Continental Shift

Your plans are in place, your move date is set, you’re financially ready. What concrete steps do you need to take to finalise your move.

door knocker, Ghadames, Libya

Think back to the last time you had to move house. What kinds of things did you have to do? Necessary tasks may include:

• Filling out and submitting change of address forms, and/or making a list of everyone you have to notify yourself
• Notifying utilities (water, gas, electricity etc) to organise final readings and have your phone, internet account, or pay-TV disconnected
• Organising or completing maintenance on the house you are moving from or to
• Notifying relevant government agencies
• Holding a garage sale
• Cancelling or re-directing regular deliveries
• Finalising local accounts
• Organising packers and movers.

Many of the same steps apply when you are moving overseas; you just need to be more thorough about tying up loose ends.

Your home
One of the first decisions you will need to make, if you own your own home, is to decide what to do with it. You have several options:

• Sell it
• Keep it empty
• Keep it and rent it out
• Keep it, rent it out on short-term leases, and return to it seasonally.

Your choice depends on your plans for your overseas move. Are you planning to leave your original country permanently, or only for a few years? Do you intend to live overseas for only part of each year, returning to your home country for the other part of the year?

Your intended length of stay overseas and planned visits to your home country will dictate whether you should maintain property ownership in your home country, and if you should maintain regular access to it for your own living requirements.

You should be wary of the option of keeping the house empty. As well as being a missed opportunity to receive rental income, such a decision risks letting the house become neglected and run-down, or a target of squatters. That said, if you have good neighbours or friends and family in the area, it can be a viable alternative to renting. One expat of our acquaintance even left his cats to live in his empty house and garden with his neighbour to feed them, for two years.

The other factor to consider when making this decision is the nature of the home. Is it suitable to be rented out? If, for example, the house is a stately period home with original fittings, large high-maintenance gardens, and a pool, you might want to think twice about renting it. The maintenance costs and worry about how the renters are treating it might be more trouble than it’s worth. You might be better off selling that home and buying an investment property specifically chosen for its ‘rentability’ and capital growth potential.

How to move overseas. That’s it for this week. Next week, I’ll continue this section with some tips for selling your home, plus more decisions you’ll need to make.

See past topics and what’s coming up next at the table of contents. Subscribe or check back for more content soon.

If you don’t want to wait, or you want the content in a nice, easy-to-read format, you can buy it in paperback from Amazon, or in paperback or electronically from Lulu.

If you’ve read it and have a spare moment, please review it at Amazon.