I’m moving from the Boston area to Austin. We looked at traditional movers and it’s just too expensive to go with those guys. I’ve been made aware of two companies, PODS and Door to Door, that essentially drop off a storage container which you fill and box yourself, and they come by later and pick it up, and deliver it to your new home.
Has anyone used a service like this before? What were your experiences? I see a lot of Boston area students using them, but we’re moving a 2 bedroom home. (Most of our stuff is books and technology stuff.) We’re getting rid of a lot of stuff as well.
Also, can someone help me understand the “moving expenses are tax deductible” line that gets thrown around all the time? Does that mean that costs I incur beyond the budget from my employer will more or less come back to me in a refund? We’re also buying a house, so we’ll be itemizing for sure this year.
Any other great advice about moving would be greatly appreciated as well. Last time we moved we did a Budget truck with the car tied on the back… scary and tiring. What’s new in the world of moving?
I think you have a misconception about tax deductions in general but that seems to be pretty common. Tax deductions don’t mean that you get reimbursed dollar for dollar from the money you would have paid in taxes. It means that you deduct the expenses from your income and you don’t have to pay taxes on that part of your income. For most people, that means you recoup about 30% of your eligible moving expenses come tax time.
When my wife and I moved from Sacramento, CA, to Vandergrift, PA, we used a similar service.
ABF dropped off a HUGE trailer. We had reserved a certain amount of square footage. We packed the contents of our house into our footage, then put up a bulwark/wall that they provided. After 2 days, they picked it up. About 2 weeks later, it showed up at our place in Vandergrift, and we had 2 days to unload it.
It cost us, literally, about $5 less than our initial projections of renting a u-haul truck and using that.
Good- We didn’t have to worry about out stuff getting stolen, or being late with the truck, or feeding a giant deisel drinking beast.
Bad- We were responsible for our stuff. A lot of stuff got bounced around, and a few things got broke. Our fault, really, but I was mad at ABF for not driving like the truck was full of eggs. Hehehe…
We used PODS to move from NY’s Hudson Valley to Portland, OR. It was a great experience. We had plenty of time to load and pack the pod ourselves beforehand, and plenty of time to unload it when it arrived. This also gave us a chance to do one last cut on the stuff we moved–i.e., if it didn’t fit in the pod, we left it behind. The cost was around $5k.
The caveat is: make sure you have good parking (so you have somewhere to stick the pod). On our loading side, we had a huge driveway. No problem. On the unloading side, we had plenty of on-street parking, and just had to get the proper permits for the 2 weeks we had the pod. Also no problem. I’ve spent a lot of time in Boston, and remember the horrific parking (and residents-only parking) situation. If you face that, a pod may not be for you. You may be better off with something you can load and move in a day.
Now, there are cheaper ways. But there were zero surprises or time stresses with PODS. Things got moved on our schedule, and there were no mysterious up-charges (typically, movers can’t tell you exactly how much a move will cost until they’ve loaded up their truck with your stuff and weighed it…often leading to a substantial increase in costs).
In Addition: Nothing broke on our trip. But we did tie the hell out of everything. Make sure you do the same, so that nothing can move. One downside, at least in colder weather, seems to be that the condensation factor can be severe–we had a tiny bit of water on things when we opened up the pod (we moved in Feb.), water that seems to have condensed on the inside of the roof and rained down on the stuff. It didn’t damage anything, but I can see situations where it might. Pack all of your things as if they were going to be sitting in a filthy, non-climate-controlled warehouse, not as if they were going to be sitting in your closet.
It is also not terribly expensive to hire a couple of guys to load a moving truck or (presumably) a pod. This is great if you have reached the age where moving furniture is really not something you need to be doing. We moved within the same city, and I think loading and unloading the 3BR house worth of stuff (boxes and furniture) was about $200. Worth every penny, plus a generous tip. And it took the guys at most an hour or two.
I recently moved and I also used ABF’s UPack service (http://www.upack.com/) but opted to go with the smaller cube instead of the big semi trailer since I didn’t have that much stuff. All in all, it got there quickly and at a reasonable price. None of my stuff was broken but we packed it all pretty securely and used lots of straps. It rained but nothing was wet inside, as the cubes they use are pretty sealed up and very sturdy. All in all I’d recommend it.