Your Papers, Please (or "The Second Time's a Charm")

The six YARCs (Youngest Available Riecken Children) drove with Erika down to my office today and picked me up.  We were off to play the fun game called "wait in line at the government service center".

It took us 90 minutes to process all six of the kids' passport applications, plus one for Erika.  Mine doesn't expire for six months, and we don't know what to do there.


The total for this little excursion?  US$801.48


The breakdown went something like this:

Item	Price	Qty	Ext Price
Pictures	$18.24	2	$36.48
Passport Processing Fee	$25.00	7	175.00
New Passport Fee	$80.00	6	$480.00
Passport Replacement Fee (Erika)	$110.00	1	$110.00
Total			$801.48

I guess we're committed now.

I should note that Erika did stop at Walgreens to get pictures taken.  The pictures were taken while sitting in a chair with a black back.  The shortest two kids had the top bar of the chair back going behind their heads (in violation of the photo requirements).  Rather than have this field trip again, we simply paid to have the pictures taken there at the government center.  Ugh.

Practice makes perfect though, as we (read Erika) had all of the paperwork in order, with birth certificates and photos, as well as all the paperwork filled out.

The kids, for what it's worth, were remarkably well behaved.

We're committed now, financially.... we can also go and visit Canada now.

Happy New Year, Parlement, Television and Accents

Happy New Year

My goal for 2011 is to celebrate my birthday (Nov 11th) under the Southern Cross.  We'll see what happens.

I received an e-mail from my friend Gil, of Sydney, this morning.  He was giving me career, visa and accent advice.  It was a good thing to read and my first e-mail of the new year.

It got me to thinking about our accents and how my kids might sound and respond to the speech of the Australians.  To measure, I found some Australian TV stations that stream on-line.  Hannah, James and Isaac (my fishing buddies) and I watched a fishing show on C31 (?) and they are now ready to get on the plane.  The host was catching snapper and my children were hooked.

I looked for some more kiddie-fare and found the Rubber Dubbers (which we watch here on public TV).  The kids didn't even realize the Rubber Dubbers had accents.  This is, I suppose, a good thing.  Though the accent on TV might be significantly different from the kid-in-the-street.

After the kids left me, I browsed around to some other channels and came across Question Time.  Oh, how I love parlement!  See the video here.

I have never watched Australian Question time, but have watched it from the BBC.  Love, love, love!  I don't know about the carpeting in the Australian senate, but in the British House of Lords there are two lines on the floor which the Lords may not cross.  The lines are about two sword lengths apart so that two debating members cannot cross blades.

And then I watched Kangaroo Boxing.  Not much difference really, if you turn the sound off.

Oh, and lastly - I found a new transplant blog called Audra's Australian Adventures.  I stayed up past midnight last night reading it.  Didn't realize it was midnight until someone started setting off fireworks.  Yeah, we're party animals here.

Death and Taxes... Mostly Taxes

We are a little nervous about the regular tax rates on income in Australia.  The base tax rate for my income bracket is 40%.  YIKES!

With that big of a chunk removed, there's no way we can afford to live there.  But, rest assured, dear reader - there are tax credit for children.  And do we have a bus load of tax credits.

It turns out that, with our minions and Erika not planning on working, we effectively cut our tax rate from 40% to 19%.  I figured this out using a calculator on one of the Australian Government web sites.  The scheme is complicated, there baing a Part A and Part B tax credit for kids.  I couldn't figure it out from the wording of the law (go figure, their tax code is as hard to read as the US tax code), but they had a helpful tax calculator.
One of the things that I'm going to have to get used to is the word "fortnight".  A fortnight here is when you build a castle with pillows and blankets in the play room and spend the evening in it.  (Fort Night)  The government of Australia is fond of using it as the term for a two week period.  So, that's about 2/3 of a score of days.

The web site calculates our income for a fortnight and then calculates child "payments".  I would think a credit would be easier to deal with, and perhaps that's what they mean.  The web site, however, uses the term payments, so I don't know if you get a check issued weekly or if it is simply an offset to your income taxes.  I do know that you can receive it every fortnight (see, getting the hang of that) or as a lump sum at the end of the year.

I think that for our first year down there, we may need to hire a "tax expert".  I hope that have TurboTax AU.