Sending your belongings by sea means living without them for months

Three ways to move a household, and they price very differently

Anything you own has to travel by air, by sea or by road, or else it doesn’t travel at all. Air is fast and charged by weight in a way that makes it sensible only for small quantities. Sea is slow, priced by volume, and becomes dramatically cheaper per box the more boxes there are. Road freight sits between them where the geography allows it.

The decision most people actually face is therefore not how to ship but whether to ship, because the cost of moving a modest household by sea is frequently comparable to the cost of replacing the movable part of it. Furniture, in particular, rarely justifies the journey.

What tips the balance is usually not economics. It is the things that cannot be repurchased: a working library, a set of tools accumulated over twenty years, instruments, a child’s belongings, anything with a history attached. Those are worth shipping almost regardless of the arithmetic.

The gap between departure and delivery is the real cost

Sea freight has an unhelpful shape. The transit itself is only part of it, and the rest is collection, consolidation with other people’s consignments, port handling, clearance and inland delivery at the far end, each with its own queue. The result is a total elapsed time measured in weeks or months rather than days, and it is not reliably predictable.

That means you are planning two separate lives: the one that begins when you arrive and the one that begins when the boxes do. People who fail to plan the first of these end up buying, in a hurry and at full price, replacements for things already in transit.

The sensible response is to define an interim kit deliberately. Enough clothing for the season you are arriving into, whatever you need to work, the documents, anything medical, and a very small number of things that make a bare flat tolerable. Everything else can wait, and knowing that it is waiting stops you from buying it twice.

What goes in the boxes is decided before they are packed

Volume is the price, so the moment to be ruthless is before anything is wrapped, not after. Almost everybody who has done this describes shipping a proportion of things they then did not want at the other end, and the proportion is usually embarrassing.

A useful test is whether an object would be repurchased at local prices if it were lost. Applied honestly it removes a great deal of what fills a home, and it protects the things that survive the test. Another is whether the item works where you are going: appliances built for one electrical standard, one voltage or one kind of plumbing are frequently useless abroad.

Pack an inventory as you go, with contents listed by box and photographs of anything valuable or fragile. It is required for insurance and for the paperwork of import, and it is also the only way to find the kettle.

The receiving end has rules and they are not yours

A consignment of personal effects entering a country is a customs matter, and the treatment of household goods belonging to somebody moving there differs from country to country and changes over time. There are usually conditions, usually documentation, and sometimes categories of goods that are restricted, so the current official guidance for the destination is the only source worth relying on and a professional shipper should be able to point you at it.

What is worth understanding in general is that clearance is a step that can stall, that it may require you to be present or contactable locally, and that storage charges can accrue while a consignment waits. Delays at this stage are common and are not usually anybody’s fault.

Anything restricted deserves particular attention before it is packed rather than after it has been loaded. Alcohol, food, plants, certain tools and anything with a battery are the categories that most often cause problems, and a shipper will tell you if asked.

Insurance, and the honest question of what a box is worth

Transit cover is priced against a declared value, and the declaration is a real decision rather than a formality. Under-declaring saves a small amount and caps any claim at a level that would not replace the contents. Over-declaring wastes money on goods that would not, in truth, be replaced.

It is worth reading what the cover excludes, since packing done by the owner rather than by the shipper is a common exclusion, as is damage that can’t be shown to have occurred in transit. This is where the inventory and the photographs earn their keep.

And it is worth accepting, in advance, that something will arrive broken. Sea freight is a rough business conducted by many hands, and the mature attitude is to ship nothing whose loss would genuinely hurt. Anything in that category should travel with you in a bag you don’t put down.