Three Helpful Tips to Decrease Your Moving Costs
While household moving services are far from the cheapest thing you can buy, they’re incredibly helpful if you’re looking to move long-distance and need some help in getting everything organized.
While friends and family can help you move within a city or a metropolitan area, and you can often get help moving larger objects from friends or family with a pickup truck or a minivan, when you’re moving from one part of the country to another it’s often much more difficult to coordinate these things without professional help.
As you likely know, however, household moving is expensive across long distances, so if you’re moving on a budget you should know some good ways to save money on your shipment. Here’s three of them:
1. Pack everything yourself
While household moving companies often include packing as part of their full-service moving services, it’s often much more expensive than if you were to pack everything yourself.
In this regard it’s important to pack properly, and you can read more about proper packing techniques at our Packing Tips for Self-Service Movers blog post. It gives a good rundown on ways to pack your goods properly, and you can often buy specialized boxes for things such as dishes or wardrobes from self-storage companies or even online.
Some household moving companies allow you to buy boxes online direct from them, but you’ll want to give them time to ship if you go that route. You can also get tips from your household moving representative regarding packing specific items safely and securely.
2. Reduce and recycle
Whether you’re moving out of a place you’ve lived in for a year or for ten years, you’re likely going to have accumulated lots of things that you really don’t need to take with you. Homes get cluttered when you have people living in them – it’s something that you really can’t avoid.
By cutting down on items that you likely will only put in storage, or stick in your closet and never ever wear, you can reduce how much you ship (and therefore how much you pay) by having a garage sale or by donating to places like the Salvation Army or Goodwill.
A garage sale will likely net you a bit of cash for your efforts, though, so we recommend doing that first and then donating anything that doesn’t sell. You’ll save money on your shipment while also making a bit of pocket change on the side and getting rid of things you don’t need.
3. Do what you can, when you can
A good idea is to make sure you prepare for everything ahead of time. Getting things like your utilities, cable and internet all setup at your new place will reduce stress during the final days before your shipper arrives to move your household goods and will allow you to focus more on your moving day.
Clearing things out of the way for your movers and making sure they can actually get your furniture and boxes out without any hassle will make things go by faster, allow your shippers to do their job easier and also reduce how much you ultimately have to pay for your household shipment.
These are just a few things that you can do to keep your costs lower – #2 especially – and for more information, you should really visit our household moving articles page. While you’re there, you can fill out our free online household moving quote request form to get multiple quotes from top-rated household goods moving companies emailed to you within an hour or so.
If you are looking to ship a car, you can fill out our free online auto transport quote form to get a free quote from us. We are a top-rated shipper and only work with top-rated carriers. This way, your vehicle is in good hands from start to finish. You can also speak to a representative any time at 800-930-7417. They can answer your questions, give you a quote, book your shipment, and much more.
Since 2007 Dave has written all the content and blogs for American Auto Shipping and during this time added the duties of customer support and transport logistics.
He currently resides in Washington with his three kids and their mom and cat. A fan of Marvel movies and good stories, when not shipping cars Dave can be found working on his novel, enjoying a good book or playing some tournament HALO.
- When to go with an Enclosed Transport - October 2, 2023
- Understanding California’s EV Mandate - August 1, 2023
- Top Reasons Auto Shippers Are Delayed - January 9, 2023