A Reward For Our Hard Work

We've been in New Zealand for just over a year, and have had from day one every intention of staying. When we arrived we had not yet applied for residency, it was a process we were yet to begin.

I secured a contract job quickly, which was later made permanent. It was at this point in January that we started down the road for residency. Our route was via the Skilled Migrant Category, and if you have not looked into this, the process although long and drawn out, is relatively simple.

Stage 1: Check to see if you would be eligible. Use the online points calculator to see if you will qualify.

Stage 2: The Expression of Interest is entry into a pool of potential applicants. If you have over 100 points, your expression is entered and selections based on the amount of points are made every 2 weeks. We qualified for 155 points so were selected immediately.

Stage 3: Invitation to Apply - At this stage, you have been selected from the pool and your EOI has been reviewed. If NZ Immigration that you are claiming points for the correct experience/qualifications etc you may them be invited to apply for residency. You need to provide all the evidence that you have stated in your EOI.

Stage 4: Residency approved or Declined! After all the data is verified and processed, a decision is made on your application. This can take between 6 to 9 months, but we were pretty lucky as we only had to wait about 4 months for this part.

So that's it, we did it, and as of yesterday we are official New Zealand permanent residents!!