A relocation is not one person’s decision, and that is exactly what every comparison spreadsheet gets wrong. Whoever opens the file types in the weights. One partner’s commute becomes a number the other partner never argued with. The nine-year-old who is leaving her school does not appear in the model at all. Then the total comes out, and it agrees with whoever filled it in.
This workbook gives every person the move happens to their own weight column. Each member spends their own 100 points across the criteria, an influence share you set blends those columns into the one household weight everything downstream runs on, and a Spread column names the row you disagree about most — so the argument happens over the weights, in daylight, instead of over the answer.
Does the winner win for everyone?
It is a question most scorers cannot ask, because they only hold one opinion. This one scores the same shortlist once for the household and then once for each member, and prints both rankings side by side. In the worked example the household’s winner is also one member’s first choice, a second member ranks a different place first, and a third member’s own top two land close enough together that the workbook prints no first choice for her — because the arithmetic does not support one.
That last part is the point. A ranking that cannot be justified is not printed.
The commute is computed, not rated
Rival scorers hand you a row called “commute” and ask you to rate it 1 to 5. A gut score out of five tells you nothing you can spend, and it quietly lets the place you already liked win.
So the Commute & Daily Cost tab does the arithmetic instead. Per commuter, per candidate: the annual miles, the annual out-of-pocket cost at your own cost per mile, and the annual hours in transit — then those hours priced at what an hour of your own time is worth to you, rolled into one annual commute burden. A twenty-minute difference each way is a working week a year, and this is where you see it in both currencies.
Does the move pay for itself, and by when?
Movers, deposits and closing, temporary housing and a trailing partner’s income gap are money you spend once. Housing, everyday costs, the commute, taxes and income are what change every year afterwards.
Relocation Break-Even sets one against the other and reports the months to pay the move back and the net across your own planning horizon. Staying exactly where you are is candidate 1 and breaks even at month 0, because it costs nothing to get there. A candidate that never pays back says so in words rather than printing a very large number.
A must-have is a gate, not a deduction
A weighted total averages a hard failure away: a place that is 45 minutes too far to commute still wins on schools and amenities, because the total does not know the difference between a preference and a requirement.
So up to five must-haves run as a screen on Candidate Places, before any score exists. A candidate that fails one is marked excluded and never enters the ranking — and being excluded, it is kept out of the automatic criteria’s own price scale too, not just out of the table. In the worked example the cheapest place on the shortlist is the one that gets screened out.
It is built not to flatter you
Four mechanisms, and all of them cost you the comfortable answer:
- The money and time criteria rate themselves. Housing Cost, Everyday Cost of Living, Commute Burden and Tax Burden compute their 1-to-5 ratings from the real figures. You cannot nudge them.
- A too-close-to-call floor. When the top two household scores sit less than 0.10 apart, the workbook names no winner — on the ranking tab and on the scorecard — and says why. The same floor runs per member.
- A flip readout. It names the smallest change to a single weight that would reverse the ranking, and how far that is from where you set it.
- Margin attribution. The gap between first and second is broken up criterion by criterion, so you can see which single row the answer actually rested on.
Your own figures, with their sources and their dates
This workbook publishes no rents, no cost-of-living index, no tax rates, no school ratings and no crime figures. A figure baked into a template is stale the day after it ships — and a stale number you trust is worse than a blank cell you fill in.
Instead, every researched figure on Candidate Places carries its own Source cell and Checked date, and anything older than a freshness window you set is flagged — with the Results tab warning you before you act on it. The included Where to Find Every Number guide names a free public source for 17 of its 20 figures, says what to type, and names the mistake people usually make; where no public source exists, it says so plainly and tells you how to price the figure yourself.
And the Research & Visit Log counts what the file could not settle — the ratings still blank, the must-haves still unknown, the figures gone stale — and turns that into a per-candidate plan for what to go and check on the ground. Print the field kit and rate the street while you are standing in it.
Own it, don’t rent it
Between a blank spreadsheet and a subscription that applies somebody else’s weights to your life sits this: one file you buy once and keep. Nothing is locked, so you can rename every criterion, add four of your own, and run it again the next time a move is on the table. It works in Excel 2019 and later, in Google Sheets, in LibreOffice Calc and in Numbers, and the download carries a one-click link to a native Google Sheets copy — no importing.
