Preparing To Move Out

Renting my house means additional insurance needs. Mainly switching my homeowners policy to a landlord policy. I also added an umbrella policy for some additional security. The umbrella policy required increased auto insurance liability limits and a homeowners policy on my new address. Unfortunately, I don’t have a new permanent address anymore, so I was forced to take out a renters insurance policy on my parents house just to obtain the umbrella policy.

Since I don’t have a permanent address, I had to figure out a mail forwarding strategy. There are many options I looked at including virtual mailboxes and mail forwarding services. I know through my research a lot of full time RV-ers use these services while they’re roaming the U.S. since they also do not have a permanent address. I could dive into the specifics of these options but since I didn’t choose that route I don’t think I’m going to at this time.

I simply ended up changing my address to my parents house. That way I still maintain Wisconsin residency, plus I already had to take a renters insurance policy out on it, I might as well fully pretend I live there! I went through all my bills, service providers, work payroll, and other mailings I get even on a quarterly or infrequent basis and made sure to change my address information with them. I’ve also made a huge effort in recent years to go paperless as much as possible. Over 95% of all my mail is junk mail – I’ve also made attempts to reduce the amount of junk mail I receive.

While changing my address with the US Postal Service they also gave me the option to have my mail scanned. Essentially they take a picture of the outside of all your envelopes, and send you an email with the scanned images. This is a free service they call Informed Delivery and might come in handy down the line. I’ll have to wait and see how beneficial that service is.

Something I was unaware of is that when I went to change my address with the City of Milwaukee’s Assessor’s Office, Treasurer’s Office and Water Works, they also require property owners who no longer reside in their homes to register with the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS). Of course they bilk you out of more money by needing to collect a fee for this registration process. In reality, they need to know who to contact or fine if your house isn’t up to code, your tenants don’t mow the lawn, or there are other complaints.

This was a separate process from simply changing my mailing address. This required filling out some paperwork and mailing it to the city clerk in the town of my new mailing address.

As part of the rental process I had a lot of house showings which made me keep my house clean. Luckily for me I typically keep my house pretty clean so it wasn’t too much additional effort to give it a once over for house showings.

I purged a lot of old clothes, donated what I could to Goodwill, and generally reduced the amount of stuff in my house. Other than some big furniture items I knew were staying, I sorted everything in the house into 4 piles. Keep and storing in the house, Keep and storing at my parents house, Taking with me, and Throwing away. I kept one small closet in my house for me to store items while I travel. Nothing personal but just stuff I didn’t want to get rid of and could store in the house. I threw a lot of stuff away. Moving is always a good time to purge stuff you no longer care about or use.

I took 1 full car load of stuff to my parents house. I did not want to have to pay for a storage unit for one, but ultimately it wasn’t all that much stuff. I’m sure my parents aren’t thrilled. All these years they have been giving me stuff from my childhood to take home with me to keep at my house. Now I’m basically giving it all back to them!

The last pile was stuff I was taking with me. I really tried to take as little as I could, but it still ended up being a full car load. But in reality that is all the stuff I need in my life, so a car load isn’t too much when I look at it that way.

There are lots of options here. I likely could have downloaded a free template off the internet and used that as the basis for my lease agreement, but instead I opted to pay for a state specific lease thru ezlandlordforms.

They ensure 100% compliance with state specific laws, and also have some additional documents and templates that I could append to the lease which I found handy. Specifically in my case, a furnished rental unit addendum, tenant receipt of keys, check in/out condition report, WI non-standard lease provisions addendum, zero tolerance for criminal activity, lease co-signer agreement, tenant guest policy, smoke-free property addendum, and lead based paint disclosure & certification. Many others I did not utilize.

I was able to customize their templates to build a lease specific to my circumstances, compile it together and email it to my tenants for review. I opted to pay for this option just to ensure I was compliant with state laws and also be able to build a lease all in one place using customizable templates, which saved me a lot of time.

This included transferring all utilities including gas, electric, water and sewer into my tenants name. Also, handed over copies of all house keys, garage keys, and garage door opener.

Take photos and video of all rooms of the house and garage. As I am preparing to move out, just another security measure to document the existing condition of the house as I left it.