The paradox is that the monthly cost of a unit will quickly exceed the value of whatever is stored there unless the items have sentimental value or are very expensive. In TFA, their losses from theft was $500 and their insurance limit was $2,000. Within two years they would exceed that in rent payments on the unit. A Google search suggests the average storage unit tenancy is only 10 months. That's reasonable. Long-term storage only makes sense when the value exceeds what can reasonably be entrusted with the lax security of a storage facility.
1. You are temporarily moving to a place outside your local area, or to a much smaller place. I was moving around for a year and a half, so I left my furniture and non-valuables in a storage unit until I would be settled again.
2. You live in a small unit in a big city. $100-$150 for an extra 50 square feet a month might be cheaper than the equivalent space and is a great choice for occasionally used items. if it's 4 dollars a square foot for living space or 2 dollars a square foot for storage space, that's a deal.
3. Short term holding: You're moving out of your rental in July, in AirBnbs until September when you've closed on your house.
If you're in a suburban house and don't have enough space, that's a bad reason to have a storage unit.
5. You are trying to hide things from your spouse.
7. You're storing the tools / materials for a small business.
For situation 3 I was able to leave stuff with family but I would have paid for storage again. I lived in a few furnished places for a year.
I plan to use it again for situation 2 when my free storage situation ends. My place is tiny and I can just store something in the facility next to my office for cheaper.
They have their place. The argument that people pay more to store something then the value probably applies to all the junk in people's homes/garages. Must be billions in real estate in the bay area storing old junk.
This is a tough one to manage psychologically, although it’s almost certainly also true of nearly anything you are storing in your own home. The difference of course is that home space is bundled inflexibly—you usually don’t have the option of paying 2% less for 2% less space.
Sometimes, the best place to store something... is the store.
https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...
As I understand UK law, if you buy stolen goods, the original owner can just claim it back and you take the loss - simply to discourage buying with knowledge it was stolen.
I guess the pawn shop would go out of business but it does seem if you let them act as a fence you are solving for the wrong problem
"Oh hello guy who looks like he sleeps rough, I would love to buy your thousands of dollars worth of power tools that you can't even tell me what they are for pennies on the dollar."
Resources held in common have historically been subject to significant control via social, civic and legalistic processes. What is typically referred to as "a tragedy of the commons situation" never turns out to be what Hardin originally suggested - individuals taking advantage of the lack of controls. Instead it is invariably individuals who first dismantle the control systems in place in order to pursue their own selfish ends.
This matters because the "tragedy of the commons" concept has been used to suggest (successfully) that communities cannot manage commonly held resources, which is false. What is true is that communities frequently cannot manage a sustained attack by selfishness and greed against their own systems of management, and that's a very, very different problem.
The pawn shop has to, at 'bare minimum' do the proper paperwork (typically copying ID and taking fingerprints among other things.) The general "way it's supposed to work" is that now the police have a clean lead to the thief or part of the ring; If the shop doesn't follow the procedures, at least where I live, you -don't- have to make them whole and there's a crapton of fines.
That said, it's still a bit of a sham in some ways. In 2011 a former niece absconded with ex-wife's <6 month old Laptop, <1 year old DSLR, Her TV, and the wedding ring [0] just after my ex moved in with her brother at the start of the separation (Ex BIL also had TVs etc taken). It wasn't until their Fourth trip to the pawn shop [1] where the wedding band engraving made it just too hard to pretend the stuff wasn't stolen [2].
[0] - kinda knew that's when it was over, lol.
[1] - Part of a chain that used to have their own show that was a bit of 'Pawn stars crossed with Jerry Springer'
[2] - Ironically this worked out; since the wedding ring was never recovered but gold had gone way up, Renters Insurance covered the pawn shop costs and the added value back from the ring handled the deductible (The rest of the ring amount went to her costs related to the separation.)
The percentage of people who see the word "notarized" alongside "inventory sheet" and simply give up must be quite high. Notarization accomplishes nothing besides causing a headache. Insurance companies don't make money by paying out claims, you know.
Unfortunately a lot of people think notarization gives some kind of legitimacy to a document, or likely in this case, it's probably not the hassle of getting it notarized, but used as a scare tactic to prevent some people from committing insurance fraud by listing inflated or made-up items (people might conflate it with perjury).
The number of cases of people adding random expensive things that would be added to insurance inventories during a claim has to approach 90% if there is no potential for consequences.
> Insurance companies don't make money by paying out claims, you know.
This is why if you want actual insurance (not "check the 'you must have insurance' box") you don't pick the cheapest company and check reviews, ignoring any reviews that don't mention a claim.
Insurance is for you and you should pick it from your own choice of company and you should tailor the policy for your own needs.
Same with financing.
In my case, I get a lot of my insurance from a guy in my town and he has an office that I can walk into if I need help.
I don't own and no local insurers will offer me non-owner insurance. I have to get the crappy expensive insurance at the rental car desk.
Some credit cards like American Express offer their own insurance as part of the membership fee as long as you pay for the rental with their card, and decline the coverage offered by the rental car company.
Insurance is for losses that will have a major impact on you. It’s putting a price on risk.
Interestingly some of 'valuable property' insurance I have used for my camera gear encourages you to submit your invoices, photos of the item, etc on your policy profile. Makes it easy to remember to toss a photo of the item, photo showing serial number area, close-up of it, invoice alongside the other info.
Granted, the equation changes dramatically when various drugs are involved.
Maybe that's why property crimes short of grand theft aren't really enforced in California?
There is a hope we will undo this soon.
Just a phone alert to say "door to unit #xyz has been opened" would be a huge improvement. Wire up a cheap webcam for extra credit.
https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/K_IeKTxlLTzLBd4F9Ett...
If I don't sign in, as soon as I try to roll my door up the alarms are going to go off. If I don't sign out after closing the door and leaving, the next time I try to sign in I will be denied entry until I speak to a manager and be yelled at about signing out when I leave.
Edit: “You have a land mine collection?”
No, but after storage unit #2, I’d daydream about starting one.
There are some neat videos out there where people make their own with Arduinos etc.
The "glitter bomb" series is pretty funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo&list=PLgeXOVaJo_...
- you're hit by a bus, and your family is clearing out the storage locker.
- management is alerted to a bad smell coming out of several units, and they have to enter yours to verify that you're not accidentally storing dead raccoons.
- the police are serving a warrant on a unit, and accidentally open yours due to a typo.
- a homeless teenager just needs a place to sleep for the night.
I didn’t say I’d actually do it. I’d surely daydream of it.
If the fees wouldn’t cover replacement of the contents within 6 months, they are too valuable to store in a storage unit.
Obviously it's up to you to figure out if it makes financial sense. But for people in urban areas with small apartments, it can be a heckuva lot cheaper than upgrading to an apartment with another bedroom.
On ebay? Sell the stuff now, buy it again if you need it. Doesn't work for everything, of course, and I don't practice it, I've got tons of space and tons of clutter.
When I left SF, I spent about 18 months traveling before permanently moving in anywhere. I did the math on "cost per cubic foot to store vs. cost to replace" then, and interestingly, furniture and most housewares didn't make the cut—except for a few sentimental items. An unexpected bonus of instead donating that stuff to Goodwill was that when I moved into my new place, I got to outfit my kitchen with much nicer stuff than what I had previously accumulated.
(Now I live in the Midwest and have a garage for the outdoor gear, which in addition to vehicle storage, also doubles as machine/metalworking/woodworking shops.)
The bottom line is, if you want to own stuff, then you must store it. You know what is more expensive than storage? Buying stuff you need or want and reselling it, again and again. Or leasing it in general. Some stuff has poor resale value, takes a lot of energy to choose and accumulate, and is not easy to replace.
Of course he eventually got caught. The insurance company had already paid the owner of one of the campers, so it went to auction, and he bought it. Kind of funny.
Last time I cleared out my old stuff there was nothing I could do to get people to take most of the crap at zero cost.
This comment honestly left me speechless.
AFAIK, there is reasonably clear evidence that deterrence has a very low impact on this sort of crime, so laws based on deterring through fear-of-sentence would not seem to be likely to have much effect.
What is it that you're proposing/desiring?
That tweaker/junkie who steals your bike, breaks into your storage unit, whatever? He's not an organization man. The dude with a standing offer to pay twenty bucks for the bike, or ten if it's shitty? He's with an organization.
What I propose is that we start enforcing the law and treat theft as a crime, not a nuisance or fact of life. Roll up the organizations, toss them in prison, and repeat over and over until the message gets out.
This isn't a problem which can be solved at the tweaker level. What we can do, and simply choose not to, is get every single dude with twenty bucks or a baggie to trade for your bike. All that's lacking is the political will.
Could you share some of this evidence?
It's important to remember that accepting crime, especially low level crime like this is a policy choice. It's the same people doing the same crimes over and over. They have run ins with the law and they just get let go to continue terrorizing the rest of us.
For instance, the number of state prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%. You can cut crime. You can just prosecute these people and take them out of society for their most destructive years (18-40) and we can end this madness.
Even a 15 strikes and you're out policy would make a huge impact on the quality of life for the rest of us
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...
It seems that you imagine that the crime is somehow intrinsic to the current group of people committing it, and that by removing them from society, their behavior would not recur.
While there are arguments for this sort of thing, it is also based on a wilfull misreading (or no-reading) of what we know about the reasons why people commit crime at all.
That person that has been arrest 15 times before cannot continue to commit crime if he's behind bars. You don't need to "read" the data to come to this conclusion.
People commit crime in large part because they can get away with it.
It's not complicated.
because it has vastly more crime than comparable nations. you have to look at what happens to crime in the US over time, when you are more or less stringent about jailing criminals; predictably as you fill the jails, crime goes down, and when you empty them, crimes goes up.
>It seems that you imagine that the crime is somehow intrinsic to the current group of people committing it, and that by removing them from society, their behavior would not recur.
people try to smuggle this false premise into discussions about law and order all the time. the primary purpose of jail is not rehabilitation, it is to protect the public from criminals. you put them in jail so that they can't commit crimes. if they commit crimes when they leave, put them in jail again. jails mostly don't rehabilitate criminals, but that's a failure of the idea of mass rehabilitation, not a failure of mass incarceration. crime is a choice.
“But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal”
So one reading of this statistic is "incarcerating people turns them into criminals"
which suggests that maybe the better way is something else than locking people up and giving them a black mark which prevents them ever getting a viable job?
The fact is that there are a sizeable number of people, for a variety of reasons, who don't have the interest or capacity in holding a viable job. It would be nice if this wasn't the case, but the world exists as it exists, not as we wish it would.
I don’t think any advanced security storage solution is likely to get many clients since they usually choose based on pricing.
Insurance is a heavily regulated industry. Please complain to your state insurance commissioner.
Your reward for being such a diligent and highly achieving collector ... is the thieves target you preferentially. "You gained a Torture++ Level, Congratulations!"
You spent so much effort solving the last burglary, and chose such a highly secure location ... that now the thieves view your collection as a high level challenge.
... and are immediately notified of the available achievement. Some Prison Warden voice announces "There's a griefer, diligence punishing achievement available in Borg sector # of #." Their thief tools immediately 0-Day, exploit, jackpot, lottery level up to be better than your facility.
I mean, I guess it is their job, so can't really fault them for that.
1. Know your insurance contract, know what's actually covered and what not (sometimes describing the same facts in two different yet truthful ways will result in your claim being accepted or denied) and have a non-shit insurance company (check reviews that talk about how they handle claims or ask friends that had claims).
2. "Self-insure" risks where the variance won't hurt you. In other words, if you can grudgingly eat the loss if it happened, don't get insurance and eat the loss if it happens. If you have a lot of disposable income, you don't need insurance for something that won't noticeably shift your budget. Likewise, pick high deductibles. What would you rather do: Eat a $300 loss, or have paid $200 in additional premiums and spend two hours of filling out their paperwork?
3a. An exception is if you just really want the peace of mind, are willing to pay for that, and think you can find an insurance company that will actually pay.
3b. Another exception is if you think they miscalculated the premiums. I know that this is unlikely, but it ties into the "peace of mind" criteria - if you think a risk is more likely than it actually is, just insuring it might be an easy way out. The premium might also be accurate for the average, but you might also think or know that you are at a significantly higher risk than average.
For the latter two points, I like to consider insurance cost "per decade" or "per lifetime".
No, premiums don't need to cover payouts. You have to pay the premiums before you get any payouts, so the company invests them and makes money that way.
When it does work is when insurance has no influence on the price of goods, and is a minor consumer. For example, when fire insurance pays to replace your goods that burnt up.
When it doesnt work is when insurance is the predominant purchaser of those goods. A good example would be US health insurance, which has an 80/20 rule just like your proposal. Health insurers by law (ACA) must pay out 80%, with 20% allowed for opex and shareholder returns. The Hazard is that as an industry, to increase returns, you want the cost of care as high as possible, thereby maximizing your allowable profit.
It is a similar problem to how power is regulated in California, which has a mandated profit cap as a percent of costs. As a result, these regulated companies have the highest opex and cost of power in the nation of approximately $0.50/kwh
Generic, cookie-cutter, boilerplate policies probably net the insurance companies a fair amount of profit. People who actually care about the actual items they are insuring are possibly the highest risk, and as such, the premiums are also the highest. In my state, an umbrella policy that would cover my home, land, frontage, vehicles, farm equipment, well pump, etc is ~$500/month, with limits of around $1mm (this was 8 years ago or so, they probably went up in premiums). a half million on two vehicles is only about $200/month and homeowners varies but is ~<$100/month. The issue is how i'd get the rest of the stuff i said insured, because in my state, the homeowner's policy doesn't cover anything but the home (and contents to a limited extent) and whatever you call a tree on your property falling down and causing injury or damage not due to negligence.
So from a systems approach, the better solution likely is something like:
Employ and provide safety for the people stealing from the units so they do not feel compelled to steal.
Imagine if the money spent securing these things, which is a multiple of this persons efforts, were spent on solving the root cause? Sounds like a better return on investment
In theory, a well designed security system at a self storage center could be good enough to deter thieves relative to the value of what's stored there. In practice, the fact that owners pay for the security, insurance pays for break ins, and customers are supposed to evaluate the whole mess leads to a lot of naivete and show and not a lot of effective solutions. Show me a self storage place that guarantees you against the loss of your stuff and I'll show you a storage place with effective security. I'll also show you one that's more expensive that the competition and doesn't have much to show a consumer to justify the surcharge.
Looking at self storage places locally, they all seem to compete on price. When I eventually found one that seemed to be competing on security, it was 50% more expensive.
Side note. If I also accept it this is why cryptocurrency being able to reduce the cost of securing a transaction is still interesting to me. When you use a bank you don’t see the army of night guards, vaults, auditors, and IT people keeping it safe.
The root cause is social inequality of various kinds (including drug dependency). That should be something for society to resolve, not a burden for storage unit or home owners on their own - short of automated guns, there's not much any individual can do to keep out thieves.
https://www.dps.texas.gov/sites/default/files/documents/crim...
If you use the disc lock the storage facility sells, you'll likely
pay an additional markup on it, but it's also guaranteed to be
acceptable to their partner insurance company.