How to make house moving less painful: Sarah Coles

It's not going to help if you’re moving next week, but you should start preparing as soon as possible, and the first step is a ruthless declutter. If you get cracking weeks or even months in advance, you can sift through your unwanted items for the gems, and make some cash.

With the luxury of time, you can use online auctions to research the previous selling price for your belongings, so you know what everything is worth. You can also clean things you want to sell, present them attractively, and pick the right websites to sell on

eBay is a useful all-rounder, but comes with a hefty final selling fee of 12.8% plus 30p and an operating fee of 0.42% – although it’s free for clothes. It tends to offer discounted weekends if you can wait for those, which brings the fees down to something more manageable.

Alternatively, you can use Amazon for second-hand books, where they’ll sell fast if you price them just a few pennies cheaper than those already on offer. Or there are specialist alternatives including Vinted for clothes – with a massive user base and no selling fees, and Music Magpie, for shifting large collections of CDs or DVDs that you could struggle to sell elsewhere. Meanwhile, if you have large items that need to be collected, there’s Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace.

If something isn’t worth the effort of selling, or you don’t have the time, you can donate it to charity, and may still be able to make money from your generosity. As long as you pay tax, you can tell them you want to gift aid your donations and the charity will automatically get tax relief at 20%. If you’re a higher rate taxpayer, check the charity will send you a receipt to show how much money is raised when your items sell. Then you can claim the extra 20% tax back yourself through a self-assessment tax return, which will bring your tax bill down.

After all of this, you’ll still end up throwing an awful lot away, but even this works in your favour. You’ll be grateful for every expired tin of beans or wrecked pair of trainers that you don’t have to pack, pay someone to move, and then unpack again at the other end.

A few weeks ahead of the move, you’ll know roughly when you’re going and how much stuff needs to be shifted, so you can think about your removal options. The more you’re prepared to do yourself, the cheaper it will be. Hiring a van, for example, can cost as little as £75 - although at the weekend this will roughly double, and if you need a bigger van, it will set you back anything upwards of £210. If you need someone to carry the other end of furniture and drive the van, the price will start at £175.

If you need more help than this, removal company charges start at around £550 for a one-bedroom house, or £1,400 for a five-bedroom house. However, it varies significantly across the country, and there may be extra charges on top. If you’re moving longer distances or up flights of stairs, you can expect the price to rise by as much as £500. There may also be fees if they need to make special arrangements to park on the day. If you can’t move out of the house and into a new one on the same day there will be storage charges too. And if you’re really pushed for time, they will dismantle furniture or pack the entire house for you, but you can expect to pay at least £400 for someone to pack for you.

You should get three quotes to be sure you’re not over-paying. Check what’s included in each of them. Some will offer insurance as an added extra, which can be pretty painful if you haven’t factored it in.

Once the move itself is sorted, you get into a realms of house admin. If you don’t do this soon, you can end up not having the insurance cover you need, failing to pay your TV licence or council tax for the new property, or losing touch with key accounts and pensions – which can have horrible consequences.

There are a few jobs that you should tackle well before you move.

Home insurance – you need to have this in place in advance.

Car insurance – they’ll let you change the address weeks ahead of the move.

TV licence – you can change the address up to three months before the move.

Council tax - tell the council (or councils) in advance, so you don’t end up paying tax at more than one address.

Broadband – speak to your provider and see what your options are. You may have a gap between internet service after a move, but planning it in advance will keep it to a minimum.

On the day itself:

Take gas, electricity and water meter readings in your old property and the new one.

Get in touch with the relevant companies and let them know you have moved.

As soon as possible afterwards, you should change the address held by:

Your GP

Dentist

Your employer

HMRC

DVLA

Schools and colleges

The Electoral register

Banks where you hold current accounts

Your credit card provider

Banks where you hold savings accounts

NS&I

Companies where you hold any pensions

Investment companies

Pet insurer and microchip company

Any saved addresses on shopping apps you regularly use

It’s a good idea to set up mail redirection too with the Royal Mail, just in case you’ve overlooked anyone. If you set it up to run for a year, you’ll scoop up annual statements and can fire off a change of address as soon as you get them. If you do it for a shorter period, you risk missing things. If you know it will take a while to do all these changes of address, start with redirection, so nothing slips though the net.

I still have a fair amount of this on my to-do list. In my case I’m only temporarily moving house while it’s rebuilt in a way that’s less likely to fall down. My ambition is to get all the admin sorted, and recover completely, just in time to do it all over again when I move back home.

How grandparents can help with property

The struggle to build a property deposit is immense now that the average house for a first-time buyer costs £241,502. Given that the HL Savings & Resilience Barometer shows the average rental household has £79 left at the end of the month, building a lump sum is a mountain to climb.

However, if parents and grandparents start early enough, they can get younger family members onto the property ladder by the age of 25, by putting aside £115 a month between them.

The keys are investment, tax efficiency and time. If you invest for 18 years in a Junior ISA, it will eventually roll into an adult ISA. From here, the buyer doesn’t need to pay in anything themselves: they can just transfer their full allowance into a Lifetime ISA each year and take advantage of the government top-up – plus investment growth. The proceeds of a LISA and JISA could hit £65,772 by their 25th birthday, giving them enough for a deposit (assuming the average first-time-buyer property costs £655,380 in 25 years’ time).