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daughter, son in law, two grand children and four great grand children.

To emigrate to New Zealand on the grandparent sponsored scheme you have
to submit an EOI Expression Of Interest which after acceptance you wait
until you are invited to apply for Residence and a visa, sit and wait until it’s
your turn. Unfortunately there is such a backlog of parents/grandparents
going to stay with family that the government has suspended all invites since
October 2016 (our acceptance for an invite was December 2015) until at
least July 2018 and with still no guarantee that the invites will start again.
The Chinese and Indian families easily outstrip the European applicants in
this method with the backlog comprising 50% Chinese and 20% Indian families
with many of the sponsoring children failing to adhere to the five year caring
stipulation the sponsorship carries, the cost to the NZ government running
into millions. When they finally lift the suspension the sponsorship period will
increase to ten years.

To retire in New Zealand without family being involved the NZ Government
require a current annual income of NZ$45 000, NZ$1 000 000 to invest for
a minimum of four years and a further NZ$500 000 for settlement and with
the current exchange rate of South African Rand to the New Zealand Dollar
being 10:1, we will just sit and wait!
Anyway to compensate for staying a while longer in Sunny SA we do get all
the Premier League games every week, so I keep up to date watching the
Spurs. TV is very good for our almost ‘third world’ country, with Sky and
although belated, many of the good UK programs all the soapies and series-
what more could we ask for!

We often watch Prime Minister’s Question Time on Sky quite a civilised
occasion in comparison with ours, always fun and games with the EFF party
our ‘enfant terrible’ of politics. Dressed in their red overalls they disrupt just
about anything with regard to Zuma. Just recently the Finance Minister was
trying to make his mid season Budget Speech and was stopped from even
starting by the EFF. This party gets so much support from the Africans in
the street that it will be quite scary if they ever get into power. They
advocate redistribution of land without compensation and secretly would
like all whites to leave the country.

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