Cost of moving

The most common question we are asked, aside from "How did you guys decide to do this?", is "How expensive is it to move?" I figured I would detail here our moving costs and how we reached them.

The single largest moving expense was shipping the car, which cost just over $1,000 (1075 to be exact). While this figure might be jarring to some, I felt it was rather reasonable. Considering that our car is only 6 months old and worth far more than the cost to ship, it was a no brainer to send it over. It was a bit tougher to decide what to do with our Buick. Would we even need 2 cars over there? How close would we be to our jobs? Is it worth paying a grand to ship a car that's worth about three? After some debate we decided to sell the car. We were originally going to offer it to my brother, but when we first told my parents we were moving they immediately bought the car from us for $2500 because one of their cars is about to die. So the new plan is for me to get a scooter/moped on the island. Obviously the weather is always awesome, and they get excellent gas mileage. Poking around on the interwebs it looks like I could get one for about $800-$1000. So selling the Buick covered the cost of shipping the Kia, buying a moped, and left about $500 extra.

The next largest expense was the plane tickets. Ticket prices fluctuate wildly, especially right around the holidays. The cheapest tickets we found were for Tuesday Jan. 3rd since its the middle of the week and after the holidays have concluded. The tickets were $650 for the both of us (320 a piece). We will be flying to Portland first, then straight to Maui. We chose Alaska Airlines because the bag fees were much cheaper than Hawaiian. The first 3 checked bags are $20 a piece; so for $120 Kayleen and I each get 3 bags that can be up to 50 lbs (plus our carry-ons), that's 300+ lbs worth of stuff! Any large/heavy items that we won't be bringing with us such as furniture will be cheaper to replace than to ship. It's also important to remember that there are people on Maui moving to the Mainland that also don't want to ship their stuff so it can be found cheaply.

We will also be sending a few items through the mail/UPS either because we don't want the airlines handling them, such as my xbox, or because it's cheaper to do so, such as Kayleen's children's books which can be sent via Media mail. Perhaps another 150 bucks for that. We will also be renting a car for the first week since our car will be there 2 days after we arrive and it will be useful to have 2 vehicles while we are looking for jobs/apartments, so another $250 for that. I'm also budgeting about $500 in order to replace the things we won't be bringing with us as well as $250 for misc expenses such as registering the car. I'm not adding in our security deposit/rent since we'd be paying that no matter where we moved and the point of this is to show the costs associated with moving to Maui specifically.

Believe it or not we will actually be saving money in a couple areas with our move. First off we are currently season ticket holders for the Sounders. Obviously we won't be using those so we sold the tickets to my brother for $950. The other thing that will be cheaper is car insurance. Since we will only be insuring one vehicle at first and will be living in a less crowded area our rates will be going down. It also helps that I recently turned 25.

So the final tally looks something like:
$1075 (car shipment)
+ $900 (moped)
+ $650 (plane tickets)
+ $150 (bag fees)
+ $150 (other shipping)
+ $250 (car rental)
+ $500 (replacements)
+ $250 (misc)
- $2500 (selling Buick)
- $950 (Sounders tickets)
- $100 (insurance)
------------------------
Grand total: $375

Not bad for moving to Paradise.