Aussie Migration - Our progress so far

Today is day 4 and a Sunday. We feel like we've been here for weeks. We've done so much, met so many people, provided with so much information. Kinda overwhelming.

I'm sitting in bed in our host's house feeling just like that; overwhelmed. Progress so far is impressive. I thank you God for the road that has been laid right in front of us and all we have to do is just to step on it and keep walking. So far, we've gotten a rental. The property belongs to a friend of a church friend who also know our hosts Jess and Daniel. It's a 4-bedroom 2-bath in a suburb called Knoxfield. One of the rooms will be locked up to store the owner's stuff or use whenever her parents come to Melbourne. They are PRs and return a few times a year. Since the house is big enough for all of us, we don't mind sharing.

Then we've gotten all the usual stuff done; Tax Filing Number (TFN), Medicare, Bank Accounts. The TFN can directly be applied online here but you will need a mailing address. We used Jess and Daniel's address for this initially.

As for the Medicare, you can just drop by any of the major shopping centres in the suburbs and you will find Medicare offices there. KK just had to fill up a form for us and showed our passport to the nice lady. Ten minutes later we have our temporary cards in the form of computer slips printed out directly. The actual card will only arrive in a few weeks I think. Anyhow it doesn't matter as we can present our temp slips to enjoy Medicare benefits whenever we visit a clinic.

Both of us opened bank accounts with Westpac. Tomorrow will move some funds over from our online MBB account. There is a limit of 10k for online transactions on Maybank's side and we can only transfer this maximum amount at a time. I do know that if you want to transfer more than that, you will need to do it over the counter using telegraphic transfer.

We also bought a car! But then, that's a story for another day. I'm pooped!