It is more cost effective, and much less of a hassle, to rent storage than to buy a bigger home. A lot of the time, however, it is not necessary to do either.
There are some exceptions, but for the most part I view storage units as just kicking the decisions you need to make about your stuff down the road. These decisions range from easy and obvious but just deferred to downright excruciating, but making them once and for all can save you a lot of money, time and energy in the long term.
It is terribly ineffective to store things that have less value than the cost of the monthly rent of the unit. Even a unit that is $100/month, and good luck finding something that cheap around here, is $1,200/year. Is what you’re storing worth $1,200? Usually, it’s better to sell the item and put the savings into an interest-bearing account.
Things I’ve seen people pay storage for: boxes of children’s school work, inherited furniture, high school yearbooks, “good” mattresses, large framed art, bicycles, antique automobiles, canoes, skis, boats, boxes of tax documents, music album and CD collections, sofas, boxes of lap top computers and hard drives they haven’t bothered to delete information from and don’t know how to handle…
One of the questions to ask is what’s going on at home that prevents storing the stuff there? Are there higher value items being stored there or is it more of the same sort of stuff that is in storage but older (or newer)? Or is the home kept pristinely and all the problematic storage off-site? Do you lack storage in general at home? Most of the time, something truly meaningful and valuable can find room in the home.
Don’t rent a unit because you imagine your kids will want the stuff when they move out. If they move out. They will not. Put the money you save on storage into an account and help them with a down payment on a house or buy them a kitchen appliance when the time comes.
For a younger person with a studio apartment who is likely to have a larger home in the near future, off-site storage makes sense. The older we are, the more likely it is that we will not use or need what is in storage and will not be moving to a larger home—quite the opposite.
Storage units also make sense for people in transition, for example, for a temporary school or work-related move it might make sense to put stuff in storage rather than to get rid of it or to move it with you.
If you decide it really doesn’t make financial sense to rent a storage unit, start with cleaning out storage areas at home and see what kind of room you can create. You might decide to move stuff that would have gone off-site to newly cleared shelving. Better yet, you might decide you love the space and clarity and can let it go altogether.
The average length of a storage unit rental is just under one year, but about 45% of renters end up staying well over a year. The contents of over 150,000 units are auctioned off each year due to non-payment of rent (abandonment).
There are several old reality series available online, Storage Wars was my favorite, based on storage unit auctions. As an organizer it was interesting because I got a sense of how much of the abandoned stuff had value. Very little, it turns out. If I remember correctly, garbage bags of old clothes was a common haul for the “lucky” high bidder.
Occasionally a winning bid found something antique that was more valuable than the amount he paid for the unit’s contents. In one episode, a large safe looked promising, but after the bidder paid to have it broken into, it was—“Ta-dah!” empty.