Korean Job Discussion Forums

[SandyG21]

Okay - once a person gets a job - then they have to get ready to go to Korea --

For those of you who are maybe older - not living with family - how did you deal with getting rid of possessions? storing things? getting rid of car? shipping things? know what to bring? getting an address back in your home country for mailing purposes? getting out of a lease or rental agreement? getting everything in order to make the move overseas? Having a bank in home country to pay bills back in your home country?

Especially for those who have no family to help them.

Details would help.

Thank you.

[Mr-Dokdo]

[SandyG21]

Somebody is cranky today!

[sarbonn]

Some of the stuff you just have to work out how to do it, like your lease situation. Talk to your landlord. That's what I did because I realized that not talking to him wasn't going to get all of that solved. It turned out to be a great thing for me as he was actually pretty helpful after the move.

I'm much older, and my immediate family has been deceased for decades now, so I pretty much was on my own, but I did receive a lot of help from a female friend of mine who has managed to do a lot of the "after he left" kinds of things that I'm fortunate she has been around because I really couldn't have expected that sort of thing from anyone else.

As for an address in your home country, perhaps a p.o. box is your best bet if you have no one else. As for possessions, you have to pretty much just suck it up and start getting rid of things. I started selling important possessions a month out, and I still had a TON of stuff left over by the day I left. Start throwing things out that you know you really don't need. I was a pack rat, and it hurt to get rid of so much stuff, but you really don't have that much room when you come here (you'll have room WHEN you get here, but getting that stuff here will be a nightmare for the most part when you have no one on the other end helping you).

You should probably already have a bank now. Go in and talk to them about transferring money from Korea. I did that a few times until I understood exactly what I needed to do. I've only wired money home once through a KB bank (don't even have a Korean account yet), and everything worked fine.

One thing I'd HIGHLY suggest doing is read over a bunch of old posts about people who are asking about what they should have brought to Korea had they known better. There are so many little nuance things that you can use over here that it's so useful to read about beforehand. I did that, and I'm grateful for it, but had I known now to look even deeper on the boards, I would have done it because I'm still trying to replace important little things that I never really thought about before. You can find a lot of things here, more than people claim, but you really have to know where to look for things, realizing that you can't really rely on just one or two stores like you can in the states (or wherever you're at).

If you have any personal questions you'd like answered, and if I can, feel free to ask. I've only been here a month and a half, but you'd be surprised how much you can pick up in such a short amount of time.