The joys of Vaccinations, Visas and Finances

The joys of Vaccinations, Visas and Finances


So, As of this morning I've had the first part of the official paperwork through, I have a sneaky feeling this is going to be a long process, I'll explain more in a minute.

Vaccines

For the moment I'm going to talk about the joy that is Vaccines. The very thought of having someone
repeatedly stab me with a needle is not what you might call my favorite past time. If your not sure of what
vaccines you need, have a look at the following link:

http://www.londonvaccinationclinic.co.uk/travel-vaccinations-for/asia-pacific/malaysia/

As soon as I had confirmation that I would be going and a rough idea of the date for my travel I contacted my local GP (Yesterday). I'm not going to name names, but suffice to say I was not overly surprised when they told me there would be a long wait for an appointment, my surgery is renowned for that. What i was surprised about was the fact that I needed to have a telephone appointment with the nurse first. What was even more surprising was that they could only offer me an appointment at the end of July for this. END OF JULY. 3 WEEKS.

Anyhoo, I explained that I needed something sooner and asked if there were any alternatives to the GP and Nurse route. They then spoke directly to the nurse who managed to make me an appointment with her for Tuesday next week. The moral of the story? Always make sure you push but are polite, if you explain your situation they and are nice to them, they tend to be nice back. I'll let you know next week the outcome of the chat with the nurse.

Visa


So, onto the joy of the Visa. Thankfully I have a school that seems to be exceptionally helpful with all of this.
I had an e-mail this morning from their HR department details everything I need to send them for the Visa process. I know that this is going to be different for different trades, types of Visa, etc, but as a rough guide, I have been asked to provide the following:


  • Signed employment contract.
  • Passport Scan (Of all pages, even if blank).
  • Passport sized photo with blue background.
  • Scans of all my academic qualifications (Got to find these now, eek).
  • Medical examination report.
  • Letter of good conduct (In my case, this will be an up to date CRB).
  • Mayisyan employment checklist.

All of this is a bit on the daunting side, especially the fact that I have to get my GP to see me for the medical side of things. I suspect yet another wait for an appointment, joy.

My biggest worry about all of this is that it's going to take a long time to sort out, in turn causing delays to me getting out there. One the other hand there is a little bit of me that would be OK with that. It would let me spend more time with my family before I have to say goodbye to them for a while.

The delays could also partly be perpetuated by me, I have a horrible feeling that I may have lost my degree certificates from both my BA and my PGCE. Requesting copies of them is straight forward enough, but at this time of the year they are in the middle of sorting certificates out for their current students. More delays!

Finance

Now to the thorny issues of finance. To be honest it seems like there should be a lot of help from the
school
again when I get out there to set everything up from the Malaysian side. It's the UK side that has already started to cause some issues. The biggest is the fact that we own our own house over here, if we were renting I don't think things would be half as complicated. 

We are hoping to sell the house in order to go over with no debt what so ever (Like most we have debt we would like to clear). The idea is that we will then re-invest in a smaller property and rent that out to cover it's mortgage. Thankfully my wife won't be coming out until January, so she will be dealing with the majority of that for us. 

That's it right? Wrong! We also have to be able to cover the mortgage on our current house, along with all the bills, etc, whilst I'm out in Kuala Lumpur. I'll let you know how that one works out! :s
Location: Basingstoke, UK

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