The van is booked, the lease has both names on it, and you have just realized nobody has said who pays the electric bill, or who takes the bins out on Thursday.

Every moving in together checklist you will find covers the boxes. Pack by room, label them, change your address. That part sorts itself, because a van turns up and forces it. The part that ends arguments in month two is the part nobody prints.

This one is the short version of both: the logistics, and the three conversations that decide whether you are still glad about the move by Christmas.

Moving in together checklist, stage one: before you sign

Once the lease is signed and the deposit is paid, every one of these gets harder to raise. Ask them while it is still a conversation.

1. Whose names are on the lease? Both is usual, and it means both of you are on the hook for the whole rent if one of you leaves. Read the lease together and ask the landlord if anything is unclear. We are organizers here, not lawyers.
2. How is rent split? An even split suits similar incomes. A split in proportion to income suits different ones. Either is fine. Not choosing is the one that is not.
3. What happens to the bills? Electric, internet, water and renter’s insurance each need a name and a due date. Decide who sets each one up and who pays it.

If you want the longer treatment of the money rule, our guide to splitting household expenses walks through even, proportional and pooled splits with real numbers.

Before the van: two of everything

Two toasters, two sofas, and a boxed set of plates one of you is attached to for reasons you will never get out of them. Sort every category into three piles: keep, sell or donate. Decide by category, not by object, or you will have the same debate forty times.

• Kitchen first. It has the most duplicates and the lowest feelings.
• Furniture next, measured against the new place, not remembered.
• Decor last. It is the one that holds the arguments.

Then the paperwork that has a clock: forward your mail with USPS, update your address with your bank, employer and insurers, and check your state’s rule for changing the address on a driver’s license. Our moving house checklist has the whole address-change list and the house-side jobs that start after the move.

The easiest way to keep this stage honest is to make it one shared list. In Chirpy you add a list called Move-in, type “forward mail”, “set up internet” and “sell the second sofa”, and give each one a name. Whoever ticks a job off, the other sees it tick, and nobody asks twice whether the internet is sorted.

Put a name on every job before the first box

Here is where Chirpy earns its place. Open Lists, go to the House tab, and you have a shared list called Around the house. Add the first week’s jobs, bins out, change the sheets, water the plants, and give each one a person. It shows on both phones, with the person’s initial beside the job and the days left under it. When one of you ticks it off, the other sees it tick.

Chirpy Basic is free for the whole household, up to six people, no card. The shared list and the calendar are on it.

The first week sets the pattern. If one person does the bins because they noticed, that person does the bins for a year.

If you want to go further than the first week, our weekly house cleaning schedule has a name on every day.

The money: one rule, one place, one month

Whatever rule you chose, the failure is the same. One of you pays the electric, the other pays the internet, and by month three each of you privately believes you pay more. Nobody is lying. Nobody can see the total.

Keep the fixed costs in one place. In Chirpy’s Money tool the household month shows what came in, what went out and the fixed costs, the same page for both of you. You add the rent and the bills once, and the shared spending sits next to them.

One honest limit: if you only want a running balance of who owes whom, a dedicated splitting app does exactly that and nothing more. Chirpy puts the same bills next to the calendar that reminds you of the due date and the list that says who is handling it, which is the part a balance does not hold.

The dates that arrive in the first month

A move creates dates you do not have yet: the first rent day, the day each utility bill lands, a landlord inspection, the internet install window. Put each one on the shared calendar the moment you know it, and set it to repeat monthly where it does. Everyone in the household is already on the calendar, so there is no inviting.

On Chirpy Pro you can say “internet install Saturday between 9 and noon” and it goes on the calendar for you. On Basic you type it in, which takes ten seconds. Either way, you have the same calendar. Our guide to share a calendar with your partner covers the setup if one of you uses Apple and the other Google.

The month-one check

Thirty days in, sit down for twenty minutes. This is not a review. It is one pass over three questions: does the money split still feel fair, does either of you feel you are doing more of the jobs, and is anything missing from the list?

Most of the time the answer is a small adjustment: swap a job, move a bill date. The point of doing it at thirty days is that small adjustments are still small. Our piece on the mental load household split covers what to do if the adjustment turns out to be the pattern.

Common questions