Michael: Door to Door

The halo rising
Over the mountains will soon
Cover us in gray.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Today I’ve got to ante up and pay the bill for shipping our household goods to Panama. It cost $9,000. That’s a lot more than I expected to pay, but it would’ve been a couple of thousand of dollars more if we hadn’t packed the container ourselves.

Initially we had to decide on what size container and what type of service. The sizes are 20’, 40’, or a shared container and the services are: 1. Let the shipping company handle all the packing and unpacking, 2. Do all the packing and unpacking yourself or 3. Do some combination of the two. We opted to for a 40’ and utilized option 3.

We were told by one shipping company that we could pack everything into a 20’ container but for $400 more we opted for the 40’ because, not being very experienced movers, we didn’t want to end up short and having to make rushed decisions about what to leave behind if we couldn’t fit it in. We did have quite a bit of room left over, but I’m comfortable we made a wise decision. The 40’ container cost us $4,200.

Next, we had to decide whether to unpack it ourselves. That would involve renting a truck in Panama and going to Panama City to deal with customs and then unpacking the truck ourselves at our storage unit. For $2,500 we opted to let the shipping company deal with this.

I never seriously considered sharing a container. There just seemed to be too many variables and unknown costs. For example, if the shipping company has to store your goods while they wait for a container to share, the shipping company charges storage fees. What those are and how high they could go, I didn’t look into. Just too many variables for me to tolerate.

A big chunk of the cost that I should’ve known about is the U.S. customs inspection fee. That is one costly x-ray - $2,500. And though the shipping companies don’t quote you that in their estimates, it is listed as a possible cost. I just didn’t bother to investigate.

Another cost that we debated was whether to purchase marine insurance. That would be an extra 2-3% of the claimed value of our goods. But since we packed the container ourselves we wouldn’t be able to get full coverage but would be limited to partial coverage that would only cover our loss if our container was lost at sea.

Another small, 2.5% cost, was using a debit or credit card to cover the shipping cost. I would’ve avoided this and used a wire transfer if I could but B. of A. doesn’t allow for transfers of over a $1,000 unless you’re enrolled in something called Safe Pass. I soon will be but am not at the moment. I couldn’t enroll instantly using a mobile device because of my international phone number, so I’ll have to have a Safe Pass card mailed to my stateside address. But that’s all too late to pay for this bill.

We really won’t know how we did as cost benefit balancers until we see how our goods held up when we unload them at our storage unit. That stress will hopefully come in a few weeks.