 Why the heck did I move my family of six across the world from the US to New Zealand? Not all of them, but twice. If you don't know, we are a family of six that have moved from Wisconsin to New Zealand and have been here a total of seven years. And the number one question that I get from you guys is why? Why did you move here? What prompted you to come here? Why did you move, go back, come back? Why are you crazy like that? Well, today I'm gonna tell you. Today I'm gonna tell you the whole story about how we decided to move to New Zealand and all of the bits in between so you're not gonna wanna miss it. Here we go. So to make this as authentic as possible, I'm going to film it in the car in the passenger side because this is where it all began. Me and my husband and kids were driving from Florida back to Wisconsin and it was nighttime. It was pitch black, so not like this, but this is good so you can at least see me talking. I always have my pillow and a blanket because I sleep really well in the car. Do you guys do that? It's just a little side note about me. Basically what happened was is we as a family were planning on getting in the caravan and traveling the U.S. for an entire year. We're gonna pull the kids out of school, homeschool them and do all of the history and travel around it. Like literally we were looking at camper vans like pricing a mile, we're doing this, this is what we're doing. We're sitting in the car from Florida to Wisconsin and my husband says we've been everywhere in the U.S. Like we've been everywhere about a couple states. Like we've kind of done everything. So like it'd be great for the kids because they'll get the U.S. history and we can experience it in the actual spots. But we've already done that. So anyway, he mentions to me, what if we think about going overseas? And I was like, okay, wasn't even going there in my mind. And then he says, what do you think about New Zealand? And literally you guys, New Zealand was a black hole. I said black hole, like I don't know anything about it. I kind of knew where it was. That's it. Because as an American, like you study Australia, but I knew nothing about New Zealand. And he's like, wow, it's dark out. The kids are asleep. You have about 30 hours in the car. You could just do research and look it up. And I thought, oh, that's actually a really good idea until I get tired and fall asleep. But anyway, I spent the entire car ride scrolling through every blog, every expats, immigrated, persons experience, moving to New Zealand, everything I can find about moving to New Zealand. And let me tell you, this is my honest experience back in 2012, I think it was. I could not find any negative information about New Zealand. Like honestly, there was one blog where this lady complained about stuff, but it was cool lady, that was the problem. So there you have it. I was like, what is this place? This sounds like paradise. It sounds like too good to be true. Like what am I missing? Like I'm a critical thinker, right? So then we go through and look through the immigration advice, realize that it's not an easy place to immigrate to as Americans. In fact, I had a friend of mine. And so this is what's steal the deal of on New Zealand. This is your story. Your story, a friend of mine who owns an international company who helps people move across the world like she knows, right? She says to me, you'll never get into New Zealand. It's the hardest country to get into for Americans. And I was like, that's all I needed. That's all I need. I was like, oh, really? Now I really want to. We went through the process. About a year and a couple months I think later, we ended up coming to New Zealand in 2013. So that's the story of how we decided to come to New Zealand. Now really the question is why? So I have four kids. My youngest was one. My oldest I think was 11. So they're pretty little, but why? Basically we wanted our kids to have an international experience. We decided there's so much that you can learn by just jumping out of your comfort zone and everything, you know, not just for them, but for us. My goal, I don't know that it was everybody's goal, probably me and my husband's goal was we just wanted to be closer as a family. Like as the kids are getting older, you're finding that they're involved in things which are good and they're starting to break away from the family, which is normal. But we just wanted to have a time together of just like close knit family. And let me tell you, we got very close as a family. It worked. We didn't know anybody. We don't have any connection. We just read about New Zealand. That's it. My husband got a job before we came because we're not that crazy. We have four kids. Because nobody knew how to like do anything, everything was new. And so we kind of depended on each other. And so then what happens is you see your family skills a lot clearer. And you work together and you appreciate each other more. And it's a good, it's a good experience. So kind of stepping out, changing everything, selling everything you own and moving across the seas is an option. It isn't the only option to do that, but sure. You know, what people think that they can gain, say in like a week long family holiday, I don't think they can gain that. Two years, doing something different, together as a family, it worked. So why the heck do we ever leave? Why do we leave after two years of living in New Zealand? So to be honest, it's a little bit fuzzy in my head. If you why, because I really didn't want to. It was really, really, really, are you getting the set hard for me to leave? I loved it. I did not expect to love it here as much as I did. And everybody loved it. Everybody, you know, wanted to stay. But mainly it was because we hadn't been home in two years, so it was important to go home, you know, just certain things happened, personal things that we just really needed to reconnect. I mean, our intention was to move back and to move back permanently. We took a trip. After we left New Zealand, we went to Australia, we went to Southeast Asia for a total of five weeks. It took me that long to get used to the idea of moving back. I missed everybody. It wasn't the people. It was just, I just felt that I thrived here. It was me. It was like, I could be myself here. I could, just everything about it. And so we moved back and we settled right at it. We, the kids who got sort of in school, my husband started coaching again. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could live my life partially in New Zealand and partially in the US. Like, I think my mom can just do how much I tried to. Because I just loved it and I missed it. Okay, so why the heck did we end up moving back to New Zealand after moving back to the States and living there completely settled into life for two years? Well, here's the truth. This is the unedited version. This is actually true. This is why we moved back to New Zealand. So what happened was, is there is a program that came out, it's called Look See Wellington, where they brought in 100 people from around the world, IT people, sorry, IT people, to come and look and see Wellington and think about getting jobs there because they're trying to get more people into these IT jobs. And my husband kept talking about this. And I was, he applied and then he made the first cut and then he made the second cut and then he had to make some video. And it's really funny. Like, I was cooking in the kitchen and he screams at me about something and I respond and like, literally that's the video. I'm like, you're not going to send that in. So he stopped the video, I walked in there and I was like, that was literally the worst video ever. My dad was laying on the couch next to me like, the worst video, you know. Somehow we, he got chosen from that video to come. Anyway, long story short, he was one of the hundred. He won a free trip to Wellington, really. He visited all our friends and I'm like, I'm coming. You think you're going, I'm coming. So I had to buy mine to get by the hotel was all there and blah, blah, blah. He had to do some interviews because that was a requirement. When he left New Zealand, he was doing a particular IT job. When we moved back to the US, he was doing a new IT job. And so we thought when we came to the Luxie Wellington that he was going to be interviewing for the same old job that he used to do that he doesn't want to do anymore. But that wasn't the case. As we came, we're hanging out with friends at the left and he did the interview and he came back from each of those, he had to do three, I believe two or three interviews. And he came back from each of those. He was like, huh, these are for like, actually the new thing that I'm doing and like a couple of steps up. Like more accurate in terms of what he actually wants to do and I'm like, ah, don't worry about this. Not, we're not talking about moving back. We just get settled everywhere. So him and maybe a handful of others got job offers before we left, he got job offers before we left. But we have no intention of this. Like this is just the honest truth, okay? We just went on a trip to Wellington. So then now we have like this decision to make. We were like, okay, the thought of having to move was really, really hard and actually didn't want to. Like we wanted to because we loved it here. We think it's a great place to raise a family. But at the same time, like the thought of doing that again was like sickening. This is the true story. I don't know if you are of faith, but we prayed about it and we just were like seeking some guidance and talking with people and we just, we felt led. We felt led to go back and two job offers and we just started asking for everything. You gotta pay this, this, pay for this. And we thought, okay, they say no to one thing, we're out. This is how much we really want to go. Like we saw it, I think we would move back to New Zealand later on in life, but like we're not crazy because some of my kids are teenagers at this point. It's a whole big decision. None of them said no to anything. Like they gave us everything we're asking for. And then we just, we just kept feeling leaded. That's what we were supposed to do. And you know, there's a lot of reasons why it makes sense, but like a lot of reasons it doesn't make sense. And we just took a leap of faith. That's the truth. We took a leap of faith and said, okay, we feel led to do this. We feel like this is the right thing and we're gonna go back. And worse people were upset. Worse we were upset that the whole thing was hard. The whole thing was hard. It was a totally different experience to come out of the first sight. The first time was like a fun two-year holiday. This was actually like, okay, so we're gonna move and we're moving permanently. You know, we actually shipped a partial container. All this comes down. So your mindset is different. Your intention is different. Like getting settled into the community, getting settled into schools, totally different. Because when you're just there for like a year or two, like the early batter. So we moved back to the same area in Wellington, area in lower huts and we got our kids in school and it was definitely more rough the second time and a little bit more difficult and struggle for the kids. Although they were really great because the kids actually really loved living in New Zealand as well, but liked to have to move again and then their friends and it's a whole thing. So now that we've lived in New Zealand, four, five years. It's been an experience. Be sure your experience in the comments and subscribe to this channel if you wanna hear more about the crazy life living in New Zealand.