Moving Budget: The Week You Need All the Cash

The €2,850 already sitting with the old landlord does not appear in that column, because it is not going to arrive in time. So you are asked for €6,700 in a fortnight while €2,850 of your own money is held somewhere you cannot reach.

There is a lever here that most tenants never pull. Section 551 does not just cap the deposit, it gives the tenant the right to pay it in three equal monthly instalments, the first due at the start of the tenancy. Used, that turns the €3,300 into €1,100 in the crunch fortnight and drops the peak from €6,700 to €4,500. The right is statutory and cannot be signed away, but it is only useful to someone who knew to ask before signing.

Treating the returning deposit as part of the budget for the next place is the most common way a move goes wrong, and the timing is worse than most people expect.

In England, the deposit must be returned within 10 days of both sides agreeing the amount, per the government’s deposit protection guidance. The load-bearing words are “agreeing the amount”. Where the parties disagree, adjudication data published in July 2025 put the average resolution at 15 days in custodial schemes but 55 days in insurance-backed ones. The Tenancy Deposit Scheme protected 4.7 million deposits in the year to March 2025, averaging £1,175 each, and cleaning accounted for 54 percent of the disputes that reached adjudication. A dispute about whether an oven was properly degreased can sit between you and four figures for two months.

Germany is slower still, and for a reason worth knowing. Section 551 sets no deadline at all for returning the deposit. Courts have filled the silence with an inspection period generally running three to six months, and a landlord may hold back a proportionate slice pending the annual reconciliation of heating and service charges, which itself is not due until twelve months after the accounting period ends. A tenant can therefore be legitimately owed part of a deposit into the following year, long after the new flat has been furnished.

Elsewhere the clocks are kinder and it pays to know which one you are under. The Netherlands caps the deposit at two months and requires return within 14 days. South Africa’s Rental Housing Act requires the deposit be held in an interest-bearing account and refunded within 7 days where nothing is deducted, or 14 where something is. Ireland’s Residential Tenancies Board caps deposit and advance rent at one month each, two months combined.

This is the part of a moving budget that does not travel. The same transaction costs a month’s rent in one city and nothing in another, so a figure a friend gave you in a different jurisdiction is not information.

In England, letting agents cannot charge tenants for referencing, credit checks, inventories, renewals, or check-out, and the deposit itself is capped at five weeks’ rent where annual rent is under £50,000, six weeks above it, under the Tenant Fees Act 2019. Germany runs the same principle through a different door: under section 2 of the WoVermRG, an agent instructed by the landlord may not demand a commission from the person looking for the flat, and any agreement to the contrary is void.

Two of the most expensive rental markets in the world have only just joined them. New York City’s FARE Act took effect on 11 June 2025, barring brokers who represent the landlord from billing the tenant, in a market where broker fees had run from one month’s rent up to 15 percent of the annual lease. Massachusetts banned forced renter-paid broker fees from 1 August 2025.

Lagos regulates the other end of the problem, the size of the advance rather than the fee. The Lagos State Tenancy Law 2011 caps what a landlord may demand from a new tenant at one year’s rent, with a penalty of ₦100,000 or three months’ imprisonment. Two things about it surprise people: the law also makes it an offence for the tenant to pay more than the cap, and section 1(3) exempts Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Ikeja GRA, and Apapa, which is to say the markets where the demand is largest.

The week of two rents feels like bad luck. Usually it is a notice period doing exactly what it was written to do.

Germany again sets the hardest constraint: section 573c fixes tenant notice at three months regardless of how long you have lived there, and the notice must land by the third working day of a month to count that month. Miss that by a day and the tenancy runs an extra month. Anyone who finds a flat with six weeks’ lead time is not choosing whether to pay double rent, only how much.

France inverts it in a way that is genuinely useful: notice is three months for an unfurnished let but drops to one month in a zone tendue, the designated high-pressure markets, and for furnished lets. The overlap risk is lowest precisely where the search is hardest. In England, tenant notice under the Renters’ Rights Act is two months, which is a month longer than many renters still assume.

Two smaller costs belong in the same fortnight and rarely make it into anyone’s list. The first is the gap in the other direction: a start date that lands a week after the old tenancy ends, which is a week of storage plus a week of somewhere to sleep. The second is the furniture. A wardrobe that fitted an alcove in the old flat and fits nothing in the new one is a disposal cost and a replacement cost arriving together, in the same week as everything else, and it is discovered by carrying it up a staircase rather than by planning.

Then there is getting the new place switched on. Setup or reconnection charges for power, water, and internet vary too much by country and supplier to put a number on here, and some suppliers ask new customers without a local payment history for a deposit of their own. It is worth ringing your providers for actual figures before the move rather than after, because these are small individually and land as a cluster.

A moving budget goes stale faster than any other kind, because almost nothing is paid on the day it was estimated. The mover’s quote changes after the survey. The agency wants a holding deposit this week and the balance next. The old landlord returns part of the deposit and keeps the rest pending a service charge reconciliation you will not see for months.

This is where a spreadsheet built the night before the move stops being accurate around day three, for the same reason spreadsheets fail at expense tracking generally: the file cannot go and fetch a number, so every update is a job someone has to remember to do in a week when they are carrying boxes. Auritrack’s premise is that you mention a cost the way you would mention it to a friend, and the assistant does the filing rather than handing you a form. Set up a budget for the move itself and each payment lands against it as you mention it, which means the question worth asking during a move, how much of the peak has actually gone, has an answer on any given evening instead of after an hour spent reconstructing it from a bank statement.

The parts that matter for a move specifically: biller profiles keep every payment to the letting agent, the removal firm, and the two landlords separate, so a deposit dispute later is a filter rather than an archaeology project. Attachments hold the inventory photographs and the check-in report against the transaction they belong to, which is what the argument about the oven will eventually turn on. And because the old deposit is money owed to you rather than money spent, it belongs in loan tracking rather than in expenses, where it sits as an outstanding balance with the landlord until it is settled.

Cost matters here more than usual, given that the whole page is about a month when money is tight. Entering costs by hand, running the budget, and keeping the records cost nothing. What you pay for is the AI: either a monthly plan or Auricoins bought as you need them, which do not expire once purchased. A new account comes with a welcome bonus, which is enough to try the thing during the move it was meant for. The pricing page has the numbers, and the AI bookkeeping page shows what the assistant does with a transaction if you want to see the mechanics before deciding.

Work out the peak first, before anything else. Open the calculator above and enter three numbers you already know or can find in ten minutes: the deposit the new place is asking for, the rent due in advance, and the mover’s quote. Add the overlap if your notice period makes one likely. What comes back is the amount you need to have in one place by a specific date.

If that number is uncomfortable, the two levers are the ones this page has already named. Check whether your jurisdiction lets you pay the deposit in instalments, and check the exact date your notice must land to avoid an extra month of rent on a flat you have left.

Whatever monthly figure the calculator returned still has to come out of ordinary months, which is a different exercise from this one, and our guide to how to budget covers setting category amounts from what you actually spent rather than what you meant to spend, which is where the room for a move usually turns out to be hiding.

Then start recording against that number when the first payment actually happens, usually the holding deposit or the agency invoice. Create an account for it, or get the app on Google Play or the App Store. You are not setting up a system, you are recording one payment against one target, and a move will supply the rest soon enough.