Moving Out – Are You Ready? – Part 1

Even after the happiest of childhoods in the happiest of homes: Sooner or later the time comes for you to leave the proverbial nest and become independent. But when is the right time for that big step: moving out?

Moving out – can you really afford it?

In order to make an informed and reasonable decision you need to do some serious and realistic budgeting. The following is not necessarily a complete list of factors to go into such a budget. However, at the very least though it should give you an idea of what to look at.

Current situation:

• How much is your current monthly income (after taxes)?
• Do you have to pay any monthly installments due to existing debt (credit cards, student loan, car payments etc.)?
• What other monthly costs do you have? (e.g. gas/public transport, health insurance, auto insurance, cell phone…)

You might pay a certain amount of money to your parents as a form of rent and/or to help with the household expenses. This would normally be considered part of your monthly expenses, for the sake of this calculation you can disregard it: It will be substituted (hypothetically) with your new, additional living expenses that will be quite different when living on your own. Right now, we simply want to see how much money you have left to go towards future rent and the additional cost of living once you move out.

Potential new situation:

In this hypothetical new situation of moving out and living on your own, you will have your monthly income minus your monthly costs and potential debt-related payments.

Paying rent (unless you are buying of course) is one of the main additional items you need to consider when doing your moving out budget. However, rent is certainly not the only additional expense! You can find more information for your calculation here.

Now you have calculated what is left from your income after

• paying for your taxes
• your rent and
• other living expenses.

Do the numbers still look good at this point? Good! Just keep in mind, this does not quite answer if you are ready and can afford to move out! We will write more about this in our next post!

In the meantime, you will need to also budget the cost of moving. So, if you want to find out more about how much the move as such might cost you, contact us to request a free quote!