This week in Los Angeles business failures

With it feeling like everything was starting to fall into place for the move it was inevitable that something would come along to keep us from getting complacent.  But what came along was really out of the blue.  Last week we got an email from the pet transport company we had signed up with that effective immediately they were “entering into legal corporate dissolution”.  They did however move our arrangements to another pet transport company.  I contacted them last week and talked to them today, and they were as baffled as we were about the company’s crack-up.  They were helpful though and reassured me that they’d be able to take on our business.  So we’ll send over all of the stuff we’ve done so far for the pets – rabies vaccines and titres, pet import permit – and they’ll give us their pet-prep guidance and get us on their schedule to get the them to NZ.

I bet you’re wondering what happens to the deposit we gave to the original company?  Not surprisingly since the company is kaput, so is the deposit.  But all is not lost!  Since I paid for it with my credit card I was able to report the charge as fraudulent since I paid for a service I did not receive.  I’ll need to fill out some forms and show them that the company went out of business, but it seems like there’s decent chance we might be able to get our deposit back, which would be awesome.

The other big news from last week is we now have a NZ bank account.  The bank was really helpful in getting it set up from overseas and is even sending us our bank cards in the mail (though we can’t activate them until we arrive in NZ).  Having a bank account set up is helpful in a couple of ways.  Importantly it will allow Kelly to get her IRD number (their equivalent of our social security number) which she’ll need for things like getting paid.  It also allows us to transfer money into the the country so that we have some funds available for us when we land.  And savings accounts in NZ actually pay interest (currently 2.1% now compared to 0.25% for our savings account here)  so we got that going for us, which is nice.