"What are the top five pieces of advice you wish you'd heard when you first moved out on your own?," The question came in a while ago from Quiz, caught my eye and stuck in my mind.

Glance around the house, and recall the first year in my own place, with guests coming to me. It was a freaking nightmare. I wasn't ready. Don't think anyone is, really. Here is the stuff I wish I had known when I first moved out on my own.

5/ Get out and meet people.

You are going to be lonely. Even with a room mate or two, you'll find yourself sitting in your room just doing nothing from time to time. Bored, yet curiously unmotivated to do anything at all. You gradually retreat from the world. Having places to go and people to see breaks that particularly nasty cycle.

Not exactly easy, since a lot of the time moving out means moving away from family and friends to a strange city. Join a club. Pick a bar and make it your local. Go to church. Go to night class. Make the effort. It is worth it.

4/ Chores grow exponentially.

Leave a dish in the sink, and it'll breed overnight. Put off dusting and vacuuming this week and soon you'll have an inch of dust on every horizontal surface. Put off the laundry because you are tired, and the day you run out of clean shirts is the day the washing machine dies on you.

Lets face it. Most people who move out on their own live like pigs until they realize just how uncomfortable that is. About the second time your place has to be fumigated for cockroaches, but before the slime mold in the kitchen learns to attack you in your sleep, you realize you have to clean the place. It takes you the entire weekend, a full box of trash bags and a shovel. Not the 20 minutes a day it would take if you were sensible and did that crap as it happens.

3/ Open all mail at once.

Ha ha, he still gets mail. Bugger off. I get my bills through the post, because paying them over the counter means they get date stamped and receipted - and I have been burned by both online payments and direct debits before. 6 times now, so screw that for a lark. My time costs enough that dealing with bank screw ups loses me money.

Open those bills the instant they arrive, and pay them (or dispute them, in the case of utility bills) the following day. Open your junk mail too. It takes a whole 30 seconds, and there are frequently good deals to be had from mail shots. One of my room mates in college left a letter from the IRS unopened for months. It contained a rebate check, and by the time he opened the letter, the check was no longer valid (UK banking rules, cheques become invalid after 3 months.)

2/ Learn To Cook Well And Plan.

Easy for me to say, making dinner for the family during Mom's late shifts was one of my assigned chores from the time I was nine and could be trusted with the oven, stove and a sharp knife. Before I moved out to head to college, I cooked every day over the summer, learning how to turn a recipe from a book into something that was (usually) edible.

And the instant I got to college, I was living on pizza, burgers and curry takeouts. One of the things no one ever tells you is that cooking is only fun if you are cooking for someone. Just for yourself, it is a grind and you really can't be bothered to fill the space between class time and bar time with making something just to fuel you.

In the end, I would cook Sunday. Make a decent meal for friends and, at the same time a weeks worth of meals for myself for the freezer. Done that way, it was much easier. Still have the habit now - I always make extra of anything that freezes well and tuck it away for days when I can't be bothered.

1/ Beware of the Mall.

Well, any and all stores, really. For the first time you can pretty much buy what you want, when you want without your Dad asking you what you want that crap for. It is a heady and addictive feeling, that freedom.

It is an illusion.

Say you love books. They sure take up a lot of room, don't they. Your gaming shrine? Turn on all your systems at once and the sun probably dims a little in protest. Oh, you like nice clothes? Where are you going to hang them all?

The balance between wanting something and having somewhere to actually put it is one you will fight with all your life.

Moving out is a lot like a relationship. It is a mix of responsibility to yourself and balancing your desires against practicality. Some people get the idea fast. Some never get the idea. The rest of us fake it.