and would be a total waste of money for this type of visa.

Apart from which, I suspect that there are not many agents who have personal experience of completing 405 applications!

Good luck with your application. Which part of Australia are you heading for?

We are heading for Adelaide. We are both in the Immigration Service so thought we could manage to complete the process without an agent. We just had a query from Perth today so it looks like they are processing our application at the moment. Did you buy a property? Is it easy for 450ers to buy property? Western Australia is lovely, we have visited most parts of Australia but not SA so it is ironic that that is where we want to end up. Did you ship all your goods out, if so can you recommend a removal firm? We have done a number of postings abroad and have used removal companies but none of them were superb. Do you recommend shipping large possessions or replacing them when we get to Australia. We have sold all our white goods to our house buyers. Are you enjoying life in Australia? Hope you don't mind the endless questions, it is just good to make contact with people in similar circumstances.

To answer your questions in turn:-

Yes, we bought a property (we actually made an offer and had it accepted on the fifth day we were in the country!). We had at one time considered buying a block and having a house built, but on reflection we decided that we wanted to be settled in our own house as soon as possible, rather than wait anything up to 18 months to have one built. Also, the vast majority of land available around here was on new estates where the block sizes are getting smaller each year, while the houses that people build on the blocks are getting bigger and bigger at the same time. Our shopping list included the need for side access for future use with a boat and trailer, and very few new blocks had this feature.

And finally we did not want to live in the middle of a building site for years, not knowing what type of houses were going to be built around us, and what it might do to any views we might have.

So we actually purchased a house which was 7 years old, in a fully-established road, only 0.22 miles from the sea (another major item on our shopping list).

Temporary visa holders can buy property, but you need to get approval from FIRB (Foreign Investor Review Board) before you can commit. So any contract must include wording that the offer is conditional upon FIRB approval. Go to www.firb.gov.au for information, including application forms. You are able to submit your application online if you want to, once you have found a property.

Many Real Estate agents will try to tell you that temporary visa holders cannot buy established property (i.e. a house where someone has lived before, even if it was for only 24 hours), but they are wrong.

For established property then Part 3 of the form is the relevant bit. To meet the conditions for buying established property, you must have at least 12 months left on your visa, you must live in the house as your main residence, and you cannot rent it out to anyone. And you have to declare that when you come to dispose of it you must sell to an Australian citizen 'or similar'.

It can take up to 28 days to get a FIRB response (and ours did - they said that November was always a very busy month for them.) All in all it took 7 weeks from the offer to get to the Settlement day - in fact it is 6 months today that we took possession.

We used Allied Pickfords for our move, and were influenced by three things - one was good reports from this forum and from the BERIA forum, secondly they came over as very professional, and thirdly their own sister company handled things at this end- so we were only dealing with Allied Pickfords. In practice the packing up in the UK appeared to go very well. We were held up at this end because they had a lot of customers waiting for delivery in the run up to Christmas and we ended up without our stuff until 27 December - two weeks after we moved into the house. Fortunately we had made some friends by then and they loaned us the essentials.

But when it came to the unpacking stage, we found there were some breakages, and most of those were caused simply by sloppy packing - for example a cherished ornament was broken when a sewing maching was placed on top of it, which was all the more frustrating when we had offered the packers the original dedicated packaging for the ornament, which was a limited edition item.

Based upon our impressions at the UK end, we had recommended Allied Pickfords to some friends who were migrating a month later. They also had some breakages which upset them.

Some other friends swear by Robinsons - their own experience was good, even though their furniture was handled by another company at this end.

We brought almost everything with us in the container, even down to the lawn mower and garden tools (some rigourous cleaning was involved there!). Lots of people in the UK said 'Aren't you going to sell up here and buy new in Australia'. The economics made that out of the question. It cost us £4500 for the container, and a further £1600 for insurance - but when we worked out the replacement value for insurance purposes it came to £41,000 - and we hadn't included values for some items which couldn't be valued (e.g photo albums). So buying new would have put us severely out of pocket, because you can never get much for your furniture when you try to sell it.

Even though we brought a very full 20ft container, our furniture looked completely lost in the new house here. This is a very normal experience for immigrants from the UK - the living area in Australian houses is very much greater than in UK houses, so you will have to anticipate the need to go out and buy a number of additional items. And your UK items will look tiny when placed against Australian walls!

By the way, don't bother to bring a TV with you - they won't work here for the terrestial channels. You might get pictures, but no sound. You might get around this with a digibox plugged into the set, but in general I would recommend buying new when you are here.

Finally, are we enjoying life in Australia? The answer to that is a very definite YES. We have made lots of friends, and are living life to the full. We have bought the boat to fill the 'essential' side access to the house, and have therefore added boating to the list of other hobbies we can enjoy much more here than in the UK - tennis, cycling, walking to name a few - mainly because of the wonderful WA weather.

I hope this all answers your questions!

Howard
Thank you so much for all your help. I will let you know how we get on.
Colette