RAGS TO RICHES | Moving House? We Got You Covered
(plus exactly how much I ended up spending)
Personal finance for creative professionals, freelancers, artists, heavily aided by stories, puns, memes and examples.
Written by Ragini Singh Khushwaha, founder of ArtNowThus and subject matter expert on the arts, content, cats, random factlets and productivity hacks.
When you begin to write about personal finance, you very quickly find yourself in the middle of the ever-active rent vs. buy conversation. Anyone personal finance can go on about the merits of their side and why one makes more sense than the other depending on where their opinions may lie.
As someone who has spent most of my working life in one of the most expensive real estate cities in the world, I’ve found myself firmly on the rent side - mostly by circumstance. Until the pandemic, when I gave up my apartment in Mumbai and moved back to my home city for a few years - a few blissful years of no rent.
Cut to July 2023, and I found myself once again making my way back into the city of dreams - with all of its opportunities and all of its costs. So many costs! Nothing boosted me back to the reality of renting like taking a look at my budget sheet at the end of one month of moving back. But honestly what surprised me the most was how surprised I ended up being by all these costs in the first place! Like I mentioned, I’ve lived in Mumbai in the past. I’ve done this rigmarole of moving house every couple of years often enough. And yet, I wasn’t ready for anything other than the most basic costs of renting and moving.
So this article is as much for me as it is for you all - a comprehensive breakdown of my move in ₹, what was planned and what I actually spent. Hopefully the next time I move, I can look through here and know exactly what to expect, as can you :)
Okay, let’s dive in!
The Ones We Knew
I’ll start with the biggest chunk of our expense, the first thing we expected and planned for - Rent.
My partner and I had estimated a monthly rental of about ₹50,000. In reality we are now paying ₹60,000. It’s not inexpensive, and the suburb we’ve moved into is notorious for its high rental prices, which seem to have soared even further in the last few years. There were plenty of benefits to us moving here though, so in the larger picture the extra rent made sense for us. We did get fortunate in finding this place through a friend, and therefore avoiding brokerage. In Mumbai that is usually a standard one month of rent, so I’m counting this as a big win!
After our rent, we needed to make sure we had a chunk of change available to put down for our security deposit. In Mumbai again, this is usually between ₹1-1.5L. It’s not really money spent, unless you count the loss of interest on the amount. It’s money that gets recycled with each house we move into, going from one deposit to the other - so once we set this aside, I usually just write this off until we get back to a no-rental situation.
Those were our two biggest costs obviously. There are a few other obvious costs that we seemed to have tracked fairly well on based on our estimates:
Leave and licence agreement for our 11 month rental : we had an agent do this for us at home, so including the convenience charge this came to a total of ₹4,000. We split this half way with our landlords and ended up paying ₹2,000 for our share.
Packing and moving costs : our costs here were relatively lower. Firstly, we moved from Pune to Mumbai which is about a four hour car drive. Which meant that over our many trips over the weekends we were able to bring down a lot of our stuff in our car. And secondly, since we know we’re going to be in and out of Pune fairly frequently, we decided to keep our home there as functional as possible and didn’t have a lot of big stuff to pack and move. Including the cost for fuel on all these trips, we ended up spending about ₹30,000-40,000 for this.
Utilities : we had originally planned for our wi-fi, electricity and gas to come to about ₹10,000 monthly. We’re currently paying between ₹5,000-6,000 for this, which is great except,
Help : things like house help, car washer, laundry which we had also estimated at ₹10,000, we now pay closer to ₹12,000-13,000 per month. So there hasn’t been much of a saving with the utilities because it’s all gone into this bucket.
Probably Relevant Side Note: The bills for utilities for the previous month will show up in your first month of living in the house. So make sure you take readings the day you move in and share these with your landlord. It’ll save you the cost of having to pay for utilities you didn’t use, because they should be covering this either with the previous tenant or themselves.
As part of our agreement we had a paint job, a basic cleaning and a pest control that the landlords would provide. I would always recommend trying to work this in, since it’s pretty basic and it should be part of a decent handover of the house. Our house is also semi-furnished. While landlord-provided furniture may be dubious in terms of an aesthetic match and quality - if you can do a check beforehand and you’re okay with it, it can be quite a cost saver. We’ve spent considerably less furnishing our apartment than we would have including appliances. If your landlord is providing appliances with the house, you’re paying for this in the rent - so ask for a basic maintenance check-up before you move in.
The Ones That Snuck Up On Us
So those were our bigger costs, that we totally anticipated and nailed. And then came all the costs we didn’t anticipate and those really kicked my butt.
Our new flat is relatively lived-in, which comes with all of that character and a LOT of small fixes that add up to big numbers pretty quickly.
Despite our landlord-provided cleaning before we moved in, our flat needed a further deep clean especially for the bathrooms and the kitchen. We also needed to deep clean the sofas and mattresses that came with the house and clean all the large grills in our windows.
These services were all booked at different points so I didn’t realise the hit immediately, but this came to about ₹8,000 for all of it.
Again, despite our landlord-provided pest control we needed a deeper pest control after we moved in once again. We also discovered an early termite problem in the house that we obviously needed to tackle immediately. All of this came to another ₹8,000, but luckily our landlord agreed to cover this.
While our house came with a few basic appliances, the two things we needed to buy were a washing machine and a TV. The apartment has a cute little niche in the kitchen tucked away for the machine, which is such a neat arrangement. But that also means that it can’t fit anything but a front load machine in that space. Front-loads are more expensive than top-loads, but we were able to pick this up during a sale and saved some money.
Buying a new washing machine, however expensive, didn’t hurt as much as having to buy a new TV. Our old TV that we had so lovingly transported to Mumbai broke mid-transit. So when we opened that box, we were greeted with a fat crack right down the screen.
All-in-all this was a ₹60,000 hit for us between the TV and the washing machine. And having to cough up this money made me so much more grateful for all the appliances that did come with the house.
We had a few other costs of a lived-in house that needed to be taken care of. Our front door lock jammed after two weeks of moving-in from simply having been a front door lock in service for too long. We also had some plumbing issues that were expensive to replace and fix. I still find us having to do a lot of these minor repairs every now and then. These are repairs that only reveal themselves as you live in the house. But they’re not part of the wear and tear of a single tenant, it’s wear and tear over years of people living here and using these. Ideally I do think that these are repairs that should be covered by the landlord (especially if it’s going to last long-term in the house). In hindsight, next time around I’m really going to try and negotiate this in the agreement.
Between all these minor repairs, and some general stupidity on our end - like locking ourselves out of our bedroom our first night in and having to call a locksmith at 10pm to let us back into the room - this was another ₹10,000 or so.
Probably Relevant Side-Tip: Plan for some contingency money to cover general stupidity. It’s going to happen.
Our apartment has a lot of large windows, which is beautiful. Except we also need to net each of these said windows to cat-proof for our very indoor cat. This honestly was one of the costs that pinched me the most. Our initial quotes for these were between ₹20,000-26,000. Eventually we spoke to a local carpenter and got this done for about ₹15,000.
Probably Relevant Side-Tip: We used Urban Company for a lot of our moving-in requirements, and it’s an absolute blessing when you’re moving to a new city or area and don’t have much information on specific plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. nearby. But there were definite times when I felt like the quotes from UC professionals were too high, especially when we compared this to local service providers. I wouldn’t stop using UC, because it’s just so convenient, but I’d definitely recommend cross-verifying the amounts quoted, especially for bigger costs.
There are a lot of little costs that don’t feel like much in each single spend, but they add up to a lot very quickly. We bought a surprising number of storage boxes in different shapes and sizes. Super useful in the long run of living here, but also significant enough a number for me to register the cost of!
The other cost that really sneaked up on me was the stocking up of our kitchen and our cleaning supplies. In the first month I seemed to run through our cleaning supplies on a weekly basis. In all of the deep cleans and the follow up cleanings, we were replacing our regular buy literally every seven days including liquids and scrubbers.
Also, food! When you’re moving and your kitchen isn’t functional or there are just too many people at home to allow for any cooking to happen - you will order in and that my friend really really adds up again. So keep that in mind and make sure you have some money set aside for this.
Another formerly unaccounted for big expense is also one of the more frivolous ones - beauty costs for the house. These are completely subjective, and not everyone will want to spend the same. There’s also the added advantage of being able to spread these costs over a few months, which we did. But these are also the little things that make the house feel like home - curtains, plants, wall hangings, lights. There were also the little things we put in to hide any ugly sores, there are seemingly many of these that come to notice once you start living in a house! Most of what we added in is renter-friendly and can move homes with us, but these add up to a tidy little sum nevertheless. I don’t regret spending on this at all though. I’ve inherited a borderline obsessive streak of house-pride from my mother, and this is an expense that makes me verry happy!
And finally, tips. I didn’t actually realise how much we spent on this at the time. But I’m going through the number of services we booked and the number of people we had to bring in to help us through the two months of settling in and it’s a fair bit. What I didn’t do this time was plan for it, so I found myself running to the ATM every 2-3 days. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me earlier at the time, but next time around I’m making sure I have enough change set aside right from the start.
I don’t have the exact numbers for costs of things like beautifying the house and the money we spent on stocking up the kitchen, tips etc. but I’d say this came to about another ₹50,000 over two months
The Cold Hard Numbers
In total, not counting the pest control that our landlord covered and not counting the rent and security deposit, we’ve spent a little over 2L making this move. This is also the first time I’ve sat down to add it all up and it’s really shocked me - moving houses is expensive!
What I’ve Learned (so you can too!)
Since I am now painfully aware of how much this actually cost me, here’s my earnest advice at the end of it all: if you're planning a move to a new home, consider staying put for at least two to three years. It just makes a lot more fiscal sense, even when you weigh it against the standard 10% annual rent hike.
Also, it’s a lot easier on your sanity!
ENDNOTE AND DISCLAIMER
Rags to Riches is a monthly column published for the ArtNowThus Blog and Newsletter. Meant for creative professionals, freelancers, artists - anyone really who hasn’t yet quite figured it out and needs a place to start from scratch.
All Rags to Riches articles are put together with the help of experts, and heavily aided by stories, puns, memes and examples - this is a finance blog you will actually want to read and (hopefully) put to use in your personal finance lives.
We’d like to establish that while the principles outlined in this section should pertain to anyone, we’ve put this together with a focus on creative professionals and freelance workers. Also, while I love spouting all things personal finance, I am not a financial advisor. This column is for information and recreational purposes only and in no way meant to offer advice or recommendations.