autorock

My Friend works for a company who has factories both here and in China and said I can ship my stuff on their account (costing me £600-£700). Our move is going to be London to the Gold Coast.

So I'm toying with the idea of doing our own shipping:
• Buy boxes/packing materials and pack/wrap stuff ourselves
• Hire local removalists to move our stuff from our London flat to his factory in Hertfordshire.
• Load stuff into a 20" container with appropriate customer paper work/labelling etc.
• Organise removalists to move stuff from the container Brisbane port to our house on the Gold Coast.

The way I figure it, even if I costs me £200 for packing materials, a generous £500 for the London removals and the same in Qld, it'll be less than £2k (plus insurance)...

This is about half price... HUGE!

Now, please anyone who can drive a truck through my plan, please let me know all the details I've overlooked....

Also, anyone who has done this and knows where the pitfalls lie (and and other great tips and tricks) please let me know!!!

DrWho

I doubt you'd save much at all on a 2,750 quote for a 20' box...

You're doing this in different stages with different people and I suspect as usual the sum of the parts will be greater than the whole... and the amount of agravation, time, etc that you are going to burn on this to save - even at the wildest 50% - is surely just not worth it... there's enough other stuff happening when you emigrate without getting involved in all this... give it to a professional and let them do it all for you... I did, despite having spent 25 years in the shipping/transport business... just my 2c...

JCSUPERMOTO

Port fee/and all the other consignment fees to boot/custom fees?

autorock

Thanks for your 2c DrWho.

Any idea who I can get shipping with for £2,750? Cheapest I can find is about £3,600.

DrWho

I used George Baker... Your rate seems high but then much of it will be based in USD so things will have gone up since I moved 2.5 years ago...

autorock

Just for future reference (in case I do end up going down the conventional route!), how did you find them?!

autorock

Yeah, have to find out these costs from the freight forwarding company. Thx..

DrWho

Fine... they use Kent International as their agent over here who are one of the largest around... for me in Sydney they did a good job... If I ever move internationally again I'd use them...

hoofie2002

The funny thing is, I would assume that shipping rates for a container would have crashed. The Baltic Dry index has gone through the floor with some containers being shipped almost free due to empty ships, although port charges etc still have to paid.

It doesn't look like the removal/shippers are passing on any reduction in their shipping costs does it ?

DrWho

Eastbound rates have been zero for many consolidators for a long time... for the shipping lines it's just equipment repositioning and if you can get someone to pay the terminal handling at either end instead of you then why not ship free... Evergreen used to (still does?) have a box ship sailing Westbound around the world just picking up M/T's...