We (two people) are moving from the west coast USA to the east coast soon. I’m looking for ideas on how to do this as cheaply as possible. Renting a uhaul looks like about $5k before gas costs. Seems like a lot. Anyone have creative ideas?
You can rent “pods”, those storage containers they deliver to your house. You pack them up and then call the company once you’re done and they put them on a truck and deliver them to your new address. Cost me about $2k for 3 of them to move 1000 miles. Lots of different companies have their own versions so call around and see which one is cheapest
Right on. Have started looking into those too. So far cost seems comparable to the uhaul.
Did this also. I think in total the trip was like 4k including the cost of 2 pods, gas in our own car, etc. Just make sure wherever you go has somewhere they can drop them, because it sucks ass to have to carry your stuff across a grass lot because the company couldn’t fit their semi truck in the apartment driveway to drop the pods.
Learn to part with at least a few things to be sure. Furniture can be easily replaced, unless you got an antique armoire knocking around.
Already planning to get rid of anything it won’t cost more to replace (or can’t replace). Will still need bed/couch/washer/dryer/TV etc.
when i moved from san francisco to new york 20ish years ago; i left all of it behind except for a mattress, clothes and blankets and it costed less than $500 since i put those things in the back of my pickup truck and drove there.
i’ve had to move another dozen or so times since then and i’ve adjusted to living w few enough possessions that i can just throw them in the back of my pickup truck and leave whenever i get tired of the place i live in; even my washer and dryer are portable.
Before I got married, everything I owned fit in my station wagon. I remember feeling very free.
Same here when I was “married” (technically not married since it was illegal at the time) .
Somehow couples are incapable of doing this.
Look at Enterprise. It seems like their truck rentals charge by mile, but they also sell regular passenger vans with the seats removed that are the same dimensions as a uhaul. Passenger cars don’t have a mileage charge.
That’s a good call. I didn’t think about renting a van. Really even buying something that I could sell afterwards might make sense too.
Seconding the “pods” type thing for fairly cheap and for the bonus points of not having to drive it yourself.
Just a warning from my experience: be careful about how efficiently you load it. When I did that I got a call a couple days later that they were over the weight limit (the forklift tipped over trying to load it onto the semi) and I was a few states away by then. Had to play a lot of phone tag with the company to hire moving contractors to unload some stuff and pack it into an extra pod, they did a horrible job causing some of my furniture to get damaged during the move.
When I did a cross country move I used Estes Suremove because it was cheaper than a uhaul and as a plus you don’t have to drive it.
They basically drop off a semi trailer and you pay for however many feet you use after loading it yourself (or hiring your own loading help which I’d recommend since they stack things better and end up saving you money that way).
You can get an estimate ahead of time so you can know how it compares. Think it was ~$2100 for a uhaul and only $1100 doing Estes so def a bit cheaper.
Only downside is you may have to wait a week or so for your stuff to arrive.
You can take a ton of bags in trains pretty affordably. I would sell pretty much everything except what I could bring that way and just take Amtrak, if I didn’t have a car I wanted to bring with me.
