We ask how long before anything else

Why the horizon

Because London is transient in a way most of the country is not. A very large share of the people moving into it are going to leave again, on a timetable they already roughly know, and nothing about that fact appears in how removals firms quote.

A six-month sublet, a two-year posting, a five-year flat and a house somebody means to stay in are four different jobs. They need different shipment sizes, different storage arrangements and completely different advice about what to sell before coming and what to buy once here. The furniture is the only thing they have in common.

The advice reverses in the middle

Below about three years, bring little and hold the rest — at home, not in London. Above it, bring everything, because paying to hold a household for several years costs more than the household and because a flat you live in for years should be a home rather than a base.

That reversal is the whole of the horizon table, and reading any column of it downwards shows exactly where it happens.

The expensive inversion

Shipping a full household to London on a two-year posting and then renting a storage unit in London for everything the flat cannot hold. It happens constantly and it is the single most expensive arrangement we see.

The same goods held at the home end — where they are going back to anyway — cost less and travel half as far. Nobody arranges it that way because nobody is asked the question at the point it would help.

Nearly everybody is wrong about it

Not through carelessness. Contracts extend, relationships work out, cities turn out to suit people. What matters is not predicting the horizon correctly but acting when it changes — and the section on that is the one most people on this site actually need.

The commonest version by a distance: a six-month arrangement that became four years, with a household still in storage and a decision that should have been taken at month eight still being deferred.

“We do not know” is a real answer

And a common one, and it has a clear implication. Move as though it is short, because undoing a small move is cheap and undoing a full one is not. That asymmetry decides it every time.

Not the other site

There is a separate site on the .com with a similar brand name and a different approach — that one is organised around whose permission a move needs. We mention it here so that nobody assumes the two are the same thing.

What we are not

Not tenancy advisers, not tax advisers, not immigration advisers. This site describes how the length of a stay affects a removals decision, which is a different thing. Landlords, agents, employers and universities appear here as categories and none is named.