May 16 2007
Getting Our Stuff to Maine
As we’re preparing for our move, some budgeting is in order. In addition to the normal rental expenses (first month’s rent, security deposit, and agency fees, if any), there is the cost of getting our stuff to Portland. This is, of course, a non-trivial expense. The first two options I’ve looked at are PODS and a Budget rental truck. At first blush, for a two bedroom apartment, Budget wins hands down. Here’s the breakdown:
PODS comes in at about $960: $175 to deliver the box to our current address, $189 for storage (what do they need to store?!?), $502 for mileage(!!!), $25 for the delivery fee to our new address, and $70 for tax. Yes, I know those numbers don’t add up exactly, I rounded liberally.
Budget comes up with a quote of about $330 for a 16′ truck (their recommended size for a two bedroom): $302 for two days of truck rental, $56 for an extra day of rental because the drop-off location is closed on the day I said we’d drop it off (which can be changed, of course), and a 10% discount for something, though they didn’t say what. This does not include tax (and I’m not sure whether we’d be taxed at the New York rate or the Maine rate), but that would still only bring the price to about $375, or only about 40% of the PODS cost. Even adding an extra $150 for gas only gets us to about 60% of the PODS cost, and I’m hoping it won’t be quite that many fill-ups.
Looking at the above initial quotes, it’s easy to see which way we’ll be going. Some more investigation is certainly warranted, but I cannot get over how much PODS wants to charge for lugging their box a few hundred miles to Maine. I know gas is high right now, and you have to pay the driver, but that’s just ridiculous. I was hopeful that I might not need to drive a big truck all the way across Massachusetts and up the coast, but it looks like I’d better start working on my side-view mirror merging skills!