Self Storage: Convenience or Money Pit?

Remove Your Junk, Don’t Store It

We’re a bit biased on this since we’re in the business of junk removal, but if you find that you’re running out of space in your home or office, we urge you not to look into one of those self storage units.

Honestly we’ve been there ourselves and paid the ever-increasing monthly rate to house our junk, most of which could and should have been thrown away years ago. At the time (this was in the late 90s) the cost for a 5 x 8 storage unit was about $40 per month. Over the years we rented that unit the cost went up to about $65 per month.  Assuming an average monthly rent of around $50 it looks like over a 10 year period we shelled out $6,000! And that’s a conservative estimate. Compare to today’s prices and you can almost double that amount.

Once we made the decision to clean out the storage unit we began saving $65 each month. Oh, the junk we were storing? Most of it got donated to charities, thus giving each piece new life instead of gathering dust in a glorified closet. The rest went into the garbage.

As Ben Franklin said, a penny saved is a penny earned and since jettisoning ourselves of our storage unit we’ve probably earned a few thousand dollars that are better spent on just about anything other than junk storage (read: hoarding).

Storage Unit Construction up 400%

A statistic on the Spare Foot website reveals that, unfortunately, Americans are turning more and more to self-storage units. Construction of these facilities has increased 4-fold over 2013 rates. As of today, there are more than 52,000 self-storage facilities in the United States and a whopping 1.9 billion square feet of storage space available for rent.

We can’t blame storage unit owners from trying to make a buck off other people’s desire to hold onto “stuff”—everyone is in business to make a profit—but to those who are considering taking on the additional financial burden of storage space rental we offer an exceptionally lower-cost alternative: junk removal.

To put it into perspective, at the lowest end you’ll probably pay $100 per month for a small unit. That’s $1,200 per year. The number of people that rent a storage unit for less than a year can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. After 5 years that’s $6,000 out the window (not counting price increases). If you were rigorous with yourself and made a decision to get rid of the things you really don’t need (or sell or donate those same things) you’d not only free up space in your home or office but in the case of selling things you might even make a few dollars.

For those items you can’t sell, can’t donate or which are just too big to handle yourself, hiring professional junk haulers makes sense for a multitude of reasons. A small storage unit takes up about 400 square feet. The square footage of our junk removal vehicles is approximately 500 square feet. By loading your unneeded junk onto our truck (say you fill the entire truck bed) you might spend $500 or so (see junk removal cost page). However, this is a one-time fee. Your junk is gone and you’ve gained about 500 square feet of space in your home.

By hiring a junk removal company like ours, Bumblebee Junk, instead of spending money for a self-storage unit you’ve saved at least $5,500 that can be better spent on household improvements (increasing the resale value of your home), car payments or college tuition. Any of these options is far superior to lugging your junk to a facility and locking it away until you either can’t afford to keep renting the unit or move to another city.

If you’re browsing the internet searching for “storage unit near me” and happen to land on this article, just take a moment to ask yourself if our suggestion doesn’t make more sense. After all, who can’t use an extra $6,000 a year?

By the way, if you already rent a self storage unit and you’re tired of paying month after month, hiring a junk hauling service like ours to clean out your unit is a great, easy and quick way to get rid of that junk once and for all!