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Cebu Living Guides - Advice about moving
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Advice on shipping your belongings to Cebu :
If you decide you want to live in Cebu, you will have to choose whether to ship over your house contents or just sell everything and
buy new when you get here. There are pros & cons to both options and it's really a matter of how attached you are to your possessions.
When we planned our move to Cebu we decided to bring everything with us and sought the services of a removal company (a Filipino owned & run business) who guaranteed a door to door service with no hidden customs charges £3600 inclusive. After many days of packing our possessions with the help of friends , the day came for it all to be loaded into a twenty foot container bound for Cebu.
Having looked at various web sites with respect to shipping personal belongings to the Philippines, it appeared that you were allowed to only bring over up to 10k PHP worth of personal items (£100 GBP) tax free, after that you are charged import duty on the rest. It was hard to determine exactly how much would be charged but we have since learnt that you can be very much at the mercy of the Customs personnel.
Everything arrived after about 6 weeks and on the whole most things got here undamaged, however there were several items that were not so lucky. There are many Removal Companies that will pack and Forward your possessions, but from my experience it is often better to use companies that are either Filipino or have a Filipino association, they typically have a better idea of what's needed and all seem to have a friend in the port areas.
If you just want to keep some items then you could choose to ship a Lift box, tea chests or Balikbayan boxes. This will be a lot cheaper and enables you to keep the items most precious to you as long as they are not to big.
As previously mentioned in the shopping guide, you can buy almost anything you like here in Cebu, so there should be no worries on your part as to finding replacement items.
liveCebu.com has teamed up with a local International Shipping company here in Cebu (see our Forwarding Section) that has over twelve years experience in handling shipments to and from the Philippines and as such has agents world wide. If you are interested in shipping items to any of the 7,100 Islands that make up the Philippines or indeed to any other country, please email us and we will get our shipping experts to deal with you enquiry.
email: enquiries@liveCebu.com
Last Updated: April 25, 2006 16:22