A big segment of the customer base for mini-storage is businesses that are using it as small-scale warehousing. So, no single item stays in there for a particularly long time.
100% correct. I have a family member wasting $350/month on a few hundred bucks worth of stuff they just won’t let go of for several years now. They won’t listen to reason.
My father-in-law went abroad for an extended cruise (long story short: had a nervous breakdown, left his wife, took the royalty cheque from his first published book which was handed to him by the postman as he walked out the door, spent it on a cruise ticket, got on the QE2, didn’t go home for MANY YEARS).
While he was away, he had his stuff put into storage. When he came back several years later, we worked out that he’d basically spent something like 10 times the amount it would cost to buy it all again, or even twice the amount to just buy a garage somewhere and throw in there.
In the process, his personal book collection (including some rare collectibles) were all destroyed or damaged by water ingress, much of the furniture and even electronics were junk, and we discovered that much of the space he was renting was taken up by things like huge rolls of bubble wrap, and bins full of rubbish that he hadn’t removed after he was done packing and had just stored without realising.
He was running up debts with the storage company so when he returned, he spent a day trying to organise it all. In a day’s work, on his return, we were able to put everything of value into a storage unit half the size and cost. But by then, he’d spent huge amounts of money paying for it to be there. Later he shipped it to America and then paid again to ship it to Kuwait and then again to ship it to Europe… Basically, over about 2 decades, he paid more to “rent” the places that stuff would live, plus transport it all, plus repair/replace the damage items caused by the moves and storage, than the complete replacement cost of everything, times by about 10-20. And the stuff he had was in active use for about a year or two out of those 20 years.
Now think of what it had cost to, say, buy furniture to actually use, while that furniture was in storage, etc. It’s like renting a second home but not even living in it.
When I moved house last, I brought EVERYTHING to the house in my car. Literally everything, bookshelves, beds, sofas, appliances, etc. That way I knew what I had, and had the opportunity to throw things away or not bother with them. I know how much I have and the only “spare” things I have, I’m consciously keeping for a reason. I don’t live minimally, by any means, but I don’t have TONS of junk that isn’t being used.
People who put things into storage: if it’s been more than six months, either sell them or use them. Sure, it’s nice to keep grandma’s old table set but you know what? It’s just getting slowly damaged by being stored/moving around, etc. Either use it or get rid of it. Doesn’t mean you can’t keep a few mementos and nice things but honestly… you shouldn’t be PAYING each month to keep those things, and even the ones taking up storage in your own home might be stopping you actually making use of your home.
Is the implication here you should just toss stuff/sell it and buy it again when you need it next?
Some things can’t be replaced.
Also this assumes that the stuff being stored isn’t used regularly which isn’t always the case.
Say you don’t have room in your apartment to keep your ski gear, but you ski a half dozen times a season. Going to buy new skis and boots every time?
There’s also the hassle of getting the stuff. Who wants to buy new Christmas decorations every year?
I’m sure this is aimed at folks who pay to use them to store junk that they would be better off getting rid of but there are tons of use cases where they make sense. And that’s without getting into business use cases.
When my now wife & I moved in together, we stores all our duplicate furniture, along with some other things since we were consolidating two 1-BR apartments into one. We figured we might upgrade to a bigger apartments and would then have use for the additional furniture. But them wife decided to go back to grad school and we decided to stay put for the duration. And the storage locker kept jacking up the price another $10/mo every 3 months or so…. We realized we were spending like $1200/yr to store about $1500 worth of furniture! Sold most of the stuff and managed to pawn some boxes, etc. on my parents. When we bought a townhouse, we reclaimed some of the stuff, but some is still in parents’ basement storage almost 20 years later.
Not all of them, but a fair number do. I know a guy who has storage units all over the state and they’re all full of junk. Not like antiques or collectibles, literally junk. Scraps of building supplies, worn out (not antique) furniture, old busted up RVs, stuff that most people would, rightly, just throw away. Hoarding, basically, but he doesn’t have property to store his hoard, so it goes into storage units.
Never thought about it that way but yeah. Aside from like 2 or 3 extremely expensive pieces most of it is under <$200 which is like 3 months of storage rent
True. I do feel in some cases it’s not so much pay for storage, as it is paying for emotional comfort.
There’s a strange comfort in paying for something you’ll never use. It’s like we’re renting nostalgia by the month. Every storage locker is a little time capsule full of the things we thought mattered at the moment… and a reminder that priorities change faster than our willingness to declutter.
When our storage facility had a bunch of lockers broken into, including mine, and the thieves left more junk in mine than what I had in there I knew it was time to get rid of it all and stop renting.
My in laws are this way, as is a salon I do a little work for. In laws are just bad with money and poor decision makers, salon seems to be on autopilot and any time I bring it up they don’t have time to deal with it. Both cases are “not my money, you guys do you”.
Absolutely, I have friends that lived in Pueblo, Colorado and then moved to Denver. They had a baby and stayed with family. Put their home items in storage. Moved to a house in Grand Junction ten plus years later and did the math. They paid $10k for storage, the stuff they had was just cheap furniture, maybe worth half that.
My wife did the same thing before we got married. Her stuff was in south Louisiana and it was also all moldy/mildewy when we finally got it.
Most folks sacrifice a lot of daily value for things they aren’t used daily. Table saw, treadmill, Christmas tree…
Years ago I rented a unit to get the rest of the stuff outta my house. Went on vacation for that month. Came back. Looked around and just scrapped everything I couldn’t throw away.
I rented for a year.
I was originally planning to sell my stuff and replace it later.
I did some price checking and discovered that the 2 leaf dinning table with 6 chairs would cost me $1200-1600 to replace. It was gifted to me.
Washer and dryer would cost $1200 minimum
Fridge would cost $800 minimum
Storage unit was ori9$96/ month and went up to $110 after about 6 months.
I paid less in storage than it would have cost to replace my dining table. And I had an entire household of items in addition to that.
However, I’ve bought storage units that obviously had nothing of value that people had been renting for years.
Some storage unit companies will provide a free rental truck for bringing stuff to your storage unit. However, they will not provide a free rental truck when you want to leave the storage unit! Of course, the reason for this is to make it less convenient for you to move out so you stay for longer than you really need to. Many, many people end up keeping stuff in their storage unit and pay much more for the storage unit rent than what all the stuff in it is worth.
I can’t believe more people don’t have storage. It’s so cheap! I visit it every six months to swap out my winter stuff for summer stuff. Why would I try to keep both in my closets at the same time? (I should add that I live in a dense metro city where we don’t have a lot of extra space or garages)
Not necessarily, but I see your point. I once rented a storage locker for my furniture when I moved in with my girlfriend. We planned on buying a house together just a month later or so. It would’ve been worth it if we didn’t change plans to join a project that would finish 2 years later. When we decided to do that I just sold all my stuff and gave away the rest so I could cancel the storage as soon as possible. Giving my stuff away saved me more than waiting to sell it.
So yeah, short term it could be worth it. But long term is probably not.
My general rule is to consider whether the item in question is worth the $/sq.ft it’s taking up in between times that I use it. If it’s roughly equal to buy another one on the off chance I need it then it gets sold secondhand and I not only free up space but mental and physical energy of moving it around to make room for something else.
It’s not about that. Some of the stuff may be hard to find.
I can barely afford storage for my physical body, but I still keep a drawer full of blank notepads because it’s my favorite kind and the manufacturer went bankrupt in 2020.
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And then if you can’t keep paying and don’t move it out, you lose the stuff anyways. It’s a racket.
True in many cases, but sometimes it pays to have this stuff available at a short notice rather than buying new stuff 2-3 times a year it’s required
Also you don’t have that stuff cluttering your apartment
It’s less useful in places with easy rent of things versus easy rent of space
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The same can likely be said about buying a house.
A big segment of the customer base for mini-storage is businesses that are using it as small-scale warehousing. So, no single item stays in there for a particularly long time.
Yep. people paying $150/mth to store $400 worth of stuff
100% correct. I have a family member wasting $350/month on a few hundred bucks worth of stuff they just won’t let go of for several years now. They won’t listen to reason.
My father-in-law went abroad for an extended cruise (long story short: had a nervous breakdown, left his wife, took the royalty cheque from his first published book which was handed to him by the postman as he walked out the door, spent it on a cruise ticket, got on the QE2, didn’t go home for MANY YEARS).
While he was away, he had his stuff put into storage. When he came back several years later, we worked out that he’d basically spent something like 10 times the amount it would cost to buy it all again, or even twice the amount to just buy a garage somewhere and throw in there.
In the process, his personal book collection (including some rare collectibles) were all destroyed or damaged by water ingress, much of the furniture and even electronics were junk, and we discovered that much of the space he was renting was taken up by things like huge rolls of bubble wrap, and bins full of rubbish that he hadn’t removed after he was done packing and had just stored without realising.
He was running up debts with the storage company so when he returned, he spent a day trying to organise it all. In a day’s work, on his return, we were able to put everything of value into a storage unit half the size and cost. But by then, he’d spent huge amounts of money paying for it to be there. Later he shipped it to America and then paid again to ship it to Kuwait and then again to ship it to Europe… Basically, over about 2 decades, he paid more to “rent” the places that stuff would live, plus transport it all, plus repair/replace the damage items caused by the moves and storage, than the complete replacement cost of everything, times by about 10-20. And the stuff he had was in active use for about a year or two out of those 20 years.
Now think of what it had cost to, say, buy furniture to actually use, while that furniture was in storage, etc. It’s like renting a second home but not even living in it.
When I moved house last, I brought EVERYTHING to the house in my car. Literally everything, bookshelves, beds, sofas, appliances, etc. That way I knew what I had, and had the opportunity to throw things away or not bother with them. I know how much I have and the only “spare” things I have, I’m consciously keeping for a reason. I don’t live minimally, by any means, but I don’t have TONS of junk that isn’t being used.
People who put things into storage: if it’s been more than six months, either sell them or use them. Sure, it’s nice to keep grandma’s old table set but you know what? It’s just getting slowly damaged by being stored/moving around, etc. Either use it or get rid of it. Doesn’t mean you can’t keep a few mementos and nice things but honestly… you shouldn’t be PAYING each month to keep those things, and even the ones taking up storage in your own home might be stopping you actually making use of your home.
Is the implication here you should just toss stuff/sell it and buy it again when you need it next?
Some things can’t be replaced.
Also this assumes that the stuff being stored isn’t used regularly which isn’t always the case.
Say you don’t have room in your apartment to keep your ski gear, but you ski a half dozen times a season. Going to buy new skis and boots every time?
There’s also the hassle of getting the stuff. Who wants to buy new Christmas decorations every year?
I’m sure this is aimed at folks who pay to use them to store junk that they would be better off getting rid of but there are tons of use cases where they make sense. And that’s without getting into business use cases.
Depends. I use mine to stash my offsite backups. Way cheaper then cloud storage 🙂
When my now wife & I moved in together, we stores all our duplicate furniture, along with some other things since we were consolidating two 1-BR apartments into one. We figured we might upgrade to a bigger apartments and would then have use for the additional furniture. But them wife decided to go back to grad school and we decided to stay put for the duration. And the storage locker kept jacking up the price another $10/mo every 3 months or so…. We realized we were spending like $1200/yr to store about $1500 worth of furniture! Sold most of the stuff and managed to pawn some boxes, etc. on my parents. When we bought a townhouse, we reclaimed some of the stuff, but some is still in parents’ basement storage almost 20 years later.
“Probably”?
“Probably” is what people say when they’re too lazy to use google.
Sure, but lots use it to store sentimental things as well which don’t really have a price.
Not all of them, but a fair number do. I know a guy who has storage units all over the state and they’re all full of junk. Not like antiques or collectibles, literally junk. Scraps of building supplies, worn out (not antique) furniture, old busted up RVs, stuff that most people would, rightly, just throw away. Hoarding, basically, but he doesn’t have property to store his hoard, so it goes into storage units.
Never thought about it that way but yeah. Aside from like 2 or 3 extremely expensive pieces most of it is under <$200 which is like 3 months of storage rent
True. I do feel in some cases it’s not so much pay for storage, as it is paying for emotional comfort.
There’s a strange comfort in paying for something you’ll never use. It’s like we’re renting nostalgia by the month. Every storage locker is a little time capsule full of the things we thought mattered at the moment… and a reminder that priorities change faster than our willingness to declutter.
And people pay several times more than their home is actually worth over a 30 year mortgage. What’s the point?
Usually you do it because you allegedly like the contents style or uniqueness.
When our storage facility had a bunch of lockers broken into, including mine, and the thieves left more junk in mine than what I had in there I knew it was time to get rid of it all and stop renting.
My in laws are this way, as is a salon I do a little work for. In laws are just bad with money and poor decision makers, salon seems to be on autopilot and any time I bring it up they don’t have time to deal with it. Both cases are “not my money, you guys do you”.
You could probably replace everything inside for less than two years of payments.
Absolutely, I have friends that lived in Pueblo, Colorado and then moved to Denver. They had a baby and stayed with family. Put their home items in storage. Moved to a house in Grand Junction ten plus years later and did the math. They paid $10k for storage, the stuff they had was just cheap furniture, maybe worth half that.
My wife did the same thing before we got married. Her stuff was in south Louisiana and it was also all moldy/mildewy when we finally got it.
Most folks sacrifice a lot of daily value for things they aren’t used daily. Table saw, treadmill, Christmas tree…
Years ago I rented a unit to get the rest of the stuff outta my house. Went on vacation for that month. Came back. Looked around and just scrapped everything I couldn’t throw away.
I rented for a year.
I was originally planning to sell my stuff and replace it later.
I did some price checking and discovered that the 2 leaf dinning table with 6 chairs would cost me $1200-1600 to replace. It was gifted to me.
Washer and dryer would cost $1200 minimum
Fridge would cost $800 minimum
Storage unit was ori9$96/ month and went up to $110 after about 6 months.
I paid less in storage than it would have cost to replace my dining table. And I had an entire household of items in addition to that.
However, I’ve bought storage units that obviously had nothing of value that people had been renting for years.
Storage lockers are basically high-interest loans you take out against your own bad taste
Some storage unit companies will provide a free rental truck for bringing stuff to your storage unit. However, they will not provide a free rental truck when you want to leave the storage unit! Of course, the reason for this is to make it less convenient for you to move out so you stay for longer than you really need to. Many, many people end up keeping stuff in their storage unit and pay much more for the storage unit rent than what all the stuff in it is worth.
I can’t believe more people don’t have storage. It’s so cheap! I visit it every six months to swap out my winter stuff for summer stuff. Why would I try to keep both in my closets at the same time? (I should add that I live in a dense metro city where we don’t have a lot of extra space or garages)
People spent way more for houses than the contents inside.
My mom was a hoarder so she had storage units all the time and I swear on my life I will never pay for a storage unit ever in my life again.
Not necessarily, but I see your point. I once rented a storage locker for my furniture when I moved in with my girlfriend. We planned on buying a house together just a month later or so. It would’ve been worth it if we didn’t change plans to join a project that would finish 2 years later. When we decided to do that I just sold all my stuff and gave away the rest so I could cancel the storage as soon as possible. Giving my stuff away saved me more than waiting to sell it.
So yeah, short term it could be worth it. But long term is probably not.
I know a few friends did some math and found that buying a storage unit for stuff and a smaller apartment was cheaper than getting a bigger apartment.
if the things they store are only used on occasion, then it can definitely be worth it to clear out a lot of room in their apartments
My general rule is to consider whether the item in question is worth the $/sq.ft it’s taking up in between times that I use it. If it’s roughly equal to buy another one on the off chance I need it then it gets sold secondhand and I not only free up space but mental and physical energy of moving it around to make room for something else.
You can say the same about rent.
I’ve definitely spent more on rent in the past 3 years than my net worth.
The same could easily be said for all the shit I have cluttering my increasingly expensive apartment.
preach, my brother has used one for years and years and its just not worth it
It’s not about that. Some of the stuff may be hard to find.
I can barely afford storage for my physical body, but I still keep a drawer full of blank notepads because it’s my favorite kind and the manufacturer went bankrupt in 2020.