Keeping your household organized is a challenge in the best of circumstances, let alone when you're in the midst of dealing with the disruption of moving.

As a member of the Top 5 in Real Estate Network®, I always take the extra steps necessary to help my clients experience a stress-free, successful move. Throughout my years in the real estate business, I've witnessed many common mistakes that people make during the course of a move.

Here are seven to avoid:

  1. Packing everything. Prior to moving, it's important to take a look around and decide what you don't want to keep. This will cut down on costs by not having to transfer unnecessary items.
  2. Sending it all to storage. Storage is usually expensive and just delays the inevitable. Eventually, what you store will need to be moved into your home, so try and bring it all the first time.
  3. Shopping on the Internet for move quotes without dealing with a live person. This is one instance where dealing with a live person is necessary. You need to be able to ask specific questions and have your estimate explained to you line by line so that you can see where costs can be cut.
  4. Not looking into what your homeowners' insurance covers. For a nominal cost, these types of insurance policies may cover your goods in transit.
  5. Not taking photographs of items before disassembling them for the move. You will be unable to process an insurance claim if you don't have proof of what the item looked like before you packed it.
  6. Overlooking the box count. If you are paying for boxes by the piece, keep track as things are being packed as each box has a different price attached to it. You don't want to end up with 300 boxes when you only needed 200. Also, if the moving company sees that you're keeping track, movers will be less inclined to hit you up for additional costs when the job is done.
  7. Forgetting to take inventory. If you don't create an inventory, there's no fool-proof way to know if you've left something behind or if it somehow got lost in transit.

Work closely with your real estate professional to help avoid these and other common pitfalls of moving. You can also e-mail me for more information. Please share these moving mistakes with friends and family, too, so that the journey to their new home is a happy one!