What to do before you start anew

To the Class of 2013, first of all, congratulations! Revel in your success for as long as you can because life is about to get a little hectic, if it hasn’t already.

As a 2012 graduate, I moved from Ohio to Texas in June to live with my dad and stepmom until I could find work. In October, I finally broke through and got a sports writer job at a small newspaper in Hugo, Oklahoma. Six months later, I got another job at a larger paper in Paris, Texas. So, for the second time in six months, I have to do everything that moving to another state entails.

I don’t intend to seem like a know-it-all with this list of helpful hints. I just hope to provide some tips that I wish I had when I went through the relocating process.

Make a budget.

•     If you’ve accepted a job, you should know how much money you’re going to be making per year. Look up a chart that breaks down about how much in taxes you’ll be paying in that state, estimate costs for electricity, cable/Internet, car payment, student loans (I feel your pain), renter’s insurance, car insurance, cell phone payment, food and miscellaneous items. Whatever balance you have left over should give you a good idea of your price range for an apartment.
• Just so you have some numbers to draw from, my basic cable and Internet bundled package from Suddenlink is about $93 a month. I haven’t had an electric bill over $30 a month yet. If you don’t know how much your student loan payments will be, I am on the standard plan and its a little over $285 a month.

Find a place to live!

•     No matter how far your next job is from your current location, try and see the place first. Don’t be afraid to ask your co-workers or work contact where good locations are. They’ll be looking out for your best interests and they know the area already.

When you find some places, here are some things to do/look for:

• Drive around the neighborhood. See your proximity to essential places like grocery stores and laundromats (if necessary). I know “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but look at the kinds of cars in the parking lot of where you’re living. It can reflect a lot about the tenants. In the same vein, ask about whether you’re living in/near government assisted housing.
• Don’t let the landlord/owner rush you through place. If they do, there’s probably something they don’t want you to find out about. Take your time.
• Check the locks. Even if you’re living in a decent neighborhood, with the world today (gosh, I sound old) you probably want a deadbolt lock. This should be pretty standard in most properties. There should be locks on the windows too.
• Bring a flashlight. Use it to inspect in hard to see places like the backs of cabinets, behind refrigerators, behind water heating units, inside ovens. Moist, warm places are heaven to all kinds of creatures that you don’t want to be co-habitating with.
• Check the water fixtures. Turn on the faucets and the shower. You don’t want to take that post-moving day shower under a trickle of water. Also, the water may not be a very pretty color in that area. You want to know that too.
• Inspect the fridge and freezer. This is where you’ll be putting your food. It should be clean.
• Seriously consider your space. It’s hard when you don’t have your own furniture (I’ll cover shopping for that later), but think about how much stuff you have. If all you have at the moment is clothes, take a look at the closet space. For many one-bedroom places, the closet is probably going to be your only storage space. You’ll want to be able to fit clothes and anything else, like your folded up moving boxes.
• Listen. Is the road nearby too loud? Are the neighbors loud? Get a feel for what it will be like when you’re relaxing by yourself.
• Take pictures. You may be looking at many properties that day. Sometimes its hard to keep them straight. Plus, your friends and family will want to see what you’re considering too.

 Ask questions like:

What’s the square footage?

How much is the rent?
What’s covered in the rent?
How long is the lease?
Is there a deposit required?
Where should I go for cable/Internet and electricity providers? (also ask about water and gas if necessary)
Is there parking? Assigned spots? Guest parking?
Are there laundry services on site? (if not in your apartment)
What do I do with trash?
Is there a garbage disposal?
Is the stove gas or electric?
Who lived here before?
• The person who lived in my first place before I did lived there for eight years and never cleaned. So I had to deal with the roaches he left behind. You want to know what you might be getting into.
Have the appliances been replaced recently?
• If you know you’ve got a 15-year old refrigerator, be prepared for possible malfunctions.
Is there a maintenance crew?
• Ask what you would do if your sink pipe started gushing water. What is their plan?
Is there a garbage disposal?

All of this effort may seem silly and may be a pain when you’re tired from looking at places all day, but when you’re trying to decide, having all of these details will be a great help.

If there’s a property that really fits all of your parameters, see what you can do to reserve it for a while as you decide. If you find somewhere that you really see yourself living in, then don’t be afraid to take it, especially if you’re running out of time or if there’s limited properties available.

Hooray! Now you found your living space! If you’re like most college grads, it’s probably unfurnished, which means…

Furniture shopping!

Take that graduation money that you hoped to use to buy a new gadget and realize that now you have to spend it on what you need, not what you want. Yay, adulthood!

• If you’re like me and have to move to a small town where there’s not many furniture shopping options available, consider buying your stuff in the nearest city. I did my shopping in the strip mall heaven of Frisco, Texas, where there’s a massive new Ikea to boot, and then loaded that in a truck to bring to Hugo (where there’s WalMart and nothing else).
• Buying furniture is also a good opportunity to build up good credit on your credit card. Charge your items, then pay off your $1,000-$1,500 bill a little at a time. A good credit card rating is worth so much these days when people do not have time for those who don’t pay their bills. Good credit leads to discounts!

**Another thing, if you need to provide a credit score for your landlord or just want to have it for you, go to myfico.com. You get a free trial, but they’ll ask you to put in your credit card info because after 10 days, they’ll charge you for a three-month membership at $14.95 a month. In the confirmation e-mail they send you, there’s a phone number to call to cancel. Just make sure you do it! Canceling takes five minutes, they just make their money when people forget.

• A benefit of shopping in a relatively affluent area is that you can find good bargains on things at the local consignment shop/Goodwill. I bought an awesome three-person couch for $199 at a secondhand store in Frisco. I bought it and they put it on reserve to be picked up the day I moved, when I had the moving van. I bought a nightstand on wheels as a TV stand for $18 in another consignment store.
• My bedroom night stand, which I specifically wanted to have drawers all of the way down, I (finally!) found at a Goodwill in McKinney for $25.
• I bought my kitchen table and chairs at Ikea. They’re just plain unvarnished wood and the set was less than $200, if I remember correctly.
• If there’s one thing you can’t skimp on though, it’s a bed. Our bed is our best friend, a place where humans spend 1/3 of their lives. I knew I was going over my budget, but you can bet I don’t regret for a second spending around $375 for a 10-inch memory foam mattress at Sam’s Club. It cost another $100 or so for the boxspring and another $35 for the bed frame.
• What that experience also taught me was don’t be afraid to look in unusual places. Who knew Sam’s Club would be a great mattress shopping option?
• DO NOT BUY A USED MATTRESS! I don’t care how clean it looks or how cheap it is. With all of the bedbug craziness going around…just don’t. Don’t even think about it.
• For some reason, it was tough for me to find side tables and lamps that I liked.

**Important tip: measure the side of your couch before going side table shopping or vice versa. You don’t want a table that you can’t reach from your couch.

• I also got lucky with getting some hand-me-down furniture. I got a coffee table from my stepmom’s mom and some nice pictures for my walls that people didn’t want anymore. Ask around, especially if you know someone else who is relocating and looking to unload furniture.

Now that you’ve got furniture and a place to live, you may be storing it somewhere until your moving date. While you’re waiting, make sure you’ve figured out these details (especially if you’re moving to a new state):

• Turning on your electric: call the electric company and set up an account and date of activation. They don’t actually need to interact with you, so feel free to pick a date before you actually get there.
• Turning on cable/Internet: For our generation, the Internet is crucial. Depending on what day you move, it may be a bit until you can get it hooked up because the cable companies typically aren’t open on the weekends. Arrange a time around your work schedule and maybe bite the bullet and read a book if you’re not in 4G land anymore til you get set up.

**Note: be prepared to buy a router. In Hugo (pop. 5,000), the modem worked, but the wifi wasn’t being recognized by my Macbook. Unfortunately, all the Suddenlink people could do was suggest I buy a router. It worked, but not without the stress of me worrying I’d be connected to an Ethernet cable indefinitely (first world problems).

• Buy renter’s insurance: This protects you against theft and other disasters like fire, flood, etc. You may be able to get this through your/your parent’s car insurance company, so check that out first. That wasn’t an option for me, so at work, I asked for a recent phone book and looked through possibilities. I called Geico and they had a ridiculous rate (<$190) through Traveler’s Insurance.

My stuff isn’t worth all that much (see previous paragraphs), so I got the $20,000 coverage because it cost the same as the $15,000 coverage. A low deductible is good for someone like me (small bank account) because a deductible is what you will pay out of pocket before the insurance starts paying. With Geico, I have a $500 deductible. I wouldn’t go higher than a $1,000.
Also, ask around. In Hugo, there weren’t national options, but my co-worker’s husband was an insurance agent, so I got lucky in that sense.

• Buy car insurance: If you’re moving to a different state, even if you have a national company, you will probably have to update your policy. I have Esurance and when I went to update my address from Oklahoma to Texas, it turned out I had to cancel my OK policy and buy a TX policy. Took a half hour on the phone, but at least I know it’s updated for when I get my new plates & driver’s license (see below).

• Update license plates: This is a time-sensitive matter. In Texas, you have 30 days to register. When you go to get your registration sticker and plates, you will likely need: insurance card and proof of vehicle ownership, such as the registration or title from a previous state.

**I’ve only done this once and in a small town, but you may want to have cash because the tag office didn’t take plastic and this stuff is pricey. In Texas, the base registration fee is $52.75, but they add other fees on top of that. If I remember correctly, my total for everything in Oklahoma was about $130, but I also had to pay to get the title in my name. Luckily there was an ATM in the Tag Office (somehow they thought of everything).

• Update driver’s license: Another time-sensitive matter. In Texas, it’s 90 days. Again, this varies from state-to-state, but to be safe, you should bring your old license, original Social Security card, original birth certificate and proof of residency (a bill sent to your address).

**At least in Texas and Oklahoma, you need proof of car insurance in that state in order to register your car. I didn’t know that when I moved to OK, so I went back and forth to the Tag Office about a zillion times slowly checking off every requirement as I went. Insurance first, license second.
**Have cash on you (again) when you get your license because there are fees. It will probably be somewhere around $25. Get used to that feeling of your wallet being emptied quickly.

• Change address on anything else: Go to the US Postal Service website and make sure to have your mail forwarded permanently. It costs $1. Also, call up your bank and have the billing address changed on any debit/credit cards. I would make sure all previous debits clear before you do so because you don’t want any checks or payments to be invalid. Update magazine subscriptions, medical bills, student loan bills, former renter’s/car insurance policies. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

Hey, guess what? You just grew up a little bit. Now you have useful knowledge you can pass on to those younger than you! Wisdom rocks. You should be proud of yourself 🙂 I know I am proud of myself because this stuff is tiring! Now take a seat on your new-used couch, treat yourself with some fast food and enjoy your first nights at your new pad! You can worry about grocery shopping tomorrow.

Oh, and if you have any further questions, call home (not my home, your home.) Have a safe trip!