Meggers is moving across the country, so she asked Questionland for some help:

I have a small studio apartment of stuff that I need to move across the country. My car is too small to pull a trailer. Preliminary inquiries into renting a truck & pulling my car or hiring a you-pack-we-move service have resulted in quotes of about $1000. At that rate I might as well sell everything here and purchase used stuff in the new city. Isn’t there a better option? Help!

Turns out fellow Questionlander, whiskeypony, has done this trek many times and had a bunch of helpful advice:

When you specify that you’d like to load and retrieve your things from the depot instead of in front of your apartment building, the cost is decreased dramatically.

I’ve moved across the country multiple times, though, and every other time I’ve sold my furniture and shipped everything I need through the mail. Big boxes shipped through non-media mail is not as expensive as you think – around $50 for a 3′ square box. By selling everything else you get this great feeling of being unhindered by stuff, and you also get a bunch of dollars in your pocket for the move!

You can read whiskeypony’s whole response here. And Meggers was so thankful for the advice she granted a mushroom as thanks—and now they’re both this week’s Answer of the Week winners! Thanks to whiskeypony’s helpful advice, both Meggers and whiskeypony will receive a $25 gift card to Pagliacci Pizza.

Congratulations!

Megan Seling is The Stranger's managing editor. She mostly writes about hockey, snacks, and music. And sometimes her dog, Johnny Waffles.

8 replies on “What’s the Cheapest Way to Move Across the Country?”

  2. Word of caution: I’ve also shipped my stuff through freight and mail on a cross-country move and, while the cost was certainly cheap, it got smashed to shit (my guess is from the boxes being thrown as they’re loaded and unloaded), so be sure to take anything even remotely breakable/valuable with you in the car.

  4. I shipped household goods via train and saved a bundle. The only requirement was that no box could weigh more than 50 pounds. You must be able to take the boxes to the depot and pick them up at the other end. Everything arrived in time and intact.

  5. A long time ago, before I had a car, I moved household goods by Greyhound Package Express and picked them up at the destination a week or two later after I found a place to live. I’m told that, even if that service is still available, they can’t be held because of concern about bombs. I guess the terrorists won, in that little arena at least. But it was cheap, and no damage–it just went from the baggage compartment to racks in the depot, it didn’t have to traverse miles of conveyor belts in a giant centralized hub somewhere, or get thrown around and smashed by gorillas loading trucks.

  6. @2,

    My sister briefly worked for UPS. Their strategy for loading a truck involves building a “wall” of boxes in the truck, then throwing other boxes over it until full; rinse and repeat.

  7. Thanks for the advice, everyone. I am seriously tempted to send a box using each of these methods just to compare them. For it to be true science I’d have to include a raw egg in each box, of course.

  8. I moved from NYC to Seattle in 1991 by buying a used panel van from a used car lot in Queens and selling it to a used car lot on Aurora. I lost about $500 on the second transaction, but still came out way ahead in terms of total cost of the move.

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