How We Moved Across The Country For $3,045

The time has come: we’re about to leave our cozy tiny house in Georgia and hit the road again. We’re once again going to be ‘real’ nomads 😉 !

It’s been almost 6 months of this Georgia tiny house tangent as a result of the pandemic and all my international travel being cancelled, and now I’m culling my items again in the attempt to live out of a 40L backpack. This preparation for moving made me reflect on the last time I actually took all my stuff with me for our cross-country move from NYC to Seattle in 2015.

It seems like everything is more expensive in New York City. I understand some of it, such as rent, since it’s an island and there is very limited space people can fill. As a result of that, moving within NYC also costs an arm and a leg (though rents have been decreasing during the pandemic as people leave the area 😉 ).

Anyway, I paid $700 to move TEN BLOCKS in NYC. That was me deciding “I was worth it” and “I didn’t need to carry furniture up 4 flights of stairs” only to realize…I was wrong 🙂 . I felt like I was dealing with the mafia when working with that particular moving company and it did not decrease my stress level one iota. And this was the best company I had contacted – many simply never returned my calls.

So after realizing I was about to pay an extra month of rent to move half a mile, I started looking into ways to cut my costs, especially since the actual movers or trucks are not where the expenses end. On top of that, you have to have boxes, packing materials and moving blankets to get your stuff from point A to point B.

When I started looking at estimates of how much it would cost to get all these accessories needed to move, it was too much for my brain to handle. Luckily this research came in handy when we decided to move away from NYC and I wanted to do it in a way that was frugal and kept my stress to a minimum.

Moving across the country seems really daunting. I was freaked out by it, especially since my partner had only been to the southern-most part of the west coast (San Diego) while we were moving to Seattle (the northern-most part of the west coast). Logistically I tried to decide the best way to approach this move.

Options we thought of included:

1. I drive us (my partner doesn’t have license) across the country in a uhaul (which sounds horrible and terrifying)
2. We get rid of all our stuff and re-buy it (We calculated it and this turns out more expensive than just shipping it at full price)

So instead of the above options, we decided to keep most of our large items, get rid of anything we don’t actually use, and ship the rest across the country. In the end we were able to do this for a little over $3,000, which I don’t think is bad for moving your life across almost 3,000 miles. Here’s how we did it:

Book In Advance/During The Off Season 

Like many aspects of planning in my life, I started searching for a cross-country moving company way in advance. I started calling around in January for a July move so I could cost out what it would be and budget accordingly. Well, my neurotic tendencies bore fruit this time because I discovered that:

1. Moving companies have on and off seasons with different prices
2. Some companies allow you to book during the off season (January) for an on season (July) move at off season prices

As a result of these revelations, I booked our July move in January for $3,045, which was HALF of the July estimates. For once my preoccupation with planning paid off 😉 . The company we used is called U-Pack. If you see giant trucks with a green “ABF” on the side, that’s them. They partner with the freight company ABF to drag stuff all over the place.

Anyway, this was the price for a part of a trailer that U-Pack provided. After a minimum area, they charge you by the foot. We did end up going a foot or two over, but it didn’t break the bank as you can see. Originally we were going to use one of their enclosed Cube options they call a ReloCube, but I discovered that those are not allowed to be parked in lower Manhattan (where we lived at the time), so instead we had a tractor trailer parked outside our house for an hour or so…not sure how that’s better Manhattan, but ok 🙂 .

Move The Stuff Yourself

Want a work out? Just move your own furniture 🙂 . It will make your muscles sore for days, is free (instead of a fancy gym membership) and gives you more appreciation (or disdain 😉 ) for all the shit you own – win, win, win!

This is obviously partially in jest because moving stuff is HARD and now that I’m at the old, old age of 31, if I owned stuff, I would pay someone else to move it. As the wise Murtaugh said “I’m getting too old for this shit”, but at the ripe age of 25 when I moved across the country, I was totally physically capable of moving my stuff myself and did so to save a pretty penny.

We loaded our items onto the truck when it parked outside our Manhattan apartment and unloaded it when it arrived at our new place in Seattle. No backs or relationships were broken in the process 🙂 .

Gather Free Shit

Back to the accessories conundrum: I found a way to get sturdy moving boxes for free in NYC. I learned from doing research online that grocery and liquor stores recycle all their boxes that carry bottles and heavy items. You can just ask a customer service rep if they have any boxes they’re getting rid of and they’ll give them to you!

I also discovered that in lower Manhattan at least, there are a lot of businesses that have shipments coming in, which means a lot of boxes. If you walk down the street during recycling day, there are countless pre-wrapped bundles of clean boxes just sitting there.

My partner was originally skeptical of this approach since they are boxes from the street 😉 , but after inspecting them agreed there was nothing weird or sketchy about them so we used them for years to come. I suspect other major cities might have a similar ‘free box’ community and know that the grocery/liquor store hack is available everywhere.

The way I got some packing blankets and bubble wrap was actually the height of ridiculousness, but I was in the middle of my “Tightwad Phase” so what can you expect 😉 ? In 2014 I visited a friend in Seattle and saw the city for the first time. It was actually this visit that made me fall in love with the city and that skyrocketed Seattle onto and to the top of our “Where Should We Move Next?” list.

This friend had just moved and was lamenting the cost of it all. She also was saying that she had all these moving blankets and bubble wrap left over that the moving company wouldn’t take back. She offered it to me and I…flew across the country with those items in my carry on. Yes. I carried a giant thing of bubble wrap and some moving blankets onto a plane like it was a normal thing to do to save maybe $100. I didn’t say all my ideas were good 😉 .

Conclusion

So that’s how we moved across the country for $3,045. I booked in advance, moved our own stuff and gathered free moving supplies. A transition that I was concerned would cost a cool $7,000 ended up being less than half of that. I hope that these tips help you if you’re contemplating a move in the future – though obviously there’s also the option of getting rid of all your stuff and starting over elsewhere like we did in September. Then moving is just the cost of a plane ticket 😉 .

How much have your moves cost in the past? Did you find any hacks to decrease the price?