Your household contents to Spain: full load, part load or sell

With a move to Australia the question is simple, because there's only one answer: a sea container, or nothing. With Spain you have a real choice, and that makes it harder.

This item is the biggest variable in your budget. It's also entirely yours: there's no authority that prescribes anything, no form, no deadline. Only a decision that can make a difference of thousands of euros — in both directions.

The four routes

Sell everything and start again there. The cheapest route, and not infrequently the wisest. Dutch furniture often fits badly in a Spanish house: different sizes, different windows, different floors, and many Spanish rental homes are furnished. Count on the proceeds of your things minus the cost of furnishing anew.

A part load (groupage). Your things share a lorry with those of others. Cheaper than your own lorry, but you're tied to the carrier's schedule — departure and arrival dates fall within a margin of days to weeks.

Your own lorry. More expensive, but you set the date and your things are loaded once and unloaded once. For a complete household and a tight schedule the difference from groupage is smaller than it seems.

Driving yourself. Hire a van or load up your own car, drive for two days. Works for whoever takes little. Count in the fuel, toll roads, one or two overnight stays and the return journey — that's more than people estimate.

The cost indication on the Spain page works out a range for this based on your household. Those are emphatically estimates and not rates: there's no authority that sets this, and every quote turns out differently.

The option people forget: in two stages

You don't have to do this in one go, and that may well be the most useful thing there is to say about it.

Go with suitcases first, rent a furnished home, and only have your household contents come once you know where you're going to live and what that house looks like. That's a common route and often the wisest, for three reasons:

• You only know what fits once you know the house
• You're not buying anything in the first year anyway, because you rent first — and that's the most expensive mistake Dutch emigrants make, so that order is fixed
• With six months' distance you can judge much better what you really miss

The sum nobody does. Six months of storage in the Netherlands costs a fraction of what you lose if you send a full load to the wrong house and get rid of half of it anyway.

The downside is real: you pay for a move twice, or at any rate a move plus storage. Weigh that against what you save by only deciding once you know.

Your car is a separate story

If you take your car, it doesn't simply move along with your household contents. As soon as you have your main residence in Spain, the car has to go onto Spanish plates and you pay the vehicle taxes there. According to the European information on this, that can involve a deadline of around a month after settling, and converting too late leads to fines.

That conversion is a procedure in itself: technical inspection, papers, tax. Count on it costing time and money, and factor that into the question of whether you want to take that car at all. Selling an older car in the Netherlands and buying one in Spain is often cheaper than it seems — although for that purchase you in turn need your empadronamiento.

The precise deadline and procedure differ and change; check them with the Spanish traffic authority (DGT) before you plan around them.

Where this sits in your process

The move is a parallel track: it runs alongside your registration papers and has its own deadlines. What makes it special is that it's the only one that's fully reversible as long as you haven't booked anything yet — and fully irreversible as soon as the lorry is moving.

So decide late. Ask for three quotes, ask for them at the same time for the same inventory, and ask explicitly what's not included in the price: insurance, packing and unpacking, stairs, a parking permit, storage in case of delay. Those are the items the bill runs over on.