As a long-time immigrant to a few countries, one thing we’ve gotten fairly proficient at is moving house in complex ways: securing visas, houses on another continent, banking with no credit history, etc etc. One of the most complex, and easily mistaken parts of the process is moving your goods overseas, and the stakes are quite high. Shipping by air can easily run into the thousands of £££ for just a few large items. As the freightos blog suggests, shipping less than 45kg by air can cost at least $34/kg whereas getting beyond 300kg gets all the way down to $5/kg, and if you use ocean freight this gets much lower. The current rate to ship an entire euro-pallet (800mm x 1200mm at 1m high) which will fit 24 small u-haul moving boxes from USSEA (the freight terminal in Seattle) to GBLGP (London) is around $250-300 so around $12.50/box which is around the same price as a single 45kg box sent by air. To ship an [ENTIRE 20 foot container](https://www.icontainers.com/help/20-foot-container/) runs around $3200 right now (as of Jan 2024). That 20′ container measures 6.10m long x 2.44m wide x 2.59m high, so it will hold a bit more than 960 of those small boxes, running you around $3.30 a box. The key difference here is the timing. Ocean freight can tend to run about 4-6 weeks to send items, whereas air frieght can be a week or less. But what are you in such a hurry for, really?
In this brief post, I’m going to provide a bit of a rundown on how things work and how to get the best deal for shipping your belongings. This can be achieved, if you are patient, by sea freight, that is, loading your boxes into a shipping container which is shipped by sea.
The first thing to observe is that when you’re working at pallet / container level, the size isn’t quite so high stakes. You could easily pay the same to ship 5-6 boxes by plane that you might spend to ship an entire 1m3 pallet of boxes as freight. So while I’m not going to encourage you to send your car or large furniture, it’s worth pausing giving away all your worldly goods. However, it’s also worth wondering how much you really care about belongings? Heirloom furniture, dishes, and Christmas ornaments all might have a particular sentimental value, and I can understand that completely. But what about your everyday dishes? Mattresses, couches and furniture? It’s likely you can sell or donate these things locally before moving and then when you arrive in your new home find replacements in charity shops or via online platforms like freecycle or freegle. This has worked well for us – and again, with a bit of patience and time you can furnish a whole house for very little expense, provided you don’t mind a bit of vintage and the charm of mismatched housewares.
So let’s say you’ve gotten down to your core belongings that are precious, unique, or useful enough to justify shipping (for me this involves pretty much all clothing which is rather hard to find in appropriate sizes). And let’s assume this is something like 20-30 boxes which will fit into 1-2 cubic meters of palletised shipping.
The next thing you need to appreciate is the process of logistics. Shipping involves a huge number of steps, which each need to be managed and insured separately. I’d estimate that at least half of the cost of freight will go to middlemen, er, logistics managers and freight forwarders, who coordinate across the many steps of gathering boxes from your home, taking them to the local logistics center, getting these pallets on a truck to the local seaport, arranging their safe passage on a boat, unloading at the sea port on the other side etc etc. Each of these steps is likely to be with a completely independent company, or at least a well-compartmentalised subsidiary within a large corporation. In any case, you need to be sure that every step will be tracked, accountable, insured, and documented. If your head feels ready to explode, then you should keep things simple. If you have the ability to drive your goods in a borrowed van to the seaport, then you may be able to skip a few steps and save yourself a lot of money.
It’s worth noting that seaports are not the same as airports, and sometimes the major seaports are hundreds of miles away from what you may think is a major airport. There are also major and minor seaports, and in most cases best to go for shipping to a major seaport and finishing the last leg with freight via truck, van, or your own car. You can look up UK seaports here: https://uk-ports.org/uk-ports-map/.
The key thing you need to get wise about here is “Incoterms”. According to freightOS: “Freight incoterms (International Commercial Terms) are the standard terms used in sales contracts for importing and exporting”. There are 11 different kinds of incoterms, which range from the bare bones service of FOB “Free On Board” where the shipper will literally deposit the items on a container ship (not recommended) to the nearly fullly covered EXW “Ex Works” where someone will pick up your goods at your premise and cover loading and insurance the whole way through. My advice is to try and reduce the number of hops in the journey, e.g. bring to the seaport, rather than try to work with lower tier incoterms. What you don’t want is to find out that you were supposed to show up in a distant city to unload something or that your goods were dropped on the curb uninsured somewhere you didn’t expect.
The next key logistic relates to the amount of cargo you’re shipping. For Ocean Freight there are basically two different sizes: LCL and FCL. LCL stands for “less than container load” and FCL is “full container load”. Essentially, the key thing here is whether you’re going to fill an entire shipping container, which run at 20 feet or 40 feet long. In some cases, if you’re past filling half a shipping container, you may as well just go FCL which is ususally billed at a flat rate, as the cost differeces aren’t going to be substantial with an LCL load charged per kg and cubic meter as I’ve highlighted on the first page above.
My advice is to figure out how many boxes you want to ship, round up by 20% and then start to collect quotes from shippers. And, again, I’d recommend you go with a provider who will handle insurance and customs costs bundled with the freight. I’ve found the tools at FreightOS to be pretty useful in getting estimates. FreightFinders will also give you access to a variety of shippers. Good luck with your move!