What it actually costs to close the distance
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For two years, "when we finally live together" was a sentence we said instead of a plan. It felt romantic. It was also a way of not looking at the number.
Because there is a number. Closing the distance isn't one cost, it's a pile of them, and most of them are invisible until they land in the same month.
The costs nobody warns you about
When we finally sat down and listed everything, the rent wasn't the scary part. These were:
- The double life while you wait. Two rents, two sets of bills, and the flights back and forth. This is the cost that quietly runs for months before you've moved a single box.
- The deposit and the setup. Bond, first month up front, the sudden realisation you own zero furniture between you.
- The visa, if there's a border. Application fees, health checks, police certificates, and a timeline measured in seasons, not weeks.
- The buffer for the gap. If one of you can't work straight away in the new country, someone is carrying two people's costs on one income for a while.
None of these are dramatic on their own. Together, they're the reason "someday" stays "someday."
a pile of costs you can see has an end. "someday" doesn't.
Why we built a tool instead of a spreadsheet
We tried the spreadsheet. Twice. It always died the same way: one of us would change a number, the other couldn't see it, and we'd give up before we got to an answer.
So the tool does the boring part. You put in where you both are, where you'd want to land, and what you've each got, and it lays out the whole picture in one place: rent and the option to buy, the relocation, the visa, the buffer for the months in between, and roughly how long until it's actually doable.
The point isn't a perfect number. It's a number you can look at together without flinching, and then argue about, adjust, and turn into a plan.
The honest part
Every figure in it is a realistic starting point, not a live quote, and every line is editable, so the moment you get a real rent or a real visa fee, you drop it in and the picture sharpens.
What surprised us most wasn't that it was expensive. It's that it was finite. A pile of costs you can see has an end. "Someday" doesn't.
Run your own numbers and see where the two of you actually land. It takes about two minutes, and it's free.
See exactly what closing the distance would cost the two of you — free, about two minutes.
pip proofread this. pip found no errors. pip is a bird.
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