3 October 2024

I honestly can’t believe I’m writing this. Lots of people know already, but now it is finally time to make it official. Long story short: Mikael and I have been in the process of applying for a Skilled Nominated subclass 190 Permanent Residency Visa for the past 2 years after finding it hard to get out of the squirrel wheel in Sweden (I’ve no idea why we say that in Swedish). Not that we had bad lives, we actually had it pretty good, but it wasn’t enough.

This arvo, at 5:10pm, I heard Mikael’s phone ring from the other room and as soon as I heard him answer: “Hi Jenny”, I instantly knew that our journey had both just ended and begun! Jenny, our migration agent, only contacts clients via email, unless it’s THE CALL. The visa grant call! More than two years of hard work, lots of money spent, many emotional rollercoasters has finally come to an end. And our life in Australia as permanent residents can finally begin (even though we technically arrived here more than four months ago).

We can’t believe it! We are over the moon! And we are beyond grateful and thankful to be able to call Australia our home!

I understand that there might be some questions regarding this, that this came out of the blue. But don’t worry. I have privately been blogging about the process from the very start but didn’t want to publish anything before everything was finalised. And this was the last step in the process. I still can’t believe we are here, we got our grant. Holy schmoly! As time goes, I will start publishing these old blog posts so you can follow along, alongside with our current adventures down under.

What started as (yet another) crappy Swedish summer in 2022 and just getting sick and tired of vitamin D deficiencies, winter depressions, and darkness has turned into us trying to figure out what our priorities in this new life are. That will take time, because honestly, we have started our new lives from scratch, we are blank pages, we can do whatever we want. And to get to this new chapter in our lives, we have had invaluable help from the Down Under Centre, the DUC, a migration agency in England. We first contacted them in September 2022 and from then it’s been an adventure, for sure. Stay tuned for flashback posts on how we got to where we are today!

In the world of migration, it is very popular with timelines, so I will post ours here. It probably won’t make too much sense yet.

• 2022-07-29: We made the decision that we wanted to move to Australia, even though we’ve never been
• 2022-09-12: Initial DUC consultation
• 2023-02-03: Completed the gathering of documentation for Mikael’s skills assessment as an electrician
• 2023-02-25: English test
• 2023-03-25: English test 2
• 2023-06-03: Skills assessment and technical interview for Electrician (general) in Crewe, England
• 2023-06-19: Offshore Technical Skills Record (OTSR = approved skills assessment)
• 2023-07-16: Put in Expression of Interests for visa subclasses 189 and 190
• 2024-03-13: Received State Nomination for subclass 190
• 2024-04-04: Approved nomination and invitation to apply for the 190 visa
• 2024-05-28: Lodged 190 visa application onshore
• 2024-06-18: s56 request from Immigration for medicals and police checks
• 2024-07-25: Medicals
• 2024-08-24: Bridging Visa A kicked in
• 2024-10-03: Approved 190 PR visa