I currently live on the third floor, with several heavy pieces of furniture. Next time I move, I promise you that there will be movers doing all the heavy lifting. I might pack a few boxes, take care of the dishes and other little stuff, but the furniture at least will be handled by professionals. When it comes to choosing my moving company, though, I plan to be very careful. We’re talking about my personal possessions, after all, and there’s been more than one scam perpetrated by household movers. I don’t want to have to ransom back my possessions. I don’t want to argue with movers that estimate one price and charge a much higher one. I don’t want to have anything go wrong with my move.

Take Action To Protect Your Possessions

When we move, we want the best movers we can afford. The easiest way to find them is to ask around. Who have your friends and family used? Did they have any problems? Does your realtor have a recommendation, or the apartment manager? Word-of-mouth is generally the best bet for finding a reliable company. After all, your friends won’t point you to a company that treated them poorly.

It’s also worth the time to do a little due diligence — a little research. Call the local Better Business Bureau and check if anyone has filed a complaint against your company of choice. Google their names, as well, and add in your city to make sure you get relevant results. If you hear any bad news about a company, cross them off your list and move on to the next. You don’t need the worry of dealing with a company you know has had problems in the past.

The Three Estimate Rule

You always want to get at least three separate estimates to compare. If one company is significantly more expensive, you’ll probably know to avoid them on your own. But you should also consider ignoring significantly cheaper estimates. If you get two estimates that are similarly priced and a third that is much, much cheaper, you should ask yourself why that company is so much less. Statistically, that’s the moving company most likely to cause trouble for you. It’s just like scams in any other industry: if it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

You should also ask for a contract that lists out all prices, rather than signing an estimate. It’s very easy to tack on extra surcharges to a signed estimate — perhaps there’s a per mile charge for driving or extra fees for packing. You want to know those in advance and have them in writing. Using a signed contract will protect you if your movers try to pull something. If nothing else, you have documentation if you wind up taking them to small claims court.

Ask Questions

You’re about to let people you don’t know into your home. You may have your children around; you definitely have your possessions around. Ask the moving company about the movers — do they conduct background checks? Does the company have insurance? What about a claims policy? You’re paying enough to be nosy.

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Budgeting your money is one of the best methods to control your spending, simply because you know where each of your dollars ends up. But you can’t allow your budget to turn into a straight jacket: you should control your budget, rather than the other way around.

Unfortunately, many people — especially when they’re first developing a personal budget — let the budget take the leading role, often in two different ways.

1. They don’t plan for changing circumstances, like a mid-month emergency.
2. They don’t change their budget in response to upcoming events, like moving.

You don’t need to carve your budget in stone: you do not need a budget that will work month in and month out. Instead, your budget should be a living document — the kind you can easily amend or change. Furthermore, you should plan to change it on a fairly regular basis. It isn’t unreasonable to expect that you’ll need to at least review your budget and make small changes every month or so. However, it is practically mandatory to revise your budget when you have something out of the ordinary coming up: a vacation, moving expenses or even the holidays.

Consider the expenses of moving to a new home: you may be able to tweak your budget from residence to residence fairly easily if the rent or mortgage payments are similar. But the actual act of moving should also figure into your budget: extra gasoline for your truck, renting a U-Haul or hiring movers each can require an allotment of money in your budget that you wouldn’t normally worry about.

So how can you make your budget flexible?

Start out by keeping track of your budget in such a way that you feel comfortable making changes. I use an spreadsheet, although I know many people who still feel more comfortable with a paper budget. The one warning I would like to make about a paper budget, though, is that most people aren’t comfortable marking up a piece of paper over and over again. You may wind up rewriting your budget, or otherwise spend too much time trying to make a simple piece of paper look a little clearer.

You should also make the effort to check your budget once a month, preferably with your calendar in hand. I like sitting down at the beginning of the month, and reviewing both upcoming events and what I expect to need to spend, all in one go. I typically set aside one afternoon a month for all sorts of paperwork, including my budget. Most people don’t need to spend hours tweaking their budget — some months you may only need 10 minutes. But don’t forget to look a couple months out. If you’re trying to save a little extra for a trip home for the holidays, you should take that into account when reviewing your budget several months earlier.

Lastly, you need to remember who’s in charge. It’s your budget, and you should never be scared to rip it up and start over, if you need to.