| By :
Alison Withers
Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers Moving house these days is not necessarily going to be in-country. Globalisation has made globetrotters of us all as people move for jobs, quality of life or to be close to children and grandchildren in other countries. There are a number of ways to organise an international home contents move, including shipping cars, and more and more people are trying to keep their costs down by doing their own packing and container loading as well as dealing with all the required documents and permissions. It can, however, be a complex process so it is easy to forget something crucial, especially when every country in the world has its own rules and restrictions on importing your property. One particularly complex area is auto shipping. It may be that you have a trade which uses a specialised vehicle that cost a lot to buy and that you would prefer to take along rather than replace when you get there. There are a number of arrangements you have to make before you leave. Anyone permanently taking a vehicle out of the UK must notify the DVLA. If you have a Registration Document (V5) you can do this by completing section C to show the intended date of export. You should then returm your V5 to the DVLA or to a local DVLA office. In its place you will receive a Certificate of Permanent Export (V561) as confirmation of your vehicle's registration. If you have a Registration Certificate, called a V5C, for the vehicle you must notify the export on the purple section - V5C/4. You must take your Registration Certificate with you as you may have to hand it over to the relevant authority when the vehicle is registered abroad. For a private individual getting a competitive quote from a shipping company is more difficult. As commercial organisations they tend to prefer to ship regularly for clients sending goods abroad, in preference to dealing with a one-off transaction. Car shipping rates reflect the size of the vehicle. A normal saloon car will carry a lower rate than say a long wheelbase land-rover or a people carrier. Rates are also affected by the number of vehicles being shipped and even the price of oil! It is not a cheap exercise when you add in the costs of the paperwork, insurance and import duties. Then there are the regulations for ensuring they are transported safely and securely, which means they have to be correctly strapped down if they are going in a container and have to contain less than a quarter of a tank of fuel. But it is not only about the costs of the actual shipping. Then you have to include the import duties in your destination country plus the insurance costs. As an illustration Australia's regulations for importing vehicles, for example, include a requirement to pass quarantine regulations while the South African Customs and Excise Department has a downloadable PDF of its guidelines that runs to 1000-plus pages although it does cover the import regulations for just about anything you can think of, not only cars. All in all, even if you plan to save on costs by going the self-pack shipping route it makes sense to have the reassurance of an experienced consultant who can guide you through the paperwork and source the most competitive quotes for you before you start.
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