Cost Affective Moving
You may want several movers to come to your home to help you plan the move and to give you estimates. You can register in MovingVanLine.com and the movers of this website will contact you. It helps if you decide what items you want the movers to handle: You may want them, for example, to handle large furnishings only, while you take clothing and boxes. Always plan to handle jewelry and other valuables yourself.
Make your mind up on who will do the packing of your items. You’ll save time if you have the mover pack, but on local moves particularly, packing can amount to half or more of a moving company’s price. And, in a Consumer Reports survey of MovingVanLine.com customers, 55 percent of those who had the company do the packing reported damage, compared to 32 percent of those who did the packing themselves.
But having a company pack does give you a better basis for filing a claim if damage occurs. Majority of movers will not pay a claim for damage to goods you packed unless the outside of the carton has been visibly dented.
Items which are not breakable can be packed by you and the expert packer frm MovingVanLine.com can pack all the high-risk items. This will minimize the cost of your moving.
Most movers at MovingVanLine.com limit their liability for loss or damage to 60 cents times the item’s weight in pounds. That would be $3, for example, for an expensive five-pound vase. You may want to pay extra for “actual- value protection,” which costs about $5 per thousand dollars of coverage and will pay the full-replacement cost of an item minus depreciation. One more option is “full-value protection,” which does not deduct for depreciation. Full-value protection costs about $8 per thousand dollars of coverage, but you can cut the cost if you agree to a $250 deductible.
If you have the mover do the packing, you may pay $300 or more just for the boxes. You can cut costs by getting your own boxes, or by asking the mover about used boxes, which they sometimes supply free.
Be sure that the estimate makes clear the services to be performed and all the major items to be transported. Otherwise, the carrier may want to charge extra for work you thought was included.