Hello,
I have a bunch of stuff in a storage locker in Oxnard CA, which is nice except that I am now in Johnson City TN. I was looking at the price of moving my stuff, which is enough to fill a one-bedroom apartment, and I have absolutely no idea what’s reasonable.
Have others out there done anything similar? How much did it set you back? I’m looking at about $2200, which seems good, but might that be an underestimate? I have absolutely no idea.
That sounds reasonable for a cross-country move. We’ve moved a 4-bedroom house’s worth of stuff from CA to OR, and the cost was $7000 several years ago. When we got quotes for moving the same amount of stuff from Missouri to CA, the quotes all ranged close to $20,000.
I just moved a one bedroom apartment from Pennsylvania to northern California using Zippy Shell. I did hire people to load and unload the shell, but did the packing and unpacking myself. Cost was about $4,200. Another company with a similar service is PODS.
Both Zippy Shell and PODS provide free quotes.
It’s easy now to hire labor at either end, e.g. MovingHelp.com So if you want to do it yourself with a U-Haul truck, it’s quite easy. I’m doing something similar right now – I realized that I needed to be on site to sort through stuff & supervise loading, so I figured I might as well just drive the truck and hire labor at each end, make a road trip out of it and save a bunch of money.
Yes the amount you quote will get you packing materials if you need them, a Uhaul or Ryder truck and labor to load it as long as you do the packing and driving yourself. does not cover fuel or any other travel related costs. Might be enough to pay labor at the other end to unload.
The $4200 quoted by BoMW is much more accurate. The cost will vary though from company to company and how you handle things.
You might be able to get by with renting a trailer instead of a truck, depending on your vehicle. This will probably be cheaper, and might make it easier to transport your vehicle and you across the country, too, depending on how many drivers you have in the household.
Actually, OP can you clarify whether you’re asking about an estimate you already received or whether you want to know if you’re allotting enough money? I understood you to mean that you already had an estimate.
Just to clarify, he $2200 is an estimate I had received, and I wanted to make sure it was reasonable.
As for driving it myself, that is not feasible because I am already in Tennessee, and I won’t be able to get time off to drive it myself.
That said, I just got another two estimates for $1100, which seems way lower than anything else.
Sometimes its cheaper just to sell everything and buy everything new.
2300 miles? I though $2200 sounded very reasonable for a full-service move. I don’t see how $1100 is even possible. What level of service are you actually talking about?
My job pays a certain amount for moving expenses. It doesn’t pay anything for buying new stuff.
Me too. But it’s full service apparently. I did have to pay a bit extra for having an elevator, and I got insurance (from another company), so there’s that. I think the catch is that it can take up to a month before my stuff shows up. They’re definitely not in a hurry.
The original estimate does seem reasonable. We’ve moved intercity a number of times now. In my experience the companies we contacted for quotes fell into two categories: companies that would by default send a person around to your house to inventory everything and companies that would insist on doing it over the phone, with formulas based on number of rooms and expecting you to mention the big ticket items. The quotes for the former were all significantly more expensive than the quotes from the latter. The latter all gave me bad vibes. I never got direct answers to any of my questions, and was left with the strong impression that if we had used them a “oh, gosh, this is much more weight then we talked about, we’re just going to have to double / triple / etc the cost” was in store for us on moving day.
So we’ve always gone with the former, more expensive, quotes. Usually not even the cheapest of those, since they were mostly in the same ballpark. At that point we just went on a gut feeling about trustworthiness and competence.
I’m not sure if that is the reason behind your discrepancy. But it might be something to watch out for.
Just be very careful. Moving is one of the industries most prone to scams and/or criminal activity. It is still one of the few jobs that will hire just about anyone with a strong back.
I moved about 5 tears ago only about 5 miles and I didn’t have a whole lot of stuff but it was more than I could handle on my own. To make a long story short, I asked for online bids and got flooded with them immediately. I picked the least scammy sounding one in the middle of the price range but I still picked completely wrong.
I got two brothers who were both convicted violent felons (they volunteered that information like it was nothing) and their flunky. The super-cons had a violent fight right in my from yard as soon as they got my stuff loaded, one took off in the truck while the other stayed behind to try to call him back on his cell phone. My stuff and the truck went missing for two hours. I am convinced the fight was staged and they only did that so that they could take my stuff away and go through anything of value. I had them beaten on that front though. I had already moved and hidden anything that I really cared about.
After the truck came back, I tried to lead them to my new house when they suddenly turned onto a side road went missing again for another hour. They claimed they got lost but that could not have happened. We finally got them to the new place, they still claimed they hated each other and they were just going to leave until they got their personal issues worked out. They finally unloaded my stuff but half my furniture was damaged. I already paid them to take a couch for proper disposal and they freely admitted that they just dumped it beside the road somewhere.
After they basically threw all my stuff randomly into the new house, I didn’t know whether to call the police (which I couldn’t really do with them standing there) or just make them go away. They had the audacity to ‘suggest’ that I pay them a $400 tip on top of the service charges just to get them out. I realized at that point that I had fallen victim to a scam with the real threat of violence if I didn’t comply. I was being held hostage and they were using my stuff as collateral. I am sad to say I paid it just to get them out and far away. It may have been some of the best money I ever spent however.
My point is to be really careful with movers. It is the one job that will gladly hire drug addicts, robbers, murderers and anyone else that feels like hauling heavy furniture up and down stairs all day. Look carefully at the reviews, get referrals and make sure the people you are paying are the ones actually doing the moving.
Your quote seems absurdly low to me and that sets off my personal alarms but I don’t know what services you asked for.
I was worried about that too, but the $1100 quote was for double the volume of the $2200 quote, and the price per additional cubic foot is lower, too. Plus, the stuff is currently in a storage locker, of which I know the dimensions. So, I’ve pretty much decided to go with the $1100 option. I’ll keep everyone posted on how things turn out.
How will the moving company do the pickup from the storage locker? Are you just going to mail the key to them? Will you have a friend there to supervise and make sure they don’t miss anything?
My biggest tip is to use this as an opportunity to throw away just about everything you aren’t emotionally attached to. Almost every American has much more useless stuff than they realize and the vast majority of it can be even more easily and cheaply replaced than the cost of moving it 2000+ miles.
You don’t need to move that whole closet full of old clothes that you haven’t worn in years. Pick out the ones that you really wear and donate the rest. You also don’t need to carefully pack the contents of your kitchen and spice cabinets. Those are also the ones that you aren’t using.
I have moved many times including cross country and it is very freeing to just toss all the dead weight and start again with only the things that you use and enjoy. It is often more cost effective just to have a yard sale and buy new and better stuff that you will actually use once you get to your destination.
The fact that most of your stuff is still in a storage locker probably means that most of it isn’t essential but I don’t know your situation. There are people that will buy storage locker goods in bulk once you pick out what you want to keep. You won’t get much for most of it but it may be better than trying to move heavy but marginal items cross country.
Using United to move our stuff from central Illinois to the Puget Sound area (approx 2200 miles) ended up costing 90c/pound. We had another estimate from a major moving company (can’t remember which) that was 30% higher. That was for loading and unloading, but not for packing or materials.
Shagnasty, why did you hire these people to move you? Did you meet with them first, or did you communicate only through e-mail beforehand?
If you use an established company, whether local or bigger, you will be more likely to have reliable people doing the job.
I didn’t intend on doing it that way. I was stuck in Colorado with two kids due to Hurricane Irene while trying to arrange a short move back in Massachusetts. Something that should have been simple turned out to be anything but that. As soon as I put in on online request for a bid, the phone started ringing and didn’t stop for days. I wasn’t there to interview anyone and I really needed movers as soon as I got back home. I just picked one and missed.
The only saving grace was that I remained calm even when things went bad. I was dealing with some seriously dangerous people that had possession of every non-critical thing that I owned. I was happy to throw $100 bills at them at the end to make them go away. It was not my greatest moment but I am not sure what I could have done better. They were not with the company that called me. It turned out, that was just a dispatch company that hired independent contractors like my new criminal friends.
Not really relevant to the OP because I live in Japan but just as a point of perspective, when we moved this year, as a ten-year married couple and all their stuff, it was only about US 1000 dollars. Moving companies here hire fit young university students, pay them well for a day’s work heavy lifting, and have good training. All the small things like books and clothes we box-up first ourselves in the week prior to moving. The large furniture and appliances get packed up by the company on the moving day.