Hi Scott, this is my first post on thie forum - saw your post and thought I would reply.....
Long story short, I'm Australian, my girlfriend in English, so we have done the 'move your life overseas' a couple of times.
I sold house, left job and moved to the UK back in 2004 - it was permenant thing - we didn't know if (or when) we would ever move somewhere else.
Late last year we have moved back to Australia.
For us it was a little easier than most - for a start, I had her at the UK end, and her family etc to help me out....and vice-versa. PLus we both have dual nationality, so we have no issues with work visa's etc.
Having siad that (work visa issues aside) its a LOT easier than many people make out - especially the UK to Australia move (and Australia to the UK). Our Governments have lots of joint arrangments, so its easy to organise things like drivers licencs, get car insurance, open bank accounts, etc etc. There is no language barrier (as there would be if you moved to Spain for example) and a lot of things are similar... There are lots of shipping companies who specialise in these moves and its really quite a simple arrangement
I suggest you look at the Britishexpats.com forums - it is a forum with thousands of members - all of them british who have (or will, or want to) move overseas, there is discussion for everything from visa applications to how to deal with parents to the best way to ship your belongings!
For an Australian, moving overseas is easy - I live in a big country - so when I 'moved away from home' at the age of 17 to go to college, I moved 14 hours away......... so moving to the UK was not that much further!
