I moved in 2022 from outside Atlanta, Georgia to Western NY. My fiancée and I got engaged on New Years 2021 and we wanted to combine our households. She wasn't able to move to Georgia so I moved to NY. We had been each paying for flights every month or so for about a year and the cost was adding up - not to mention damage caused on our wheelchairs each flight. We wanted to go from spending monthly plane tickets during the pandemic to being in one household.
The last time she visited we decided that I would go with her and stay instead of heading back to Georgia. We went into planning mode right away making a list of all the things we needed to do and calling around for moving services. We realized quickly that renting full service movers was not going to be something we would be able to afford.
We looked at options for how to get both of us and my belongings up north and everything ended up being expensive. We finally just asked if one of my former attendant's would be able to drive a truck up with her boyfriend after both of my attendant's had finished helping me pack. After calling around to many different moving truck companies, I found that no one would be willing to rent the vehicle to me and have someone else drive. I am an unlicensed person with a disability and I attempted to pay but the companies insisted on the driver being the one to submit their credit card information.
We were only a few days away from the move date and we decided we needed to just ship the boxes and furniture up. We thought the total was going to be $400 to ship through FedEx but when my attendant arrived to start the process, she let us know that the price was a little over $600. The change in price was stressful as we did not expect the added cost. Neither of us had an unending pool of funds and this amount hit our wallets.
Thinking back, I think it would have been less stressful if we had been able to use a nonprofit like Disability Moving Assistance. We ended up with some broken items because they weren't packed properly due to the hurry. Some of my glass items ended up broken. I would have benefitted from DMA's rental assistance of vehicles and getting coordinated with volunteers to assist with the physical tasks.