Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another

I’ve been one of those people with one account for media, purchases and subscriptions and another one for iCloud. The purchases account, referred to as secondary in this document, is shared with family members (i.e., they use this same account and credentials for purchases too). Family members in turn have their own individual iCloud accounts.

I’ve never tried doing Family Sharing with this setup because it seemed confusing — it wants to use the iCloud account as the primary one whereas I’ve always added credit to the purchases account (taking advantage of some Apple Store Code discount offers).

Now, I have some credit balance on my purchases account, but I do see the “Migrate Purchases” option in settings even though this document says it won’t be available until I:

> Spend any balance remaining on your secondary Apple Account.

If this is enforced during migration or prevents me from migrating, I’d have to wait for a year or so to use up that balance. Apple really should’ve included account balance transfer as part of the migration.

To add to this mess, I actually have two purchases accounts across two different countries (i.e., one purchases account for one country and another one for a different country). I’ve only purchased free items in one of those accounts. This works, with some inconvenience, while I don’t touch my iCloud account at all.

I’m really interested in getting this sorted out (using one account per family member and using Family Sharing), but it looks like I may run into more problems.

If anyone here did read all the way till here, I’m open to suggestions on simplifying this as well as warnings and gotchas.

Now it would be great if Apple allowed associating more than one country for my purchases to my apple id, i.e. based on having credit cards issued by banks in different countries. Seems that for Apple does not exist the concept of living between to countries (expats, dual citizens, etc)

Is there an easy way to find a list of your purchased apps?

> You can’t migrate purchases if both the primary Apple Account and the secondary Apple Account have music library data associated with each of them.

Is this not a severe restriction? (I am unsure as I am not entirely sure I understand what it means.)