Even in the best cases, moving yourself, your family, and everyone’s possessions into a new home can be a hectic process. Organizing the items and compiling lists of where everything is and what needs to be done can go a long way towards ensuring that the moving process will go smoothly, but there are several items that many families forget to take into consideration when moving to a new home. Here are the most commonly forgotten items in the moving process for most families in America.

1. Know what your new address will be before you move. Many individuals will begin to cancel old services and enroll in new services before moving to the new home and will need the new home’s address so that service providers will know what home requires the services. Having to look for the address during each conversation will become very frustrating very quickly, so it is best to commit the new address to memory as soon as possible.

2. Place important records in a secure place for the duration of the moving process. When moving from one home to another, sometimes things become misplaced or lost in the shuffle of possessions. Important documents, such as birth certificates, social security cards, and medical records, are too important to become lost in the shuffle and should be kept either in a safe deposit box or in an easily accessible location while moving items to the new home.

3. Restore borrowed items to their proper owners. In today’s world of considerate neighbors and sharing between family members, it is very easy to forget that an important item has been loaned to a friend or has been borrowed from a friend and needs to be returned before the move. When packing the items in the home, a special effort should be made to remember whether the item is yours or should be returned to the person that it was borrowed from.

4. Cancel all services and memberships that will no longer be needed. When moving to a new city, often the last thing on a person’s mind is all of the associations that they have established around their current home. Many individuals have a membership to a health club, a movie rental business, some personal entertainment clubs (such as nightclubs or hobby clubs), and a library. Being sure to terminate these memberships and returning any property that belongs to the association prior to moving will eliminate a great deal of headaches and hassle in the future.

5. Collect all of the keys for the old home. Many individuals have had spare keys to their home made to give to adult children, parents, neighbors, or any other trusted individual that may need to access the home while they were away. All of these keys should be collected and placed in a safe place to be given to the new owners of the home or returned to the property owner that the home is being rented from.