Moving to Norway from the UK

[jinkster]

NRS said:

jinkster said:

How much is it for a cabin out here? Something not too huge.

Not very cheap! The cheapest with a quick check is around £80 000 for a small apartment that is around 35km from Voss.

http://m.finn.no/realestate/leisuresale/ad.html?fi...

Then you have something like this for a 4 bedroom place (around £700 000).

http://m.finn.no/realestate/leisuresale/ad.html?fi...

There's actually very little for sale in Voss itself (normally it would be passed onto the children rather than sold) - there's more available in Myrkdalen. It seems to be generally around £150-350 000 for apartments.

http://m.finn.no/realestate/leisuresale/search.htm...

However Voss would be a popular place in Norway due to the skiing and it being close to Bergen (so you can easily travel there for a weekend from the city). Cabins in more remote places/ less popular places can be a lot cheaper - say £40 000.

Thanks for your help NRS. I really love this place a lot! Are there many other expenses in buying property? Such as council tax, stamp duty etc. Are the bills cheap (everything seems to be electric)?

[KemP]

jinkster said:

Thanks for your help NRS. I really love this place a lot! Are there many other expenses in buying property? Such as council tax, stamp duty etc. Are the bills cheap (everything seems to be electric)?

One of the issues you will have is getting a D number. Without it you will not be able to start the bidding process. If you open a bank account some banks will apply for the D number for you, many will not. This process can take many many weeks. In fact this was the only way we were able to get one. Once you place a bid it is legally binding you cannot get out of it. You bid, it gets accepted the property is yours. You pay before the given date other wise you are charged a %

Electricity is cheap. Council tax isnt that cheap but will vary on where you live.

[KemP]

I will have been here for 6 years in June.

When people say you are taxed a lot they just read the headline figures.

What I get back is Holiday pay, where every June you get 12% of your salary. Half tax in December, 4 weeks minimum holiday, my partner had a year off on maternity leave paid at 75%. I got 12 weeks off fully paid. Our little one attends nursery 5 days a week, where she gets fed. It costs us £300 a month. The State pays the rest. If you lose your job then the state pays 50% of you last years salary for the first year while you job search.

Work life balance is much better here than in the UK. As someone else commented no one is in the office Friday afternoon. From mid June the country pretty much shuts down for Summer holidays.

If you do not like outdoor life then Norway will suck for you. We ski in the Winter and the Summer is spent in the boat. Winter is dark and depressing before the snow comes. Summer is light almost 24hrs. The majority of people lead an outdoor life.

There are many things that I dont like about Norway some of regulations seem very petty, but for me it is a price worth paying.

Oh yeah cars, it is PH after all. Expensive. Limited choice. Low speed limits, high speeding fines. Sneaky mobile speed traps. Some brilliant driving roads. Road tolls on most of the motorways and inner city areas plus road tax isnt cheap. For me, I now have a boat instead of a PH worthy car. I get far more use and enjoyment out of it.

[sneijder]

Why do you want to move OP ? Might be very relevant.

The culture is very different, it either works for you or it doesn't, there's no in between.

[NRS]

jinkster said:

Thanks for your help NRS. I really love this place a lot! Are there many other expenses in buying property? Such as council tax, stamp duty etc. Are the bills cheap (everything seems to be electric)?

Are you thinking of a cabin or a house? They are treated separately in terms of rules on tax. I don't know the exact rules in terms of owning a second place, so these are what I know of for the rules if it was your first house.

The main buying cost is the equivalent of stamp duty which is 2.5% of the buying price. In addition there is a few hundred £ for the other costs.

For running costs there can be a lot of variation, as it would depend if you have an apartment (which you generally share costs which might not be ideal if you were not often there - but isn't an issue if you would rent it out anyway). This one as an example is quite expensive as it is:

Approximately £50pm for council tax, £130pm for heating, electricity and general costs, £70pm for keeping the outside clean. You'd probably have to add building insurance to that as it doesn't look like it is included.

http://m.finn.no/realestate/leisuresale/ad.html?fi...

This one is another option:

http://m.finn.no/realestate/leisuresale/ad.html?fi...

It seems to be £50pm for council tax, £65pm for electricity (uses electric heaters), £15pm insurance and the same for cleaning the road of snow etc. It also seems to have a long term rental cost on the land which is £30.

Be aware the standards in cabins can vary a lot. For example the second one linked doesn't have running water so you need to collect it from the river (could be an issue in winter!).

Rental prices seem to be from anything like £300-600+pw for a 2 bedroom place just looking very quickly at Finn. However there seems to be a huge variation in them!

[NordicCrankShaft]

We seem to have quite a little Brits in Norway thing going on here

[sneijder]

NordicCrankShaft said:

We seem to have quite a little Brits in Norway thing going on here

+1

I'm afraid I've been turned to the Norwegian side and might need to hand in my PH card , I have a Passat GTE in the garage and an Opel Ampera E coming in July. Our households car journeys will be around 10% ICE by the summer I reckon.

I think it's time for a boat soon though, so I'll still be burning some fossils ..

[NRS]

sneijder said:

+1

I'm afraid I've been turned to the Norwegian side and might need to hand in my PH card , I have a Passat GTE in the garage and an Opel Ampera E coming in July. Our households car journeys will be around 10% ICE by the summer I reckon.

I think it's time for a boat soon though, so I'll still be burning some fossils ..

I live a little bit south of Tromsø but am determined not to hand in my PH card yet, so have the quintessential PHer car as my only car (a MX-5). That said with around 5-6 months of snow per year it does mean quite a long period of taking it easy/ having a lot of slidy fun at low speeds. No boat though!

[NordicCrankShaft]

I handed mine in last August when I got banned from driving for 5 months for a slight speeding misdemeanor.

However, I have gone some way to gaining it back to getting rid of the eGolf and replacing it with a warm/hot Alfa.

[sneijder]

NordicCrankShaft said:

I handed mine in last August when I got banned from driving for 5 months for a slight speeding misdemeanor.

Ouch ! Go on.. was there a prison alternative, was it slightly tempting to do that ?

[sneijder]

NRS said:

I live a little bit south of Tromsø but am determined not to hand in my PH card yet, so have the quintessential PHer car as my only car (a MX-5). That said with around 5-6 months of snow per year it does mean quite a long period of taking it easy/ having a lot of slidy fun at low speeds. No boat though!

Aye, the boat might turn into an Elise or MX5..there's nothing on Finn this time of year of course so don't really know if I'm way out of budget with an Elise

[NordicCrankShaft]

sneijder said:

Aye, the boat might turn into an Elise or MX5..there's nothing on Finn this time of year of course so don't really know if I'm way out of budget with an Elise

I had been keeping an eye out for an elise and saw an orange one briefly on finn for around 180,000nok. They don't seem to hang around for long.

Not sure about the prison alternative but it cost me 8000nok. I have recently had my license changed to a Norwegian one and am allowed to drive again from Monday.

Edited by NordicCrankShaft on Saturday 7th January 11:24

[NRS]

sneijder said:

NordicCrankShaft said:

I handed mine in last August when I got banned from driving for 5 months for a slight speeding misdemeanor.

Ouch ! Go on.. was there a prison alternative, was it slightly tempting to do that ?

Ouch! 30% over? It's one of the benefits in the north - generally much less speed cameras and checks.

sneijder said:

Aye, the boat might turn into an Elise or MX5..there's nothing on Finn this time of year of course so don't really know if I'm way out of budget with an Elise

From memory the cheapest Elise were around 150 000kr. Exiges are more around 600 000kr for an S2 if I remember right.

[NRS]

NordicCrankShaft said:

I had been keeping an eye out for an elise and saw an orange one briefly on finn for around 180,000nok. They don't seem to hang around for long.

Are we all competing against each other for one?

There is a supercharged Elise that has been on sale for a few years it seems, although it comes and goes. The rest get sold more quickly.

[NordicCrankShaft]

I was speeding up in a 50 zone to overtake some mong and got nabbed 20ish metres from where it goes upto 80 at 1130pm when there was no other traffic around. The police officers with the speed gun were sat in the middle of the central reservation in a bush with a black sheet over himself, it's funny now and I hope I've learned a lesson. On the plus side the missus has had to drive when we've gone to family parties or whatever so no argument about who gets to drink and who has to drive ;D

Edited by NordicCrankShaft on Saturday 7th January 11:30

[sneijder]

NordicCrankShaft said:

I had been keeping an eye out for an elise and saw an orange one briefly on finn for around 180,000nok. They don't seem to hang around for long.

Not sure about the prison alternative but it cost me 8000nok. I have recently had my license changed to a Norwegian one and am allowed to drive again from Monday.

Edited by NordicCrankShaft on Saturday 7th January 11:24

Good to hear. It was a few years since I swapped mine, just double check you can still drive a 7.5 Tonne truck. I don't think they transfer that over. IIRC I had two years to take an eyesight test and they would have extended it with the car permission.

I feel almost guilty my UK driving test (I'm pre theory tests, it was 30 minutes driving, 3 point turn and reverse around a corner) compared to the tests some of my Norwegian friends here had to do for not even the same.

I think there's a business here, take Norwegians to the UK to do their license in a day, and drive a used Elise back for selling.... with the passenger footwell full of proper sausages.

[NordicCrankShaft]

A man after my own heart

I do miss a proper banger.....and cheese that actually has some flavour.

[King Herald]

I found it quite interesting that every village or town releases details of peoples income and assetts evey year.

I laughed at that when a Noggy workmate told me, but he insisted it must be the same in England.....

Apparently it has changed recently, become a little more private, but 5 years or so ago we looked up how much certain Noggies were earning on my ship, no secrecy, no log-in needed.

[NRS]

King Herald said:

I found it quite interesting that every village or town releases details of peoples income and assetts evey year.

I laughed at that when a Noggy workmate told me, but he insisted it must be the same in England.....

Apparently it has changed recently, become a little more private, but 5 years or so ago we looked up how much certain Noggies were earning on my ship, no secrecy, no log-in needed.

Yes, I think you now need to use the equivalent of your NI number to log in, and then you have to search one person at a time, rather than just loading up the database of the county/ town etc you work in and getting everyone.

It was kind of fun before - you could load your area and then search by age and see how you ranked, And it also said how much of xyz the tax you paid would cover. Say 5 000 000 000 000 pencils for a school, or 0.000002% of a hospital and stuff like that.

[NordicCrankShaft]

I've been told also that if someone does this you get some sort of notification telling you who it is. I guess it's probably similar to when you get a letter when a company performs a credit check.