OTHER MOVING TIPS
I have some more tips to share as well that might help with before/during/after the moving. Up to you if you’d like to heed it.
1. If you know how to pay stamp duty yourself, great, do it. But if you don’t know how or don’t know where to start, ask the agent for help. They’d almost always be happy to help as you’re a client anyway.
If you have decided on a unit and is intent on committing, one thing to note for this is to cross-check with the agent first on how much stamp duty you should pay and when you can pay for it. Once you got your number, you can pay for it yourself on the IRAS website, if you know what you’re doing. But if not, you can discuss with the agent if they could file and pay the stamp duty on your behalf first then pay him/her back for the fee amount (sometimes with a small gratuity on top). Whichever is easier for you.
2. For triage with your items, the easiest place to start is clothes. You’d be surprised how many clothes you will accumulate if you stayed at least two years in a room/unit. I suggest you put them in three piles:
- Essentials and brand-new items – these are the clothes you would NEED, in all caps. For example, if you are an executive employee, a formal bespoke suit that still fits you comfortably is an essential. If you play basketball weekly, all your good-condition basketball jerseys and shorts are essentials. These need strong assessments but TBH the ones you will easily see from the pack. As we’re in Singapore, a rain coat/jacket can be considered essential. And if it’s newly-bought within 6 months, keep it.
- Favorites – these are the clothes you like a whole lot. These need lots of assessments. I can at least predict this will be the largest of your initial piles.
- Worn-outs and “not favorite” items – these are items you assessed as either worn-out – e.g. frayed necklines, cracked designs, faded ink, loose sides – or items you deem out of style and you can comfortably live without.
Now that you got the piles done, set aside the worn-out/unfavored items in a disposable bag, and set aside the essentials in a box/container. Now, you have to contend with the “Favorites” pile. I suggest you divide it further into two piles – your “I really really want these” pile and your “I hate to see you go but I need to reduce” pile. This is the part where you’ll feel really sad, or nostalgic, or shame, or all three. Try to mute that little voice in your head that tries to convince you that 2019 convention event shirt is still wearable, or that your Balenciaga pants with a worn-out hole in the groin area still has hope. Weigh necessity over fancy and see how much clothes will easily go to your second pile.
One saver tip if you are an OFW like me – just send the reduce pile back home to build your “home vacation” wardrobe. Build that pile there so that when you go home for vacations, you don’t need to pack that much clothes in your luggage. Last time I went home in December, I didn’t even put in clothes in my luggage. This December, I will be able to reduce my luggage to a smaller one.
3. If you’re thinking of moving that big-ass heavy IKEA cabinet or shelf you bought, my suggestion is don’t bother and leave it. IKEA cabinets can be disassembled and reassembled, but they are not designed for repeated disassembly, which can degrade their quality and stability. It’s crucial to be careful, especially with particle boards, as it can get damaged, leading to less secure reassembly. Yeah, capitalism 101 here. And moving it is a pain because of the dust from the particle boards. Bump it, there’s dust falling off. And if the movers damage it, shit, you now have paperweights. Best just leave it for a grateful agent/landlord. If it’s in a very good condition, heck they might be happy for an extra furnishing.
But if the furniture is made of metal that you can reassemble and disassemble, go ahead and move them if you want.
4. Wall hooks are nice but I suggest those 3M ones you can easily remove. I’ve been to a couple of viewings where the walls still had those adhesive hooks, and the agent/tenant/landlord were wary of removing them as it might damage the painted walls further. So for me, I opted to buy those pricey 3M-branded wall hooks where the adhesive had a tab that you can pull downwards to remove the thing with minimal or no damage to the painted wall.
5. When disposing of items when cleaning the unit/room for moving, be ruthless but considerate. For example, if you have an IKEA “Linnmon” table that won’t fit in your new digs, don’t think much of it anymore and dispose of it – but I suggest to disassemble it, keep the screws in a small plastic pouch, wrap the legs in a bundle, shrink-wrap the main board and dispose of it downstairs. The purpose of it is it makes it easier for other residents checking out the pile to assess if they want the furniture or not.
Another example is the pile of clothes you deem as good for disposal. Sure, dispose of it, but either dispose it in one of those government-made disposal bins for textiles and clothes, or dispose of it downstairs but at least cleanly separate the damaged from the good-enough and put them in a clean waterproof bag, just put it beside the green bins and not inside them. The point of this is at least someone might put the clothes to better use.
6. When checking out the viewings with the listings that specified “no weird rules”, tune your bullshit detector even tighter. I emphasize this one with all due respect. This is, again, very very very subjective. This is the agent/tenant/landlord putting on their best smiles forward to assure prospective tenants that there are “no weird rules”.
But in my experience, while some of them might be genuine (which is a godsend), a lot of them are either obscuring the weird rules, or they got used to their weird or heavy-handed rules being unchallenged for so long that they deluded themselves that their rules aren’t weird and just assume everybody will comply without question.
For example, I viewed one genuinely spacious HDB unit in the middle of Ang Mo Kio a few months ago, one of my first views that I booked. The main tenant was a genial early-40’s Malay lady who was with her husband, and one of her sisters was also a tenant. I inspected the room up for rent, and the departing tenant was still there, but clearly already ready to leave with the boxes and packed items. The other parts of the unit was wide and nice as well, so I started chatting with her about what tenants might expect. I subtly discovered that these people were going to throw their weight around. Lots of arbitrary rules I found… like preferred scent for cleaning liquids, preference for hotel-style soft slippers instead of rubber slippers as the whole unit’s flooring are wood tiles, regular recomputation of electricity % for tenants (she kept bragging about her family having low electricity consumption), strict schedules for using the kitchen stove and the laundry/dryer, no visitors from 9pm to 9am, and quite a lot of self-cleaning rules – every tenant was expected to adhere to a rotational schedule of cleaning the entire unit’s common areas. Fuck that, I said in my mind. I was genial and smiling, but as soon as I said my pleasantries and goodbyes, I’m resolved not to take a second look at this listing.
7. If you have signed a contract and got allowed to move in, do not move in on the first day without doing a thorough measuring of the room. For me, when I got the clear to move in to my current rental room, I came in with just a big-ass luggage full of clothes, and a builder’s Stanley tape measure. I measured the bed, the cabinets, the shelves, the table, the free spaces and even the toilet/bath area. This is for knowing which furniture/items can fit in. Armed with this information, I was free to discard the IKEA “Jostein” shelf and the “Linnmon” table, and my other flatmate asked for the “Knarrevik” bedside table. I also learned that my cabinet’s stackable drawers were too wide for the new unit’s cabinets, so I went back to Shopee and bought four of the same model but one size smaller.
One more smaller tip is, if you see a lot of IKEA items in the room (e.g., tables, cabinets, fake flower pots, blinds), you would be wise to note what are their names in IKEA parlance (e.g. a “Micke” desk), their size, and their color. If shit breaks or chips away, at least you have a reference to what needs replacing and where to get them at IKEA.
8. For moving, vacuum storage bags are your best friend, way more than the boxes. Buy some of those from Shopee or Lazada, with a vacuum pump. Those will make your moving process WAY better. You can vacuum your head pillows and bolsters, your clothes, curtains, towels, bedsheets, duvets… lots of things, into one compact block you can put in either a big wheeled travel luggage one of those XL-size IKEA shopping bags.
9. If you get the unique opportunity to chat the departing tenant, don’t waste it. Departing tenants usually have the juicier data that the agent/tenant/landlord might withhold in fear of being a turn-off. For example, I got to briefly chat with the departing tenant of an HDB unit I viewed at Novena. He gave me the tip on two quarreling neighbors in the same floor that get noisy at night sometimes, the HDB elevators often are “on repair”, the room’s aircon sometimes make a ticking noise, neighbor directly downstairs tend to cook a lot and the smell wafts off their kitchen window making the pole area for clothes unusable, and that the place had a lot of cranky old people thay you have to shake off by saying “ok uncle/auntie” a lot. Nice, I said. After I left the unit, I struck it off my list and moved on.
10. If you’re disposing electronic appliances, strong recommendation is to dispose of it in the proper government-provided e-waste bins for them. This is just a soft recommendation but if you’re in a hurry, well go ahead and dispose it downstairs, but don’t bother to take a second look, you might leave with one last dismay.
I made this mistake when I moved out a few weeks ago. I already disposed some electric appliances in the e-waste bin a couple of HDB blocks away, but when I lifted my bed to double-check the storage space under it, I saw that I forgot to dispose my cheap Simplus dehumidifier. I was short on time (and maybe the desire to walk 10 minutes), so I just went down the HDB lift and put the appliance near the big green bin. I was hoping that someone might pick it up.
Then 2 hours later when me and my flatmate descended the lift for the last time, I took a peek at the area where I disposed the things we removed from the unit earlier. Clearly someone or some of the old people have gone through the piles, as some items have been taken. Note this in HDBs, a lot of the older people tend to take regular peeks at the void decks’ disposal area, and take whatever they fancy. But I saw that the dehumidifier have been moved but not taken. My flatmate thought to go over and take a look and maybe decide if he finally wanted it (I offered it to him earlier), but once he inspected it, he frowned and went back to me. He said that the plug has been savagely ripped out by someone. Shame that the plug was more valuable to that scavenger, but oh well, my bad.
11. When re-inspecting a room you already signed off to rent, envision how you plan to move around and where the furniture should be. Not all agents/tenants/landlords have a good sense of what an room’s optimal ergonomic layout is, can’t blame them. So when you get the all-clear, plan that too. Plan where that cabinet should be. Plan where your bed should be aligned to. Plan how efficient you can either go to bed or go to your desk when you enter the room. Plan where your wall hangings should be. Plan a solid walking area. If you do yoga or fitness games, plan an ample area fit for a yoga mat. If there’s a TV in the room, plan how that’s angled for your viewing pleasure.
12. Keep your rent-related documents/PDFs handy at all times. Make it easy for yourself to reference things pertaining to the unit. For me, I keep my current unit’s printed items – contract, stamp duty – in a folder, that I placed in the lowermost drawer of the wardrobe cabinet. My previous unit’s main tenant also kept every single document relating to the unit in a folder, which he put in a shelf drawer in his room.
13. If the unit has a hired cleaning company/freelancer that does weekly cleaning of the common area, try to squeeze in yours. If I were you, if you see that the cleaning service is either clandestine (a direct service hire) or freelanced, and the cleaner is being paid in cash, I suggest you befriend the cleaner and ask if they would do a quick mopping/vacuum/sweeping of your room for a top-up fee, maybe 10-20 minutes tops. Most often, SGD 10 will do, maybe sometimes SGD 15. Not only you’d potentially gain a friendly acquaintance, you could get unsolicited hushed tips about the other tenants, if you get my drift.
14. For those listings with a “utility cost included” selling point, always check if there’s a monthly “cap” – because often there is. Again, if this stip is there, the utility cost is baked into your monthly rent already and you won’t have to pay it separately – unless there’s a “cap”.
Some contracts from some agents/tenants/landlords stipulate a “cap” for included-cost utilities, to prevent tenants from going full tilt boogie on the electricity consumption. I mean, if that’s fully unrestrained, what’s preventing you from running server racks in your room to 24/7 mine crypto or something? I get that there’s a cap, it’s just to cover for uncouth tenants. But this stipulation is usually either upfront on the listing, or sometimes the agent/landlord says this verbally upon viewing.
For example, for a HDB flat of three tenants with a “utility cost included” thing, the agent can stipulate that the utility “cap” for a month is SGD 300 – that means, if the tenants’ overall utility fee costs on or under SGD 300 in a month, they don’t have to pay anything in utilities for that month. If they exceed that amount, say by SGD 30, the tenants have to pay SGD 10 each extra for that month on top of their rental dues.
15. Conversely, for “utility cost excluded” listings, always inquire/ask about the current “arrangement”, as this might be a bad factor. Again, if that stip is there, that means you pay for your utility use separately. And this is a thing you have to be rightfully wary about.
Usually, most multi-tenant arrangements call for an even split. For example, in a 3-bedroom HDB unit, the tenants agree to a 1/3 split on the total monthly fees. Or in a 2-bedroom 1-utility HDB unit, the tenants do a 40-40-20 split, with the 20 for the person renting the utility room. Some arrange for some tenants to get more % of the electricity bill if they are regular WFH people, some get more % of the gas bills if they cook a lot. But it’s a mutual arrangement. If you get harassed later on by some tightwad flatmate looking for someone to blame, you might be wise to look for a new rental by the end of the contract.
If you’re solo in a studio or a co-living arrangement, usually the agent/landlord either sends you a message on how much of those fees you’ll pay, or they give you free rein on the letterbox and it’s up to you to settle those bills.
And in a few rare cases, some agents/tenants/landlords exclude WiFi from the utility costs, for example “Utilities included in rent (WiFi + $20 monthly)”. I asked someone about it, and apparently it’s mostly from rentals that subscribed to some high tier of internet broadband plans, and adding it to the monthly rent’s baked-in utility allowance made it cost higher and unattractive (e.g. the rent became 1320 from 1300, not clean look), so they made it optional.
16. If you get to sign early on a contract and paid all the dues and duties, go change your address on your subscribed services the very first day you are able to. This covers everything from banking to your Shopee/Lazada accounts. This saves you the awkward possibility of knocking on your old unit’s door and sheepishly asking the new tenants to help you get your important letters/packages from the letterbox.
I’ve encountered many tenants who never changed their services’ addresses. In my previous unit’s letterbox, I always found several newsletters and items addressed to former tenants. In my first month of renting the previous unit, on a Friday night, one former tenant meekly knocked on the door and asked if any Lazada packages were placed on the doorstep, of which I told him none so far. He gave me his mobile number and asked me to notify him if anything got dropped off, which those did by the next day. One of my previous co-tenants (the Myanmar lady) asked me one time if I could go to the previous unit we shared and ask the current tenants for the letterbox to be opened to get her employer’s secure keycoded mail. I tried, but I found the unit’s door gate to be securely padlocked, and I deduced the renters went out for vacation. Worst case, lol.
Also, this shouldn’t be even an advice, it’s a hard rule – it’s a must you immediately change your address with your employer and your Singpass account.
17. If you’re doing the moving solo, consider all the help you can get before doing it truly solo. And if you’re doing it truly solo, doing the bulk of it in 3-4 days as piecemeal might be the best way.
For me, I moved truly solo. I was the last guy left in our unit, the other guy moved near NUS and the main tenant (also my co-worker) moved last August. I was going to ask my co-worker to help me make my move easier, but he lives a fair distance away, he’s busy with his own thing helping his wife with things, and I knew he had lots to do on weekends, like long gym class sessions. So I was OK with doing it solo. But I had to plan it.
In the end, I came up with a rough plan. When the agent messaged me that she’ll let me move some stuff starting October 31st, I adjusted my plans. So when I came to the unit, I came with a packed luggage and a tape measure. The green luggage was full of clothes that I put in vacuum bags and pumped the air out, plus some light novel books to fill the nooks and crannies. A deceptively heavy luggage. So what I did was file November 3 as a leave day, and resolved myself to move 90% in 3 days. In each of those days, I started at 6am and ended at 11pm. I put many things in manageable-size medium packing boxes (30cm x 35cm ones) and kept reusing my big green luggage and the vacuum bags to put in the clothes. The routine was to use a Grab six-seater to go to Geylang, deposit the items, put the empty box and the vacuum bags in the luggage, and take the bus and train back to Holland Village, then do it again and again.
Grab’s off-peak hours were before 2am-7am, 9am to 7pm, and 9pm-12am . So I made my hay at those times. I woke up, dressed decently, carried the box and luggage down the lift into the carpark, book a Grab six-seater car, drop off items in room, go back to the road. I did my planned moving loop at least 3 times each day during off-peak hours. Grueling, but in the end I was able to move 90% (and lots of triaging too). The remaining 10% I kept in that unit, and I symbolically took them with me when I finished cleaning out the whole place with the main tenant – one last haul out. All in all, I think I spent close to SGD 275 in transportation.
So… for moving solo, I highly, highly suggest enlisting a friend and renting a small moving trolley to assist with at least the moving part from your room to the carpark where the Grab/Lalamove vehicle will be parked on. For the moving boxes, ensure the box’s size can fit at the back of a six-seater SUV or a generic hauling van, and ensure it is a weight you can carry without breaking your back. And yeah, best case to use is a six-seater SUV when booking in Grab – do not book smaller vehicles unless you want a grumpy driver. Book during off-peak hours too, save your monies. For volume, I suggest doing it yourself if you have items that could fit two extra-large moving boxes and a big travel luggage and maybe some minor things like an ironing board or a massage backrest – then divide them into maybe medium-size boxes. Move with Grab for going to the unit, use local transport for going back.
18. Always befriend either the main tenant or the agent. Landlords and other co-tenants, I suggest taking a more tailored approach.
For main tenants and/or agents, always do keep a friendly stance to them. They are the most important partners for you in this rental experience. Always make the effort to accommodate them, not give them problems, and at the minimum, be collegial and cordial. And most often, you’d find that friendliness repaid in small ways.
You can befriend the other tenants, the landlord or the landlord’s family too. But if that’s difficult or you find the person/s not to your personal liking or preference, at least be a pleasant tenant.
Note that I separated them as their tiers tend to be more aligned. If you’re co-renting with other tenants, the main tenant is the important one. If you’re in a co-living or co-opted space with small studios, the agent is the important one. If you’re living in a landlord live-in situation with other tenants, the co-tenants and the landlord tend to be on the same level, although the landlord gets first dibs on your attention.
Briathrail // Albert 2MNG 
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