Moving Tips for Your New Residency, Fellowship, or Job
It’s getting close to July and that means that many of you will be moving to begin your new residency, fellowship, or real-life job – Congratulations! With that next step, though, comes the process of moving all your earthly belongings on to your new residence. Andrea and I are performing a pre-wedding move right now, so I thought I’d give you some tips to get you prepared for yours!
Start By Getting Rid of Junk and Stuff You Don’t Need – Unclutter!
This is probably the biggest and most rewarding thing you can do to prepare for your upcoming move. It’ll probably be the most time consuming, too, but it’s worth it! Start now and by the time you’re ready to move in June, you’ll have gotten rid of a bunch of stuff that you don’t need and won’t have to move it yourself or pay someone to move it.
I’ve been reading Unclutterer for a couple months now and they provide pretty decent tips including a few posts specifically about getting rid of stuff while moving.
One way to do this would be to pick a room or a closet and go through every item in it deciding what’s relevant to your life still. Old clothes you haven’t worn since high school? Gone! Quizzes and homework assignments from freshman year of undergrad? Probably not that important. The hardest thing to get rid of are gifts that sit around and gather dust. It’s nice to keep the memory, but if it’s hidden away in a closet anyway, is it doing you any good?
Decide if You Need Professional Movers
Andrea lucked out with her residency program – they provided relocation assistance that paid for professional movers to relocate her things from her apartment she had during medical school to her new apartment for residency. If you haven’t received any information about such program from your soon-to-be new employer, be sure to ask if they provide this awesome benefit! If they do provide it – be sure to take advantage as it’s the easiest way to move, bar none.
How Much Stuff Do You Have?
Assuming you currently share an apartment or house with roommates, you may not have a whole lot of stuff yet. If you’ve been living on your own, it’s a lot easier to accumulate things to fill up your living space and meet your daily needs. With roommates, you can share responsibilities – I’ll bring the toaster, you bring the microwave - but if you’re on your own, it’s all your responsibility and hence you accumulate more things. Likewise, the bigger your current living space, the more stuff it takes to fill it up.
Figure out how much stuff you have – and how much of it you want to take with you. If you’ve only got a few things, you may be able to move them by yourself. If you’ve got a two bedroom apartment filled with your stuff – the time and hassle you’ll save may be worth paying for a pro.
Call Around for Quotes
As with everything else in the world – call around for quotes before you go with somebody. Also be sure to check reviews for your potential movers to make sure they don’t have any horrible remarks on their record from people like yourself.
Doing it Yourself
Andrea and I decided to move my stuff ourselves. It’s been a daunting, eye opening task after having professional movers do it for me when I started my first job out of college. I’d moved around a lot in college between the internships and different apartments around campus, but this is the first time I’ve moved from a place that was all my own and had 3 years to accumulate stuff and fill up a two bedroom condo.
Packing
Hopefully you’ll be able to declutter your place and get rid of everything unnecessary in your apartment. If so, the packing job that lays ahead of you will be significantly less daunting.
First, you need to figure out what you’re going to put your stuff in. You’ve got several options here – buy or find some cardboard boxes or use a bunch of plastic Rubbermaid containers. There are sites around the web such as MoveOut.com or UsedCardboardBoxes.com that let you purchase cardboard boxes to use during your move. You could also hit up your local grocery/liquor/warehouse stores to see what they have leftover that you could use. Also be sure to check craigslist or freecycle for any offerings.
I was lucky enough to have a bunch of plastic Rubbermaid bins of varying sizes to pack my stuff in. These are handy since they’re sturdy, translucent for easy content identification, and easily reusable. I’ll likely keep many of these bins around for better organization of my stuff in the future.
If you’re able to take your time and do things right, be sure to pack similar items together. For example, box up the food from your kitchen all together instead of combining it with other odds and ends from around your apartment. Additionally, be sure to either label your boxes or be able to easily tell what’s inside them without having to unpackage them. Doing this will allow for easy placement of the boxes in the appropriate rooms of your new place and allow you to easily and quickly unpack.
Renting a Truck
There are several great deals on renting a moving truck. I’ve rented with Budget Truck Rentals in the past after reading some good reviews of the trucks and their service. It was about four years ago, but at the time they were pretty inexpensive and provided a pretty decent truck. They’re especially good if you’re doing a one way move and don’t want to return the truck to the same location that you rented it from.
If you’re doing a local move, check out Ryder. They have an offer right now for up to 25% off your rental if you book online and give you up to 500 miles for the rental. They have vans for $25/day and bigger trucks for $40/day after the discount – not too shabby at all!
If you go with either of these truck rentals, be sure to check on insurance. Your personal car insurance policy probably doesn’t cover the moving vans and you likely don’t want to pay for any damage that may be caused by or to the expensive moving truck – get the insurance.
Loading and Unloading Your Stuff
The most fun part of moving after packing! If you can con some friends into coming over to help load your moving truck with your belongings, that’s your best option. For the price of beer and pizza, you’ll get some decent manual labor out of them!
If you don’t want to burden your friends or you don’t have any close friends in your new city, check out MovingHelp.com where you can find folks to help you load/unload your moving truck. The prices in Columbus for two people and two hours of help ranged from $80 to $150, not too awful and definitely better than doing it all yourself! The help you hire may not have insurance, though, as nearly anyone can sign up to be a moving helper. Just like if you or your friends break something during the move, you probably won’t have any recourse. Another great feature of that website is the user ratings so you can find out what you’re getting yourself into before you hire someone.
Another alternative may be to checkout Craigslist to see if there is anyone on there offering assistance or make your own post asking for help. $20+ an hour isn’t a bad deal to help somebody lift some furniture!
Tags: moving, relocation
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Personal Finance
Great post on managing a move for residency or fellowship. In another post, you may want to cover the tax aspects of a move and address when expenses are deductible and what expenses can be claimed.
Fantastic post idea – thanks for that! Of course, lowering taxable income through the use is always a great idea. I look forward to writing up the post – researching these topics is probably one of the best parts about blogging. Thanks again!