What we wish we’d done differently before leaving

British entrepreneur, Mel Carruthers: I wish I’d tried to sell my car sooner: “I loved my Mitsubishi Pajero car and didn’t want to part with it, so I hung onto it until the last minute. I justified this by needing it for the school run, but foolishly this meant that we were trying to sell my car the week after the schools finished for the summer. The same week, many people left Dubai, and the car market was flooded with expatriates selling Pajeros. No one wanted it, so in the end we had to sell it to a dealer for much less than it was worth. In hindsight I should have sold the car a couple of months beforehand and rented a car for the last few weeks – I lost about Dh40,000 off the valuation.”

British housewife Ziggy

Bee: I wish I’d realised how hard it would be to rent a property back home:

“It took us five months to find a place and move in. Agencies would not take references from Abu Dhabi. We desperately offered a few times to pay rent a year in advance, but to no avail. They questioned very private matters - “why are you coming back?”, “why don’t you have a job?”, and wanted a guarantor from within the UK. On top of this, rental properties were in very short supply. I recommend people make sure they always have enough savings to survive for at least the first six months upon returning home, as well as enough to buy a whole new wardrobe of clothes if you’re returning to a different climate.”

Briton Lisa Howie: I wish I’d applied for my good conduct certificate from the police: “If anyone wants to work in schools or chaperone any children back in the UK, you have to be have your criminal record checked. And without five years of officialdom in the UK, it is tricky and I wish I had applied for a good conduct certificate from the Abu Dhabi police before I left. If you do it from the UK after you have left the UAE, you have to involve the embassy and the process is more complicated.”