There is a particular indignity in the first month abroad. You are a competent adult with a career, a mortgage history and a spotless record of paying for things, and you cannot get a phone contract.
It is not personal and it is not a judgement on you. It is that the systems you are joining have never heard of you, and they have no way to look you up. Knowing the order to tackle it in saves weeks.
The chain, and why it feels circular
Here is the loop that traps people. A service wants a local address. An address, particularly a rental, wants a bank account and references. The bank wants identification and often a tax number. So you stand in the middle of three things that each want one of the others first.
The way out is the tax number, because it is the one that depends on nothing except your passport and your visa. Start it on day one, or before you fly if you can.
In New Zealand that is an IRD number, and Inland Revenue runs a specific application route for new arrivals, separate from the route for people already living there (Inland Revenue · IRD number application, new arrival to New Zealand). Make sure you use the new arrival path, because using the wrong one is the most common reason an application stalls.
In Australia the equivalent is a Tax File Number, applied for through the Australian Taxation Office.
You can be paid without one. You will simply be taxed at a penalty rate until it is sorted, and then you will spend an evening reclaiming it. Start it first and that never happens.
The order I would go in
Tax number first, on arrival or before. Bank account second, since most banks will now open an account for a new migrant with a passport, visa and a temporary address, and some will start it before you land. Then a phone number, because a local mobile is what every subsequent form wants. Then the permanent address, and then everything that has been waiting on the address.
Take more identification than you think you need to every appointment. Passport, visa grant, birth certificates for children, marriage certificate if your names differ across documents, and your employment contract. A wasted trip because a document sat in a drawer is the standard first month experience and it is entirely avoidable.
The blank page nobody warns you about
Credit history does not travel. Twenty years of never missing a payment stays in the country you left, and on arrival the file is empty.
An empty file is not the same as a bad one, which is a small mercy, but it is not much help either. It affects phone contracts, car finance, rental applications and eventually a mortgage. People find this out at the worst moment, usually while trying to rent somewhere to live.
Rental applications in both countries are competitive and reference driven, and a new arrival has no local references either. Two documents genuinely help and cost you nothing. Ask your previous landlord for a written rental history letter confirming you paid on time, and ask your new employer for a letter confirming the role, the salary and the start date. Bring both to every viewing rather than promising to email them.
Beyond that, it builds by itself and faster than you expect. A local account with regular salary going in, a phone contract in your own name, bills paid on time. Within a year you look like a normal customer.
Small things that save disproportionate trouble
Keep the same email address you have always used, since it is the only continuous thread through every account you own.
Do not close your home country bank account in the first year, however satisfying it would feel. You will need it for something.
Photograph or scan every document before you fly and keep them somewhere you can reach from a phone. This is the single highest return five minutes of the whole move.
Get the children into a routine before you optimise the admin. The paperwork will wait a week. A seven year old who does not know where school is will not.
Give it a month
The whole thing takes about four weeks and then it is behind you, permanently. It feels endless while you are in it, largely because it lands in the same fortnight as jet lag, an empty house and a new job.
If you want the fuller picture of that first stretch, what to do in your first steps after arriving covers the rest of it, and the honest account of settling in and what actually helps is worth reading when the admin is done and the quiet arrives.
If you get stuck on something that looks like a paperwork problem but might be a visa one, send me a few details and I will tell you which it is.
Suzanne
