How to plan and start getting ready for the move?

[bravizzel]

When does your contract start? When did the application go in?

My suggestion would be to give HR this link and ask them to chase it up, Immigration have always been very gracious to me when I needed to rush things along a bit, for incoming employees in a position similar to yours. However it's best to wait until they have the case reference number and that should take only two weeks so they may already have it.

http://tel.directory.gov.hk/02690001...disclaimer=yes

There is only 1 person that does working visas?!!

thank you for this, hopefully it won't need too much of a push as the company i'll be joining is international and brings expats over regularly

[bravizzel]

Any thoughts on what are must brings other than clothes and some baby stuff?

We've got quite a bit of freight allowance so was thinking more in line of various smaller electrical goods (kitchen specifically) which we could bring and it'd save us having to hunt it down in HK

[bravizzel]

Well my point was that since we have most of those things and we are getting freight as part of the relocation package, we might as well bring it all to save money setting up in HK...

[knk]

Definitely bring as much over as your freight allowance allows. It's not as simple as popping into your local Sainsburys or John Lewis to buy everything you need and if you've passed the IKEA stage of your life it's not where you want to go back to.

In the first months there will be enough adjustments to make let alone 'panic' buying. In the end we bought over way too much and had to get rid of bits (using geo classifieds) of furniture in particular but it also means Mr K has his faithful chesterfield wingback to fall into of an evening and We have the most researched and comfortable bed/mattress. I could not have found the quality or style I wanted in the first months of living here. - it's taken me 12 months to finally find a bookcase I like and then it was $hk 60k!!!!! (I'm not paying that -but getting it copied for 1/3 of the price -something I couldn't have achieved on arrival)

Bring the lot, linen, cutlery, furniture, small appliances - it will cost far more to replace them!
All the best

[bravizzel]

Thanks everyone for your comments. We have decided to go the low risk option and not get rid of everything until after work visas are approved. We have however started to downsize and clear out all the excess junk that we seem to have. Hopefully this will make relocating to HK must easier/faster post visa issue date. Also, we will make use of our freight allowance and bring lots of things to save money and hassle of looking for things when we are in HK.

[kimwy66]

Bring your tv gear if you have a half decent one. The prices here are way more than in the UK. Bring your mattress if it is good. They are also expensive to get a decent western style one, and also put in sheets etc if you like cotton high quality stuff. Bed frames are generally easy and cheap to pick up here second hand in the expat sites. Bring a few kitchen gadgets, but remember kitchens are tiny in general.