Move it or sell it ? (movers, Uhaul, U-Haul, Ryder)

[pitroad]

I may be selling my home and moving to the west coast in the spring. I really don't think it makes economic sense to move a bunch of furniture and 'stuff' that far (I may be wrong and would love to hear your experience if you have gone through this).
I would be downsizing (just me left) from a 4 bedroom home to a apartment for a year at least to learn the area. My question is what would be the best way to sell a 'lot' of stuff. Is there some company that does this type of thing. I have no idea what value to place on so many things. I have heard the term 'moving sale' and 'estate sale' .... is that what people do to sell a whole houseful of things? Any insight would sure be appreciated.

[jhlcomp]

Depending on regulations in your area you can have a garage sale or just a plain old moving sale. If it were me, I would select the pieces that are most dear or useful to me as I move to an apartment - make it so that it will fit into a POD or two or a uhaul truck. You can have people pack/unpack these for you. If your belongings are not that important to you and you have the means and desire to start fresh - then do so if it makes you happy.

[pitroad]

I guess I could check into what a POD would cost. I'm just afraid it would cost a fortune to move things from the east coast to the west coast.

[sswaring]

I hear ya! I'm doing the same thing...looking at my 15 year old couch and thinking it isn't worth hauling to NC next year.

You could list items individually on craigslist. OR pack up what you want to keep, then advertise a Moving sale in the classifieds and price everything yourself and run the sale. OR call an Estate Salesperson. (phonebook) They usually run the sale right in your home OR pay you a total price to haul all your stuff away and sell it at their leisure. Obviously this last option is the least work for you!

This is normally what you do when granny dies and you need to clear out her house...but there is no reason why you shouldn't do it for a cross country move also!

[needing more]

I would sell all the big things you definatly want to sell on craigslist now and start downsizing yourself to get the most bang for your buck. Then closer to the time you want to move.. check into a POD or moving it VS an estate sale. A garage sale you have yourself and do all the work yourself. An estate sale you hire someone to come in nd do it all for you for a fee or % of $$$ made.

Just as an example.. My mom just moved from MI to south FL and it was $$$ per weight. She filled a 1/3 of a semi trailer and it was over $2200. But she didnt want to buy new for semtimental reasons.

If you are going into an apt. you could reasonably sell everything, rent a trailer from U-Haul and move your essentails (sofa, table, bed, kitchen stuff) and buy all the odds and ends when you get there.

Good luck. We are going to be doing this next yr

[newhandle]

I am moving across country and am only taking four pieces of furniture (not the sofa, not the bed) that mean something to me (were my mother's and such), some kitchen items, sentimental items, papers and cloths. Most of the rest I sold on Craigslit (beware of scammers!!) and on consignment. I found a company to come in after I move to clean out my home and take whatever is left. They will do it for free since I am leaving a few things they want to flip. It is expensive to move and I don't think, for me, there is a lot of sense bringing a lot of things that may not fit in my new home.

[monkey cabal]

Have a garage sale and sell all the big stuff. When you arrive spend a Saturday morning going to garage sales. You will probably end up with comparable stuff.

[Coldjensens]

PODs are very expensive. The base cost is not too bad, but since you will be laoding and unloading it yourself, you will need it to sit there fore several days. Then you have the transportation cost, etc. For us, the cost of hiring movers was about the same as a pod would have been, but we did nto have to hurt ourselves moving heavy furniture around.

We carefully evaluated the cost of replacing our things vs. moving them. We have a lot of antique furniture and fmaily items so leaving or selling everything was not practical for us. Once you have to get a truck of some kind, the cost of bringing more things is not very much more, unless you fill the truck. You have to sell enough off to stay in one truck of whetever size you select. We have a large family, so if we were to sell everything, and then try to replace it, we would have spent the first year after we moved doing nothing but shopping.

We looked at it this way. We could sell our washer and dryer for maybe $300 to $400 each if we ewere lucky and found a buyer in time. Buying new ones would cost $800 to $900 each. Buying used ones from a commercial reseller, would proabably cost $600 each or so. You might eventually find the same or simlar models on craigs list for about the same price that you get selling them, but there was no guarantee that we would find the same kind, plus there is the hassle of trying to find them used and running around looking at them, and thenn moving them and hoping that they work as represented.

We sold off our bicycles becausse they take a lot of space. My sister found used bikes for us at the other end before we moed and the cost was not that much, but many of them turned out to be very poor quality by comparison. It was the same problem. Selling them we got maybe $300 - $400 for six bikes and it was a hassle to sell them all. I did not find a buyer for my bike, so I had to leave it with a friend (I ended up giving it away later). To replace them new would have cost several thousand dollars. Thus, we were stuck trying to track down used ones of similar quality for a good price. It was simply not possible. We had to take whatever my sister could find for the price that we could afford. So we ended up with crummy bikes and wished that we had moved our old ones. It also took several weeks before we had seven bikes again. We did not move our stove because we rented at first and the house came with a stove. By the time we went to buy a stove, we had very little money left and we ended up buying a really cruddy 20 year old stove for $40.00(which we still have).

We sold our beautiful antique Tiger Oak piano for $2500 and figured with that money, we would just find a simlar one rather than moving the 800 pound monster. The money got spent on moving and new home surprise issues and now we no longer have a piano. Besides, unless the market has changed, we could not find one simlar to our old one for less than $4000. You have to wait for a bargain or buy it from a dealer at a premium price. I really wish that we had brought the piano with us. Four years later, we do not have a piano, and our piano playing kids just started college.

The same is true of all of the major items that we dediced not to bring (bicycles, stove, piano, a couch, lawn mower, a playhouse that I built for the kids, even the kitchen sink (literally)). We had difficulty replacing them with like quality for a good price and wish that we would have brought everything.

In short, except for the junk that you do not want anymore, I think that it does not work to sell off your things and replace them at the other end. It sounded like a great idea, but in every instance, it did not work out well. Selling everyhting is a hassle. IF you sell it via grage sale, you will not get much for it at all. Ifyou sell individual items by advertising them, you will spend forever meeting people to come look at them, and in either case, yu may not sell some of the things at all, what do you do then?

Replacing everything new is astronomically expensive. You do not get much selling your things as used items, especially if you are in a hurry, and finding replacement items of suitable quality and price can take months or even years. You can go to 50 garge sales and nto see a front loading washer. You cna go to 50 garage sales and not see a single good quality bicycle. (You will probably never find a beautiful antique tiger oak piano at a garage sale even if you go to 10,000 of them).

Unless you sell everything, you are still going to have to pay for some sort of truck or pod. You are going to pay to get that truck or pod moved to your new location (even if you drive yourself there is still considerable expense). Slightly increasing the size of the load, or even the size of the truck does not cost that much more once you are paying for the transportation of the truck or pod. You can rent a bigger U-haul for a minimal increase in price. If you hire movers, the cost of adding a few more things, is really inconsequential. the only time that you get into really substantial added cost is if oyu fill more than a sinlge semi trailer. However with a househols of 7 people including roughly 500 items (boxes of stuff count as one item each box), we still did nto fill the semi. They put someone else's stuff in the extra space and still did nto fill the truck 100%, but they could have just as easily taken more of our stuff with no added cost to them, so we could have made an agreement with them for more stuff at a minimal cost.

[St.Patrick]

When I looked into PODs the cost for the distance I was travelling put me off, same thing with renting a U-Haul or Ryder truck. I live by myself and was just moving from a bedroom in my parent's house to an apartment (i'm 31 btw) and didn't feel it worth the expense to hire movers to move a bed, desk, bookshelf, dresser, etc... Instead I just did some deep soul searching and sold everything I could possibly part with. This included DVD's, computers, home theater equipment, and all of my furniture. I used a garage sale to sell the furniture and large items and everything else I sold through eBay or Amazon.com. I ended up only needing to bring 6 boxes and a suitcase with me which I easily fit into the back of my car. I had 2 boxes filled with books that I had my parents ship via media mail. For temporary sleeping arrangements I brought an air mattress and kept my sheets/blankets.

Since you stated you are only going to be living in an apartment for about a year, you should look into finding a furnished apartment.

As for myself, I only had 1 major regret with not bringing furniture, and that was not having a comfortable chair to sit down on after moving in. It took 4 weeks to get a comfy chair from a local furniture shop after getting here, and like an idiot I didn't even think about buying an office chair from a local store to tide me over. My butt sure hurt those 4 weeks from sitting on the floor. On the upside, I have not missed a single thing that I sold and was able to use all the money raised to easily by what little furniture I actually needed.

[ferretkona]

Originally Posted by Coldjensens

,,,, We could sell our washer and dryer for maybe $300 to $400 each if we ewere lucky and found a buyer in time. Buying new ones would cost $800 to $900 each. ,,,,.

Wow! People actually spend that much for washers and dryers?
We bought ours new off costco for $500 for the pair, I will be leaving these here when we sell, if the new owner wants them.