Moving is hard enough without the financial pain! Follow these tips for moving on a budget. Save money on your move so you can spruce up your new home with some nice new decorations instead!
How to Move on a Budget
One of the things I hate most about moving is realizing how much stuff I have. I always think that packing and unpacking is going to be a breeze. I think about the stuff I use frequently, and in my mind, that’s all I need to pack. But once I get going, I realize I have so much stuff!! It’s unreal. I’ve moved a lot and this happens every single time! Something else I realize when I move is how expensive it is. The packing materials, the movers, oh my gosh.
There is no doubt about it, moving is expensive!
Follow these moving tips to save some money on your next move
Take your time and plan!
That’s my biggest piece of advice. I have other tips below, but they all fall under the umbrella of time and planning. Don’t wait until the last minute and start tossing stuff into a moving van because you’ll end up spending way more money than you really need to!
Don’t move what you don’t want
Moving is a great time to do some “spring cleaning.” Purge your house of the things you don’t want or don’t use anymore. I always find I have waaaaaay too many cleaning supplies. I really don’t want to move six, half-empty bottles of dish soap. And what about furniture? Maybe you have an old chair you really wouldn’t like to keep, or clothes or kitchenware, anything! Don’t unnecessarily put the cost into moving things you don’t want. Try selling them first, which would be great to have some extra cash to put toward the move (or anything else!). If not, you can donate them or list them as free for pick up on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, or local yard sale Facebook pages. Don’t wait until after you’ve moved to do this, otherwise you’re just moving items for no reason!
But do prepare for your new place
Think ahead to things you may need in your new house or apartment that you might not have right now. This just happened to me. I moved into a new house and realized that two out of the three bathrooms don’t have toilet paper holders. I know, it’s not THAT big of a deal and that’s probably why I didn’t notice it when I did a walk through before moving in. But I want toilet paper holders! So I ran out to Walmart and bought way overpriced standing toilet paper holders. If I had been a better planner, or had more time, I could have shopped around and found the best prices!
Get packing supplies for free (or much cheaper)
Luckily when I moved, I didn’t have too many breakable things to pack up, so I was able to get away with buying only one pack of packing paper, but even then, I felt sick doing so. One pack of packing paper was $6 at Home Depot!! So learn from my mistake and source some old newspapers to wrap your breakable belongings. You can call your local newspaper or your local recycling center and ask if they have newspaper for free, or even for a small charge. If you have friends and family who subscribe to newspapers, ask them to save their old issues for you.
Boxes are incredibly expensive, too. I’m a member of several local yard sale pages on Facebook and people are always offering up used moving boxes for free. How amazing is that! If you spent some time collecting moving boxes as these posts pop up, you could save a ton of money! You can also check out liquor stores, grocery stores, even fast food chains. These won’t be the conventional-sized moving boxes, but they’ll still be free!
Get a little help from your friends
This is an obvious one, but moving companies are extremely expensive. If you can enlist the help of your friends and rent a moving truck, you’ll be paying a fraction of the cost. And the more merrier, too. Since U-Haul and other companies who rent trucks charge by either time or milesage, you want to get it done as quickly as possible, with as few trips as possible. One way you can do this is to stage your house for moving. Organize beforehand by trying to get all your boxes together, all your framed art work, your smaller pieces of furniture, so that you can spend time just loading the truck instead of wasting time thinking about the best way to load it. And if you can fit everything on the truck in one trip, you’ll save miles!
Get excited about your move and stress less about the cost of it! With some good planning, you can save yourself a ton of money. Have you discovered other ways to save money while moving?
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