How much savings do you need before moving in together?

Short answer: there's no single number, and anyone who gives you one is selling something.

Long answer: the right number for you comes from three buckets, and once you see them separately, the whole thing stops feeling impossible.

Bucket 1, the move itself

This is the one-off cost of physically getting you both into the same home:

• Bond or deposit, plus rent up front
• The relocation, flights, shipping, the visa if there's a border
• Basic setup: a bed, a table, the stuff two households don't magically merge into one

This bucket is big but finite. It has a top. You can save toward it.

Bucket 2, the in-between buffer

This is the sneaky one. If one of you moves before they can work in the new place, waiting on a visa, or just on a job, someone covers two people's living costs on one income for a while.

Add up your monthly costs together, multiply by the number of months you might be a one-income household, and that's the buffer. For a lot of long-distance couples, this bucket is bigger than the move itself.

Bucket 3, the "don't wipe yourselves out" reserve

Never spend your last dollar closing the distance. You want a normal emergency fund left standing on the other side. Three months of expenses is a sane floor. Starting your life together financially winded is how a beautiful decision turns into a stressful one.

Putting a real number on it

Here's the thing: you don't have to guess at any of these. That's exactly the maths the Close the Distance calculator does. It takes your two situations and works out all three buckets for your specific cities, so instead of a vague "we need heaps," you get "we need this much, and at what we're saving, we're about this far away."

And "this far away" is a genuinely different feeling from "someday."

Work out your three buckets and see how close you already are.