Shipping Your Items with a Moving Company

Vehicle transport and household goods transport has a lot more in common than you might think. The businesses are set up in much the same way, you have brokers who connect you to carriers and those carriers might be a father son team who just own one truck or they might be a large company that owns twenty trucks.

But, unlike auto transport, there is a lot of preparation.

Packing up your house is tons more work than getting your car ready for transport. Everything has to be wrapped and boxed before the truck arrives and this can take weeks. Some moving companies can pack up your things for you but of course that costs much more. Most of the time people prefer to leave just a few difficult things for the movers and pack the rest themselves. Even more so than auto transport you have to communicate with your moving company. If they need to pack something they need to know about it way before so they can bring the correct supplies.

You will also have to weigh everything in order to get an accurate estimate. This means knowing exactly what you are going to ship months prior to the actual move and actually weighing it with a scale. I don’t recommend cutting corners when doing this either, I’ve heard horror stories where people are charged way more than they expected because they either didn’t weigh everything correctly or they didn’t plan exactly what they’re going to bring ahead of time. Don’t be like those people.

Making arrangements ahead of time is ten times as important when moving compared to just shipping a car. Call as far in advance as possible, at least two months, but if you know exactly where you are going a year in advance it’s never too early to start doing research. If you are flying out you will want to have your things packed and ready to go a week or two before your scheduled departure. You don’t want to have to reschedule your flight and pay extra because you didn’t give your moving broker enough time to find a driver. There are less moving trucks than there are auto transport trucks and each trucks takes one person’s things at a time. Availability could be a huge issue for you if you don’t make plans ahead of time.

And like anything else, read the fine print. These people are moving almost all of your worldly possessions so make sure you know what is guaranteed and what isn’t. Be smart, communicate well and your move will go smoothly.