Moving Back Home? Settle Up Before the Local Account Closes
#settlement#currency
When you move back home after living abroad, your bank account and phone number shut down before your flight does. The order to settle in, what to do with deposits and final bills that arrive after you leave, and why to close it out in the local currency.
Moving back home after a few years abroad is a long checklist. End the lease, sell the furniture, cancel the phone plan, close the bank account, ship the boxes.
What rarely makes the list is the money still floating between you and your roommate or local friends. The amounts are small, but the moment your local account closes, most of your ways to send or receive that money close with it. Sort it out later with an international transfer and the fee can be larger than the amount itself.
🗓️ The money deadline comes before the flight
Your flight date is fixed. Your money deadline is earlier.
The first is the bank account. You want it open long enough to receive your last paycheck and any refunds, so it tends to stay open until the final week, but in some countries closing an account takes an appointment and a few days. The second is your phone number. Transfer services that use a phone number as the identifier can stop working for you once the number is cancelled.
So the window where you can move money in the local currency ends not on your flight date, but on whichever comes first: the account closing or the number going dead. Work backward and plan to finish settling a few days before that.
🏦 Receive first, pay last
If money is owed in both directions, the order matters.
Settle the debts where you are the one receiving first. For someone to send you money, your account has to still be alive. The debts where you are paying can wait until just before the account closes, because sending works right up to the end.
Settling item by item multiplies the number of transfers. With any one person, net what you paid for them against what they paid for you, and move only the difference. If several people are involved, the logic in how to minimize the number of settlements applies.
🔑 Who receives the money that comes back after you leave
The hardest part of moving home is the money that appears after you are gone. Two items show up almost every time.
A security deposit is usually returned only after the move-out inspection. If your roommate is staying on, the deposit simply stays with the apartment. The final utility bill is similar: it may not arrive until weeks after your flight.
For both, the practical answer is to close them out on an estimate before you leave, and hand the receiving and paying over to whoever stays. Agree in advance that small differences from the real figure will not be re-settled. A cross-border transfer to fix a small gap almost always costs more in fees than the gap itself.
💱 Close it out in the local currency
It is tempting to think in your home currency when you settle. Keep it in the local currency until it is done. To your roommate, only the local amount means anything; the converted number is your concern alone.
Here is a two-person apartment share in Tokyo. A is moving home at the end of March. B is keeping the apartment.
| Item | Amount (JPY) | From → to |
|---|---|---|
| A’s half of the deposit paid at move-in | 60,000 | B → A (B takes over the apartment) |
| Estimated March electricity, A’s share | 8,000 | A → B (the bill goes to B) |
| A’s share of groceries B paid for | 3,500 | A → B |
| Net | 48,500 | B → A |
Three transfers become one. Because B takes over the apartment along with the deposit, whatever deposit is returned at final move-out belongs to B, and A has nothing to collect from abroad.
If you have been recording day-to-day costs in the local currency, you never have to build this table at all. In Evere, set the project’s base currency to JPY and the settle-up screen shows the netted amount directly. The conversion to your home currency is something to think about later, in your own budget. Splitting currencies while studying abroad is covered in settling up with a roommate while studying abroad.
❓ Common questions
Q. What if the final utility bill comes in higher than the estimate? If the difference is small, the best rule is that the person who stayed covers it, agreed before you leave. Only when it is far off is it worth adjusting, next time you meet or through a way to pay in your home currency.
Q. Do debts with local friends work the same way? Yes, and they should come before the roommate. The less often you see someone, the harder it gets to bring up once the farewell dinners start. The approach in leaving a job and settling what’s still owed carries over well.
Q. Can I just keep the local account open for a while after I leave? If you can, it is an option. Some countries charge account fees or require identity checks to be renewed, though, so unless you plan to keep it for years, settling before you fly leaves fewer loose ends.
Q. My roommate is happy to pay me in my home currency instead. Is that fine? Write down the exchange rate you used, in one line. Without it, there is no way to check the number if the question ever comes up again.