If you’re in two minds about what to take with you when you move to New Zealand, be warned that second-hand furniture is not cheap there and you are likely to be better off shipping items from the UK.

 

Only those who travel really light are going to be able to move to New Zealand with just a suitcase. For the rest of us though we usually have stuff that needs shipping through an international removal firm. The big question is what should you ship and what should you leave behind?

“When my husband and I packed up our house we were ruthless with things we would leave behind,” Pattie Pegler, author of NewZealandBuyingGuide.com said. “We sold off a double bed, a three-seater leather sofa, our bicycles and various smaller furniture items we’d bought in Ikea – all for silly prices. Our reasoning was that it seemed daft to spend money shipping a £20 bookcase from Ikea, we’d just replace it when we arrived in New Zealand.

“It was the wrong decision. Things like furniture are expensive in New Zealand and there’s no Ikea equivalent where you can buy cheap but nice looking pieces. There’s a booming trade in second hand sales on auction site TradeMe, but again good things don’t go cheap. For example, we sold a double bed in London for £10. The cheapest we were able to find on Trade Me when we arrived was $150! In fact, if we’d shipped all our stuff out we’d probably have been able to sell on what we didn’t want at a profit. If I was moving again, I’d ship absolutely everything!”

For details of property for sale in New Zealand, visit the NZ listings on Rightmove Overseas. One way to save money when buying in NZ is to use a currency specialist when transferring your pounds into dollars to complete the purchase of your property. For more information on this, contact Smart Currency Exchange.

To understand the full step-by-step process to buying a property in New Zealand, collect The Overseas Guides Company’s ‘New Zealand Property Buying Guide’