The Basics
Written by Ashley Kelmore, Posted in Getting Ready, Move to UK: Before You Go
Once you have your visa, there’s a lot to take care of. If you own a house, you have to figure out if you’re going to rent it or sell it. If you’re renting, you have to give notice to your landlord. If you have a job, you have to let them know you’re leaving. You have to figure out what you’re going to do with your belongings, your pets, etc.
This section is to help you get through these days, which go by VERY quickly.
When we moved, we did it during the winter holiday season. So take what you’re going through now, and throw in a week-long trip to visit all immediate family members, plus trying to see the friends you’re moving away from, and you can probably see that this can be an emotionally draining as well as physically tiring time.
Being organized can help. For us, we found that creating a shared Google spreadsheet was a good way to put on paper all the things we needed to do.
We had a tab for each general area, and then listed the tasks and who was responsible. For us, that included:
- Jobs (and the visa stuff)
- Health (like reminders to get in appointments before losing insurance)
- London Living (including researching neighborhoods)
- Renting our house
- Actual move (flights, etc.)
- Furniture (what we wanted to sell / store / give away)
- Car
- Finances
- Cats
- Shipping (a tab for each box, with contents, because they ask you for the details of what’s inside when you ship overseas)
In the very beginning it can seem overwhelming, but we found this spreadsheet was a great way to keep in focus all that we needed to get done to make sure that the move was as as easy as possible.
To be clear: it’s not going to be easy.
But it could be extraordinarily hard, and no one wants that, right?
