New2Maine.com

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!

Checking my Feedburner stats and my Google Analytics report, I notice that New2Maine.com has actually had a couple of visitors. Welcome! I haven’t posted a link to this site anywhere yet, and I haven’t even registered it with Technorati or anything, so I’m pleased that, in just four days of existence, a handful of (un?)lucky souls have stumbled upon our little site. We hope you’ll come back often and listen in as we head up to Portland and make a go of it as Mainers.

With our attempts at online apartment hunting meeting with poor results thus far, we’ve started getting somewhere from an unexpected source: family friends. It turns out that more family members than we could have imagined know someone who lives in or near Portland. We’ve started to get names and numbers of people to talk to up there. None of these referrals have turned out to be landlords looking for tenants, but this is certainly and interesting and positive development. Rather than thinking She and I are nuts for wanting to move to Maine, most of our family has been very supportive (though I suspect there are some selfish motivations in there–almost all of them tell us how they can’t wait to come visit and have some lobster). The apartment hunt continues, but now with some actual human contact too and not just virtual hunting.

So I’m reaching the conclusion that May is a bit too early to be looking for an apartment for August 1. I’ve heard back from another apartment owner who said that she only accepts small dogs (ours is 65 pounds–not exactly small), but no news from anyone who is even able to show us their apartment. She and I are beginning to wonder whether it’s even worth going up over Memorial Day.

We have tried a few others websites. An interesting service called Rental Want Ads posts apartment wanted messages for landlords to view. We did this, but I don’t know that we’ll get any response (again, May is just too early). We’ve also spent some more time on Craig’s List, and Rent.com too. Nothing promising, but we push on. Someone has to have a place for us to live up there!

I’ve never been big on the whole apartment hunting thing. The last apartment She and I lived in fell into our laps through some friends at church. We’re currently living with a roommate while we save for The Big Move, and he did all the work to find this place. So needless to say, I’ve not much experience when it comes to looking for a place to live. Couple that with the fact that the place we’re looking to live is 275 miles away, and apartment hunting is pretty damned hard to do.

I’ve recently been spending some time checking out what Craig’s List has to offer, and I’ve emailed a few people about apartments. So far I haven’t had much luck. Looking in May when you want to move in August 1st certainly doesn’t help any. The few landlords I have heard back from either have already rented their places or plan to well before August. I’m sure that Craig’s List will be more helpful as the moving day approaches, but so far it’s only been useful for giving us an idea of housing costs.

We’ve already been up to Portland in February and spoke to a realtor in Scarborough about rentals. As expected, he didn’t have anything to show us given the nearly six month lead time. She and I will be going back up for Memorial Day weekend (which also happens to be our second anniversary) to do some more scouting. I’m hoping I’ll be able to find at least one or two apartments that we can actually see then, but I’m not holding my breath. If nothing else, we’ll use the time to enjoy more of Portland’s dining scene and to help narrow down the exact area we want to call home. So far Scarborough is tops on the list, with Portland and South Portland running just behind. Westbrook and some of the towns north of Portland are also options.

On tap for this afternoon, I’ll be adding some more bits and pieces to New2Maine.com and scouring the web for rental sites that list Maine properties. I guess it really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but most of the sites I’ve seen so far offer summer rentals with weekly rates in the $800-1000 range to start. That’s what we’re hoping to find for a monthly rental, so the listings I’ve seen haven’t been of much use. I’ll report back tomorrow with my findings.