Everyone knows that moving is stressful. But when you’ve got a company helping pay for it, there’s at least some opportunity to make it suck just a little bit less. Having just been through this myself, here are my top five tips for making the most of a corporate relocation.
1. Get It In Writing
First off, and perhaps most obviously, is that before you even consider accepting a position in a new city, the company needs to share with you what their corporate relocation package includes. If they tell you that there is “relocation assistance” but won’t give you the details until after you’ve accepted the offer? Push back.
Get it in writing, so you can see what you’re actually dealing with. Then, if the company’s policy doesn’t include certain things (for example, closing costs on selling your house, or temporary housing) ask them to make up the difference with a starting bonus.
2. Get Your Spouse Job Hunting Immediately
Honestly, this was the absolute best thing we did for our move. My husband didn’t wait until I’d landed the job and accepted the offer, or even until the “spousal career assistance” benefit of my relocation package kicked in to begin his own job search — he dove right in while I was still in later-round interviews. This meant that he had a job offer on the table just a few weeks after I did.
And lo and behold, since he was able to get an offer before we had moved, his company ALSO offered him a corporate relocation package!
While you can’t double up on most relocation benefits (for both tax reasons, and also because certain tasks only need to be done once) this did allow us to plug some of the gaps in my relocation package; for instance, my package didn’t cover the costs associated with selling our house and buying a new one, but his package did. Similarly, my package only provided for 30-days of temporary housing; we ended up needing 40 days before we could take possession of our new house, and his package covered those additional 10 days for us.
In the end, having two relocation packages to draw from was a HUGE help to us and was only possible because my (highly-employable) spouse started his job search early.
3. Be Uber-Organized & Work as a Team
There are so many details and process type things you have to coordinate for a move, especially if you’re buying/selling property as part of it. Lists are going to become your best friend during this process.
Some people recommend making a “move binder” and putting every thing in there – notes, contact information, appointments, vendor recommendations etc. For us, we did more of a digital version of this using Google Docs, a shared Google calendar, and a LOT of regular communication.
As I was able to quit my existing job earlier, I became our “move-out coordinator.” Each day when the hubby got home from his job, I handed him his honey-do list for the day: things like organizing his closet, taking things to Goodwill, throwing away things in the garage, in order to get us ready to sell our house and have the movers come.
Once we left our departure house, because the hubby started his new job later, he became the “move-in coordinator”. He helped keep the pets comfortable in the temporary housing, verified appointments with vendors who were doing work on our new house, and helped supervise deliveries. It was a real team effort.
4. Stay on Top of Your Vendors
Part of being organized during this process is staying on top of your vendors, ESPECIALLY if you didn’t get to choose them because they were provided through your relocation package. You know that saying, “when you assume you make ‘an ass out of u and me'”? That is double, triple, quadruple true for moving.
We had a lot of things that needed to happen on very specific dates. That meant “being proactive” (read: micro-managing) a lot of our vendors. What does that look like?
- I didn’t wait for my real estate agent to tell me what houses we should go see: I gave her a list of 18 that fit our criteria and had her make appointments at all of them during the one weekend we had to house hunt.
- I didn’t take for granted that our loan processing was going along smoothly, I talked to our loan processor nearly every single day and helped him hunt down all the documents he needed until we got our “clear to close”.
- I didn’t wait until the 30-day notice requirement to tell our temporary housing provider of our intent to extend by 10 days, I told them as soon as I knew, and followed up daily until I had it in writing that the extension was confirmed.
These are just a few examples, but you get the point. This is not the time to be blissfully unaware of the status of things.
5. Be Prepared for the Ick
However, even with best laid plans, there’s a reason moving ranks as one of the most stressful life events you can go through. With so many variables, something is bound to go wrong.
For us, it was our dog: two weeks into moving into our temporary housing, our elderly dog got super sick with “vestibular disease” aka “old dog syndrome”. He couldn’t walk, he certainly couldn’t go up and down the stairs to our temporary apartment, and he was so nauseated he wouldn’t even eat.
In the end, we chose to board our dog at the vet for a week, in order to make sure he had the care he needed — care we couldn’t provide in the hectic environment of being in between temporary housing and a just-moved-into new house.
Even once we’d moved in to our new place, we ended up needing twice-a-day dog walking services until we were convinced that our dog had recovered from his illness and could be trusted to use his newly-installed doggie door. And of course, none of these pet-related costs were covered by either of our relocation packages.
All that being said, though, we were lucky. We’ve had friends whose movers broke half their possessions, friends who showed up to find that their temporary housing was not a good situation, etc. It’s not always clear what form the “ick” will take, but just plan that something during your move is going to go really, really wrong, and when it does, it’s going to really suck.
So that’s it. I won’t go so far as to say that moving can be “fun,” but in our case, these five things did make the process go fairly smoothly. If you’re also facing a corporate relocation, or have been through one in the past, don’t hesitate to share your tips below in the comments!
