Our move to Malaysia is very slowly getting closer and, thanks to our December 31 departure, I can finally say that we leave next month. I can not wait! I keep getting asked how we are going with our preparations to leave, so I thought I would tell you all about it. The fact is that it is really not that hard.

I’m looking forward to taking off!

Our house – easy!

This part is quite easy as our house is already rented out and we live in an apartment that we rent. Our lease is up, so all we have to do is give 30 days notice before the date we want to move out. As long as we leave it clean and tidy, there is nothing more to worry about on this front.

Our belongings – easy!

We are gradually throwing out a lot of stuff, and I would say that we have already got rid of about 1/4 of our belongings since making the decision. We will get rid of more over the next 7 weeks and the remainder will be split between the shed at our house and my mum’s garage.

We have researched and bought one thing – a good safe – to keep our valuables extra safe in these locations.

We should only need a van to move and it feels good to be ridding ourselves of so many things.

Our car – hardest!

We have decided to sell our car and this is the hardest thing we need to deal with. It is really only the hardest as it is hard to know how long it will take to sell and it will be painful living without it if it sells quickly. We plan to list it online in two weeks time.

Travel bookings – medium

We are looking forward to getting back to Bali

We have a couple of weeks of holiday before we get to Penang. We are all booked and ready to go apart for 3 nights. We are going to have a fabulous time in KL and Bali and I look forward to sharing it with you. We have flights booked for quite a few other trips. The only destination we are still trying to fit in is Japan. We also recently bought our travel insurance.

As for Penang, we have not done much except line up the first few nights at some great accommodation. Hopefully in that time we will find somewhere to live, a car to drive and sort out a preschool. We can dream anyway! It seems best to organise everything in person once we arrive.

Other documents – harder

Organising a million other documents and setting up everything we need managed while we away is tedious and annoying. We keep learning of other documents we should take with us just in case – like the kids’ vaccination records, our marriage certificate (we never bothered getting one) and international drivers licenses. There are also the fun tasks of changing our addresses, sorting out what to do when the Amazon cheques hopefully come flooding in and ensuring the banks stop smsing us whenever we want to transfer money.

There are lots of other small jobs like this which are really not a big deal but are not much fun either. We have a spreadsheet with everything listed with jobs each week and J and I make an effort to go through it every Wednesday night to ensure we are on track.

The kids – easiest!

Z and S last month at Docklands – They are growing up fast!

We have been preparing the kids by talking about it often which is not hard as they are as excited as us. We have also been reading some great books by Janet McCrea Dieman which I think are the perfect way to prepare kids for travel or just to help them learn more about the world around them. Z is particularly excited about getting on a plane again since he hasn’t since we flew home from the USA in January and he has forgotten what it was like.

We actually started swimming lessons again in the hope to make them as water safe as possible since we may live near a pool. We have also recently toilet trained Z. It is very weird to think that we can finally leave all the baby stuff at home!

Overall?

It is going very smoothly. I keep thinking there must be more that we need to do for such a big move, but it’s really quite easy. It helps that I have done this twice before when setting out for long term travel, although arranging everything for four of us is more work.

Only 51 more sleeps to go!

You can also read about our decision to move to Asia and what has happened since in today is the day that we move to Asia!

Any tips for anything we might be forgetting? I’m sure there must be something!