Imagup General Magazine 2024
Whether in their twenties, thirties, or more, everyone comes to the moment when they decide to move alone to start a new stage in their lives. However, many questions and fears arise. If you can’t count on a helping hand from family or friends, there are some great moving companies like CityMove.
On the eve of moving for the first time, we decided to collect the advice of friends, acquaintances, and even some strangers and share them with you. They have taught us some fundamental lessons when it comes not only to moving out for the first time but living some quality life outside the parents’ house.
The following are the top 10 lessons we have learned:
Before moving
1. Save some money
It is always a good idea to have some savings, but even before you decide to move. That way, you do not have to spend your last coin on the essentials, such as refrigerator, bed, or food.
A good option is also to buy some things in advance, such as plates, glasses, cutlery, towels, and sheets. Something you have gathered little by little does not represent a considerable expense; on the contrary, it can be beneficial.
2. Choose the appropriate location
If possible, choose an area that is close to the places where you spend more time, such as work or faculty. The time you can save, and fatigue from walking, traveling by bus or car are very precious. Furthermore, you can take advantage of it and have hobbies, enjoy yourself with family, friends or pets.
You should also check the level of security in the house/apartment and the neighborhood, find out with the neighbors if there were some assaults or not. Also, it would be good to know if there are security guards in the surroundings and what are the insecure points of the house to reinforce them (breakable windows, shortcuts from the street, low walls, etc.)
3. Get a guarantor who has an excellent financial history
If you are going to rent a house, it is essential to have an adequate economic account and also the person you choose as a guarantor. Real estate agents or people who rent, take this as an essential fact to approve the rental application.
4. Read the contract thoroughly
If you are going to rent a place, make sure everything works well: water and electricity keys, bathrooms, air conditioning systems, if they are already included, etc. You should check if there is something to be fixed before making a contract and read it with ease. It will clarify all the doubts you have before signing it.
5. Fumigate
A few days before moving, it is good to do proper fumigation. To do this, you can hire a company or take the matter into your own hands and do it with liquid poisons, easily applied for indoor and outdoor. Be sure to put it in all corners and pipes, as well as in the immediate access. Close the place and return between 24 and 48 hours later to air the rooms and do a good general cleaning.
Ok, you already moved, and now what?
6. Change the locks and make some spare keys
For your security, change the locks when moving. You never know if any “friend of others” can have access or if the previous tenant left their keys in a reliable place.
Make more than one copy and give it to trusted people. You don’t want to be left outside your own home, having to call the locksmith to open it.
7. Learn to cook
Cooking is an essential skill when it comes to saving expenses and being able to avoid eating out or delivery, which can be an option, but it is not always the healthiest one. The first step in cooking is to know how to do shopping and store groceries. If you are going to take fruits or vegetables, keep in mind that they last a maximum of 7 days.
If you carry meat, separate it into sachets and freeze the pieces you won’t need. Try to take advantage of super offers in supermarkets. If you want to learn how to cook, there is nothing that search engines cannot teach you. There are also various blogs that you can follow and use as inspiration.
8. Do not leave for tomorrow what you can clean (throw or order) today
Wash the cutlery after each use, avoid accumulating dirty cutlery at all costs.
Write down on a blackboard or a visible place the days the trash passes, classify the garbage into organic, inorganic, and recyclable and throw the organic before it smells terrible, gather worms, or have a complete unicellular ecosystem living inside. If your internal environmentalist is ready to take the next step, you can buy products that generate less garbage (the container inside the container), because garbage container is a design error.
With the cleaning of the whole house, it is good to have an established periodicity type: things that are cleaned every day, once a week, once a month, annual washing of cats.
9. Learn to wash clothes
If you thought that washing clothes only implies sorting it by color, there is an entire universe that you are missing.
Some tips: Before washing, check the pockets of your clothes. Also, check your clothing when you take off or before ironing to see if they are missing buttons or are ripped. Buy a clothesline, and hang clothes well with clothespins; Do not spin your jeans, hang them half wet to save ironing.
Delicate garments, such as yarn shirts, should be dried on a towel. New clothes that you don’t know if they fade or not, you should wash by hand, separately. Do not put wet clothes in the laundry basket because it gets moldy, and that doesn’t come out anymore. Blouses or dresses of silk or chiffon iron only with hot air pointing the hairdryer and last but not least: do not mix colors in the washing machine.
10. Keep track of expenses
Make a list of what you earn and what you spend every month. That includes the basics and indispensables – the rent, light, water, fees, market, and so on. Having a budget where you have what you need will make it easier for you to manage your money.
It is also useful to write down in a visible calendar the dates of payments/maturities of services so that nothing happens.
What nobody tells you
Some extras did not enter the ranking, but we cannot leave them out because they are the best that the crowdsourcing provided us with:
Do not walk naked in front of the windows that face the street. (Quite self-explanatory, unless your mission in life is to be a viral attraction).
Always close the knob of your bottle.
There are many things you can save on, but never on toilet paper.
Do not leave hair in the drains. We wish you good luck for the new beginning in life!
