The American Moving and Storage Association has revealed that the average cost of transporting all your belongings to a new house is $2,300. For long-distance moves, the total almost doubles to $4,300.The good news is that thinking smart and planning ahead can reduce these costs significantly. Read on to discover simple tips for moving home that will ease the burden on your wallet.
Shop Around for a Low-Cost Moving Company
If you’re moving across states, you probably have no choice but to hire a professional moving company. Make sure you get the best possible price by shopping around for at least three quotes.Note: To give an accurate quote, reputable moving companies will come to your house or perform a live video inspection of your property and its belongings.
If you’re only moving across town, you maybe able to combine using your own car own car and hiring a rental truck and driver. If you do take this route, use your car to transport your carefully wrapped essentials and valuables. This way, you can fill your rental van with furniture and heavy items, minimizing the risk of breakages in transit.
Enlist the Help of Your Friends and DIY
Hiring professional movers and packers is likely to cost you a fortune. Before making the decision to hire a moving company, think: can I do this myself? It’s not going to easy, but enlisting the help of your friends and embarking on a DIY move is a great cost-cutting option. You might need to pay back your friends in food, alcohol or free entry into your first house party, but it will save you a lot of money in the long run.
Get Creative With Your Packing Materials
Packing supplies are a costly but often needless expense. Instead of shelling out for bubble wrap and special packing paper, use your blankets, bed sheets, socks, and thick jumpers to protect your china, glass and other fragile items. Local retailers, liquor stores, and supermarkets will often have a surplus of cardboard boxes. If not, suitcases, laundry baskets, and toy boxes that you’ll be transporting anyway double nicely as moving crates.
Don’t Resist the Urge to Purge
Getting rid of unwanted items before you move is one of the easiest ways to cut the cost of transportation. To purge effectively, you only need to remember one rule: If you haven’t used it in a year, you need to sell it, donate it, or throw it in the trash.
Hosting a pre-move garage sale will help you find a new home for items you no longer need but someone else might love.Giving the donation pile to a local charity organization serves a good cause at the same time as making valuable space. Large items of broken furniture, damaged electronics, and faulty fridges will need disposing of via junk removal or dumpster rental.
Junk Removal vs Dumpster Rental
Junk removal services will pick up and remove your unwanted items. Using dumpster rental companies near you means you hire a container, fill it yourself, and then it’s picked back up a week later. From a cost perspective, junk removal services make sense if you have a few large items you need to dispose of quickly. Renting a dumpster, on the other hand, isa more sensible choice if you need time to purge properly and want to save money doing some of the manual labor yourself.
Have a Contingency Plan
Murphy’s Law says that “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. In other words, when moving house, it’s a good idea to prepare for the unexpected. Imagine for a second that the moving date for your new property gets pushed back by two weeks. In this worst-case scenario, you will probably still need to move out of your current property. Arranging somewhere to stay with friends or family is a contingency plan that could save you thousands of dollars on alternative lodging and storage units expenses.
Make Your New House a Home
When you finally make the move, you will probably need to make several improvements so that your new house looks and feels the way you want it to. Maximize value and minimize the cost by reading our advice on how to save money on new home DIY projects.
Without planning and due care, moving house can turn into one of the most stressful and expensive landmarks in your life. While the tips above might not relieve the anxiety of swapping one house for another, they will almost certainly save you thousands of dollars. Good luck with the move!