The step-by-step plan for New Zealand

Here is the difference with Canada and Australia, and it's a big difference. There you build up a file and lodge it from the Netherlands; here almost everything starts with a job offer from an employer accredited by Immigration New Zealand. Without that employer your application simply doesn't exist.

Four doors are realistic. If your occupation is on tier 1 of the Green List, you apply for permanent residence straight away with that job offer — the fastest route there is. If it's on tier 2, you first work 24 months in New Zealand and then apply for residence. If it's on neither, there's the Skilled Migrant Category: six points plus a suitable job. And whoever is 18 to 30 inclusive can turn the whole order around with a working holiday of twelve months — that gets you there, and you look on the spot for an employer who helps you further.

This is the find of this corridor, and it's in almost no Dutch guide. Whoever becomes a tax resident of New Zealand for the first time — and wasn't one in the ten years before — automatically gets a temporary exemption of about four years on almost all their foreign income. Interest, dividends, rent from your Dutch home, income from foreign investment funds: untaxed in New Zealand, for forty-eight months. You don't have to apply for anything; you get it if you meet the conditions.

Two things you need to know already, because they change your planning. Wages and income from personal services you earn abroad are not covered — it's about capital, not about work. And you can only get the exemption once in your life.

The sting is in the trade-off. If you apply for Working for Families — the New Zealand child scheme, including Best Start — the exemption ends, also if your partner applies for it. For a family with children and little foreign capital that's an easy choice; for whoever rents out a Dutch home or has a portfolio, it can make a difference of thousands of euros a year. Work it out before you apply for anything, not after.

Put the date on which the window closes in your diary straight away. After that the ordinary rules apply, including the FIF regime on foreign shares above NZ$ 50,000 purchase value — see step 5.7.

Three limits are hard, and there's no point calculating around them.

Age. For the residence routes you're 55 or younger at the moment you apply. No exceptions, no waiver. Whoever is older is in practice left with only a temporary route or the route via a child who already lives there — see the article.

English. Dutch people aren't exempt. For the main applicant of a skilled residence visa IELTS 6.5 average applies, or an equivalent score on one of the other accepted tests. A test taken at home doesn't count. For your partner and children from 16 a lighter requirement applies: speak English, or prepay the lessons in New Zealand.

Health and character. Everyone from 15 has a medical examination with chest X-ray, with a doctor designated by Immigration New Zealand. And everyone from 17 submits police certificates — from every country of which you're a citizen and from every country where you lived for twelve months or longer in the past ten years. Those certificates may be no older than six months at lodging. That's the reason they're in phase 2 and not here.

The application is dearer here than at most destinations: count on around NZ$ 6,450 for a residence application, regardless of whether you do it via the Green List or via the points. Below that there are still the language test, the medical examination and the police certificates.

But the real money is further on: the ocean in between is the longest of all the destinations we offer (six to nine weeks' sailing), and your car stays here — see step 4.4. Work it out with your own choices before you start on anything.

New Zealand is the farthest destination on this site, and that's not a mood picture but a fact with consequences. A single journey costs you well over twenty-four hours and a stopover; popping over to a funeral in the Netherlands is a week of your life and a hefty sum. Discuss that out loud, because it's the reason people return.

Also discuss the things that only start to weigh later: the house prices in Auckland and Wellington, the fact that in most places you're stuck without a car, and that in the first years you may not buy a house — that's not a budget question but a law, and it's in step 5.5.

Set a date by which you want to have left. Not because it's fixed, but because everything that comes after this has a lead time you can only judge against a date: finding a job takes months, a pet six months, a container two.

Vertrekklaar works out for you whether it fits, and says so honestly if it doesn't. Shifting is always allowed — the date is yours, not the tool's.