No idea how to go about moving to a new place

[redfox14]

My husband and I are hoping to move this year with our daughter, to a new area about an hour and an half away from where we live currently. We own our house and are both currently employed (DH is full time and I’m part time).

It might sound daft but I’m a bit daunted by the process of moving - I don’t know what to do first! We need to put our house up for sale and I know the process of buying and waiting for a sale to go through can take a long time. Do we wait until our house is sold to look for jobs?

I may sound clueless but the only time I’ve ever moved out of my local area before was for university, and I worked in retail at the time so was able to just transfer stores.

We also will be looking at putting our daughter into nursery when we move, but I haven’t got an exact idea of when we will be moving there which makes things difficult when making enquiries at the nursery.

If anyone has made a big move before and had to sort out house/job/schools - how did you do it? Very grateful for any tips!

You can do a lot of research online nowadays.

Join local Facebook pages and ask for advice on nurseries, schools, areas etc.

You could give yourself some time, put your stuff in storage and rent in the new area that way you can sort jobs and nursery out.

I've never changed area but when my parents did (3 hours away) my dad stayed at his parents and kept his old job visiting us at the weekends until he got a job in their new location - seemed alot of faff to me and I suspect not the way most people do things

When we moved, DH got a new job and rented Monday to Friday until the house sale went through. I was on maternity leave.

Will you need a mortgage because you might struggle if you don’t have jobs in the new place to go to.

I would put your house on the market and look for jobs simultaneously. I think to a certain extent, it depends on the sort of work you do, and you may have to accept that in order to stay employed, you may need to consider a flexible working request (if that's possible) or commuting back to your old area for a time for work.

We moved about 1.5 hours away. Dh and I are fortunate that neither of our jobs is linked to where we live necessarily. I already wfh most days and have a long commute (my office is neither close to our old house or our new one). Dh is self-employed and while he was able to do most of his work from home in the new location, he still travels back to our old area one day away because he has a commercial premises/staff there still.

We researched schools/nurseries around each house we seriously considered, but we only approached them once we had an offer accepted. Once the offer was accepted, I registered us for the new nursery and we decided on a tentative start date based around our suspected completion date. For schools, we were an in-year application for one, so they could offer us a place within 2 weeks, so I applied like January for a February start (we were completing in February). For our nursery age dc who was starting school, we just made the deadline, which I think was 15th Jan, so we registered for nursery and applied for school at the same time. Because we had exchanged, I could use the new address for our application. It's a more tricky situation if you are applying for a new starter reception place and you miss the deadline - because if schools are oversubscribed, you may not get your local school.

We rented for a year to take the pressure off. Sold our house, started looking for jobs once we'd exchanged contracts then moved into a rental in the area we knew we wanted to buy in. It meant DDs could start at a school that we wouldn't be moving them from again. Took 6 months or so of being in the rental until we found the right house to buy. Fortunately we were seen as being in a very strong buying position as the money from our house sale was in the bank and we were chain free.

I'd focus on getting jobs first. You need those to pay the bills and decide on your budget for your new home. Then I'd put your house on the market and rent in the new area. It will mean the sale should be more straightforward. You'll also be a 'first-time buyer' once it's gone through and will have the pick of the market. You’ll have time then to be choosy about the area you finally settle in and nurseries.

This depends if you can afford the rent while your sale is going through. Or can you stay with family?