According to one site the storage unit business in the United States is about a $39 billion dollar a year business. The wealthiest individuals in Kentucky are the founders of a storage company in the state and his daughter. They are both billionaires. It is estimated that there are between 45,000-60,000 storage units in the country and that nearly 10 percent of Americans rent at least one unit.
Chances are you have watched the TV program Storage Wars at least once. When people rent storage units and do not pay their rent for several months the storage company is allowed to auction off the contents of the unit to recoup their expenses. The program highlights several buyers of those units in California. I find the program interesting even though one of the buyers has claimed the show is rigged. His claim is that some of the expensive items found in the units that are bought by the buyers are put there by the producers to make the show more interesting to the viewers.
I have bought an occasional storage unit in the past myself, and I can tell you I never found a Picasso wrapped in an old blanket nor have I found safes filled with money or gold and silver coins. A good unit produces enough good items to pay for itself and a little profit. Most of them contain a lot of junk that has to be taken to the dump. Much of what is found there is evidence of a lot of bad choices in the person's life that explains why they were not able to pay their rent. For the life of me, I can't understand why people would pay good money to rent space to keep much of what I find in storage units. Sociologists and other social scientists would have a field day exploring what people keep in storage units!
The buyers on Storage Wars often point out that buying these units is a numbers game. Some of them have said that for every 10 units they buy one pays off well enough to make it profitable. That's probably accurate. This article isn't to help you become a good storage unit buyer. I wouldn't know how to write an article like that based on my limited experience buying units! The purpose of this blog is to encourage you to make better choices in life.
The average cost of a storage unit according to the site I referenced earlier is $89 a month. That is over $1,000.00 a year with some units renting for more than twice that amount. To be completely transparent, I do rent a unit for slightly more than that, but my unit is rented to store items I sell at auction and my supplies. It is a legitimate business expense. Many units are rented by small business owners for the same reason. This is much different than the typical renter who is spending money each month to store junk they don't want to pitch.
What does the typical storage unit renter store for his $89 a month or higher rent? You'll find a lot of dirty mattresses, broken toys, bags of clothes that usually ends up stiff and moldy in their black trash bags after a few months, broken and ripped furniture, broken bicycles, book and magazines, food items (which has attracted mice), personal papers, kitchen items such as plates and silverware, cardboard, bags filled with trash that should have been set out for trash collection and adult items. Based on the cobwebs and dust in some of these units these items have been stored for several years which means that thousands of dollars have been wasted on storing these items.
Before you respond that this was the property of these people and represented the best they may have had, I am not judging them. I am saying that based on how long these items had been in storage they would have been better off financially taking this stuff to the dump rather than storing it. Maybe they had been storing it because they had to move into a smaller place. They could have saved the money they spent on rental fees and bought new items and new clothing when they were able to find a larger place to live. I've talked to people who bought units and tried to wash the molded clothes to resell. They were not salvageable. Pitching these items would have been financially a better choice than spending money each month to store them, and the people would have been able to purchase better items that what they were storing.
Tomorrow we'll look at another lesson about choices learned from studying storage units.
No comments:
Post a Comment