Price to move
 

What are experiences with the price of a mover, coming from the northeast - say PA or NJ? To The Villages

i am not talking about moving all our furniture, just some.
Living room furniture, boxes of kitchen stuff, towels, sheets, clothes, some fairly new mattress?

We are planning to buy a lot of new furniture.

Are we talking $7500? $10,000? $20,000?

Thanks in advance.

Budget 10K and work backwards from there. I think my two U-Haul, U-Box “aka pods” were around $3 K. It varies so much depending on how much you do yourself. With a POD or U-box you load and unload. Add movers to load and unload them and your costs start to increase. You have to figure your budget and call some people and decide how much you’re doing yourself.

Dam, with the exception of our 1886 vintage grandmother clock, all the furniture in our house probably doesn’t add up to $10K. Scrap all the stuff and reload with some really good quality and affordable used furniture. The Villages, and the surrounding areas, probably has one of the highest mortality rates of well to do folks you’ll ever come across. Take advantage of the incredible bargain hunting opportunity and let the old stuff go.

We moved here from Marblehead, Ma in 2007 and I do not recall the cost, but it far less costly than a mover and I would guess probably lower than any of your numbers by half. Obviously prices have increased.

Getting a cost estimate is easy. Moving & Storage Company, Moving Containers | PODS

The PODs process for us.\

My wife and I were 63 at the time and in good health.
Like you we decided to buy new at The Villages so had limited items like you describe.
We guesstimated a 16 foot Pod.
We sold, gave away, scrapped, every thing not going south'
We collected boxes to pack stuff not going south
We laid out a 16 ft pod dimension in our garage and placed packed stuff in that template.
POD was dropped off two weeks prior to move.
Moved stuff from Template to POD
Scheduled POD Pickup day before closing.
Stayed at Bed and Breakfast day before closing.
Closed and left for the Villages.
POD delivered within several days.
We unloaded (Note a good sturdy Hand truck helped the whole process)

Note We still brought too much stuff.
Also, if you spend some time here prior to move, Do yourself a favor and go to the Estate sales before you buy all new. If you could spend a month here prior to moving, I'm sure you could find some great buys that might also eliminate the need for bringing more stuff south.

Moved from MD in 2020 for $7,500. About 6,000 lbs, enough to fill a house with the exception of one king size bed.

We used a U-pack 30 foot ABF trailer truck. They drop it off just like a pod and you pay for the inside length that you use. They then put up a bulkhead and will hall a machine or something else in the same trailer if you don't use all 30 feet of it. If you can't handle the loading just hire a couple strong young men to do it for you. Cheaper than a pod and it can handle all that you have in one trip. I also agree with most here, don't bother bringing down heavy dark furniture as you will soon wish you had not.

Save yourself a lot of grief. Purge and purge a lot more. Even when you feel you've purged enough, you will still get rid of things when you get here. Save so much on moving costs and just get new or used furniture here to fit your new home.

Moved here from Boston area in March of this year. Had quotes for typical moving companies that ranged between $10k and $13k - for a 4 bedroom home ~4800 SF.

Ended up doing two 16 foot PODS for ~$7k. We packed ourselves and hired someone in TV area to unload (James Dose - search on FB) for ~$1k. So ~$8k all in.

Note: once we decided to go the PODS route we definitely limited the stuff we moved. We decided to get all new furniture for our new home - which is highly recommended in retrospect (but that is a different conversation).

$7000 for a full-service move of our entire house in 2020 from MD

I used JK Moving. I moved a 4 bedroom house for around 11,000 and that included some special crating needed for some expensive items. They are much different than the other big movers, no 3rd party handoff. Your stuff goes on the truck and never comes off until it reaches your house. The same driver that picks up your stuff delivers it. They deliver to Villages all the time. Highly recommended. The other big ones like Mayflower, Atlas, etc., all transferred to 3rd party companies. I did do the packing myself, but they also did some packing too. You can have them do all the packing if you like. Once I got here I did throw even more away, so I agree with everyone. Purge.

I worked in the moving and storage business for 50 years. Don’t rely on the comments you see on this but instead have a professional mover come out and give you a free estimate then you’ll know where you’re at.

I liquidated everything in my 5-bedroom house in Virginia and moved here with just my clothes and my SUV. Best thing I ever did. It felt great to get rid of the old stuff and to completely start over. I spent about $10K to furnish a 2-bedroom house in The Villages. The only things I miss are my 9-foot Brunswick Gold Crown pool table and my 30-year old Bose 901 speakers. But the Definitive Technology tower speakers sound just as good. And my cost of living decreased by about 75 percent (no exaggeration).

It all depends on how many rooms of furniture and if the moving company is doing the packing. It's very expensive.

2010 Our first house we loaded a uhaul bringing down what we needed for our parents to stay comfortably. $595, gas $143, drove straight through.

2012 second house uhaul $795, gas $197, no hotel.

2014 third house used Pods, easier to pack unload than uhaul. Cost won’t help because we got multiple discounts, still in the $1200 range.

2021 Pod storage in SC, for 3 months so the boys could remove their stuff we brought down at their request. Then pod transported to our fourth house to unload 2 bedrooms and dining room.

Our furniture is far better than the junk made today, plus I like pecan color instead of the white set ($7,000) we bought for the fourth bedroom.

In just a few months furniture prices has risen 45% on the items we are considering. It wasn’t a good quality before the increase, so off the list.

We moved 9/24 from NY. We had lived in our home almost 40 years. We used one 16’ POD and had it stored at the POD facility in Ocala for about a month until we closed All in all it was approx $4,000. No problems with pick up or drop off at our new home

January 25'. One way Uhaul 28' truck with car dolly, 5 days. $1,200

If I could have a do-over, uhaul trailer attached to car. Buy all new furniture. Why? Furniture in previous house was purchased to fit in that home and decor. Bringing it down to fit in this house and decor......nope.

These prices are insane. I guess I'm just really frugal. If I couldn't fit it into a u-haul trailer and my truck it didn't come along. Of course that is easy here as there are endless estate sales and items for sale on FB.

Sadly that means I left all my mounts up in MN. But my wife wanted a new decor to fit FL and our new house here. Thankfully I have buddies with big log houses where my mounts fit perfectly.

Exactly what we did

We moved very little from Chicagoland. But did bring a bedroom set, and living room furniture, and had full service mover. Cost was about $10k four years ago. If we had it to do again, would have brought valuables only. Would have jam packed our car and maybe a small U-Haul, and done everything ourselves with no mover. So easy to get extremely good quality used here. After all, anything brought from up north is really used too isn’t it.

Moved from Annapolis Md 2021 and had a very heavy wood dining table and other items. About 10 x 10 by 8 high. Had very high quotes 5000. Said that was too much. A company from Baltimore called and made a deal for 2000. Would sent someone to estimate. The only question was the weight of the table and assembly. I said i could get help at The Villages. Turns out there was a shipment to Jacksonville and mine filled up the space. One of the movers said the table was too heavy and where is your help. Me, you can attach the legs. The three of us spent the night in our new home and it worked out great.

Moving companies are some of biggest scams going. If I was me I order pod, load it, let pods move it to your driveway and unload it at you leisure (3 or 4 days), call pods to pick up empty pod. Done.

My guess for a quality mover (do not hire anyone who will broker your load) is $15k.

There are sites out there to give you an estimate without sales rep. follow-up. They will start out with your houses SF'age and some will move (no pun intended) into the number of rooms, piano, etc.

My friends are moving down from N.J. and using Issac Movers; the cost is $9,000.

Ok,

Seems like the lowest cost is U Haul - not interested in driving a u haul that far

Pods is next - probably the best alternative

Mover is pricey, probably between 10k and 15k, with lots of risk.

The more you do yourself, the less it costs.
U Haul = packing, loading, driving, unloading, unpacking
POD = packing, loading, unloading, unpacking
Mover = unpacking

I have more money than skill in packing or endurance for loading and unloading.

Movers have risks; it’s scary to stand in the road and wave goodbye to all your stuff. We’ve used movers three times with very good results. There has been stress and there was one sacrificial waffle iron but everything else was good. Maybe we’ve been lucky - YMMV.

Ask your potential movers! Also, will anything be stored at either end? What are insurance requirements, if it is stored somewhere?

you need to get estimates from different movers. Remember, these are only estimates, the actual charge is based on the weight of the truck before and after your belongings are loaded. I moved with Liberty and got a $600 credit from the estimate, because I had the truck weighed. I researched pods, and the moving van was cheaper, and all the boxes were free. This was about 10 years ago though

Pods are the scam, you do all the work, all they do is drive it. We look into Pods from Dallas to TV and it was 9k.

We went with a local company, and it was $5850, ( we were going to do it ourselves but after the 26' Penske truck, gas, hiring help on both ends it was only a $1200 different) we did do a huge purge, pretty much all we have is two bedroom sets with only one bed, outside couch, gun safe, small bar, hutch, tool box, power washer, office desk and a lot of boxes. See you June 28th.

If you can get help for larger pieces go with Pods. You'd be surprised how much even the smaller ones hold. Used lots of bubble wrap and blankets. Loaded it to roof. 2017 move from RI cost me a little over $1k

Holy Crap!!! Why does your bed weigh 3 tons?!?!?!

P.S. Pods' website says they're having a 10% off sale. I'll know more next week, flying cross-country to help a friend move/drive out and they're doing the move via Pods.

Moving
 

Moved in May from Philadelphia area. Another relative moved slightly earlier
Mileage is a big part of the cost. Both moves were 26 foot trucks. Not huge savings on smaller truck. Two Men and a truck was approx $13,000 without packing assistance. American Van Lines was under $10,000 with packing assistance. Pricing is seasonal. Summer is peak season so will cost more.
Two Men used good English speakers who loaded, drove and unpacked at the other end. American Van lines had nonexistent customer service. I ended up calling a general number and had them look up dispatch to know when the truck would arrive to pick up after not being able to reach the official contact person and at the other end when it would drop off!
American Van Lines subcontracted to small no name service companies. People in PA end were not native English speakers although one of crew could understand English. Handed off to different crew to drive to Florida and drop off-Probably to risky for Illegals to make the interstate trip ;) While American Van Lines was not customer friendly, they were cheap and got the job done. They packed things well and loaded the truck with an amazing amount of stuff fitting in the truck. The Person using Two Men had a much smaller load. Warm and friendly staff.

Other major carriers tend to be more expensive than American but more customer friendly.

Could save money by using PODS or similar service and hiring staff as needed to fill/unload POD at each end. Figure on $3,000 to transport 1,000 miles plus POD rental plus cost of people you hire to fill/empty POD. PODs are available in smaller sizes for a small load.

Check out PODS. We used a year and a half ago. Used 1 lg and 1 small was around 3K. No problems.

I am amazed that people will pay thousands of dollars to move used furniture across the country. You can buy and sell used furniture anywhere. I have never owned anything that was worth paying a mover to move thousands of miles.

This is excellent advice. Unless something has tremendous sentimental value, it will probably be cheaper to sell it and buy used down here. I recommend pods. Hire someone to help you load and unload the pods.

I think we spent more money moving some furniture than the furniture was worth.

Six years ago, I moved here from Maryland. Brought only wanted/needed items. Filled about one third of a moving van. Cost about $5,000. JK Movers.

We moved our furniture down here in Feb 23 from NW Pennsylvania, 7 U Haul pods. We did bring to much stuff...lol Anyways, it cost around 7k. That didn't include loading and unloading of the pods. U Haul does have contracts with people to do that. A lot of people say sell everything and buy here but the cost isn't equal, not even close. Especially if you have quality mattresses and furniture. I have yet to find someone locally that does sell quality instead of the factory line type stuff that falls apart in a couple of years...

I’m moving about $20,000 worth of stuff for less than $3000.

They wasn’t scam when I used them 11 years ago, maybe they gotten smart like rest of moving industry?

Looking at doing same thing from Michigan. Three U-boxes (5’ by 9’) quote was $1,800 (up to 9 day transit). 16’ PODS was about $3,000

If you were using any pods, be very aware of that the way things don’t break is that they are packed perfectly. Everything has to be positioned correctly and very tight so when it goes down the street or gets dropped on your driveway, nothing will shift. We moved with pods actually rat pack pods. We did a practice furniture shopping before we moved so we knew the comparison of what we had and what we would buy . We made the decision to bring quite a bit of our furniture here for as one of the other comments said we didn’t like what we saw here as far as the quality to price we were used to the furniture that we had purchased that was very expensive when we did and we didn’t mind not looking coastal Just a new bedroom set alone to match the same quality would’ve been significantly more than shipping. Everything we did that is something for you to decide and what works best for you of course.

The cost changed a bit per season and we were somewhere around 3K per largest pod.

The most important thing for us that I wanted to share was we found our Packers on U-Haul’s Packers recommended site. it’s kind of like an Amy’s list of names but you don’t have to be using U-Haul. We did not. We worked very closely with them coming from Denver and they were brilliant. We had multiple pods that went into storage before it came to our house so with multiple moves of the goodsand I think we had one glass broken it wasn’t even something important enough to remember. Good luck to you.