I Priced a Move From Berlin to Hawaii Just to See
I have a habit I’m not proud of. When Berlin does its February thing — that specific grey where the sky sits about four meters above your head for six weeks — I open a spreadsheet and price out a move somewhere I am definitely not moving.
Usually it’s Lisbon. This year, for reasons I can only describe as radiator-related, it was Maui.
I want to be clear that I did not do this seriously. I did it the way other people scroll real estate listings for houses they can’t buy. But I got far enough into it that I learned some genuinely useful things about what an intercontinental move actually involves, and most of them had nothing to do with the flights.
Here’s the whole spreadsheet, roughly in the order the reality hit.
Step zero, which I skipped entirely at first
I spent about forty minutes happily costing shipping before it occurred to me that I cannot simply decide to live in the United States.
This is embarrassing for someone who has done the visa dance in several countries already. But Hawaii feels like a holiday, and holidays don’t require paperwork, and my brain filed it accordingly.
The reality: USCIS explains that if you live outside the US and want to work there, you generally need a visa from the State Department, and in many cases an employer must file a petition on your behalf before you’re even eligible to apply. There are five employment-based immigrant preference categories, and none of them are “I am tired of winter.”
So the honest first line of the budget isn’t a number at all. It’s a question: on what basis would you legally be there? Everything downstream depends on the answer, and for most of us the answer is a job offer or a spouse.
Then the shipping, and why I ended up talking to actual Maui movers
This is where the spreadsheet got interesting, because ocean freight prices in a way that punishes sentimentality.
You are not paying for weight so much as volume, and every cubic meter crosses roughly 12,000 kilometers of water. That bookshelf you like? It costs the same to ship as a bookshelf you’d replace for eighty euros at the other end.
Customs matters more than I expected. CBP guidance allows household effects — furniture, carpets, tableware, linens, tools of the trade — in duty-free if you’ve used them abroad for at least a year and they’re not for sale. But clothing, jewelry, photography equipment and electronics count as personal effects rather than household effects, and vehicles are dutiable full stop.
My camera gear, in other words, is not furniture. Good to know before it’s on a boat.
The other thing I learned is that the last leg is its own problem. Freight lands at a port, and something has to move it from there to an actual address on an actual island — which is why you end up talking to Maui movers rather than a single national company. Wailea Movers, based in Kihei, handles mainland relocations alongside inter-island moves, and they’re a licensed carrier rather than a broker, which is a distinction I did not know to ask about until I started reading.
That distinction is the practical takeaway. A broker sells you a price and subcontracts the work. A carrier does the work. For a move where your things spend weeks on the ocean, knowing who is actually accountable is worth more than a slightly better quote.
The pets, which is where I actually stopped
I don’t have a dog. If I did, this section would have ended the fantasy on its own.
Hawaii is rabies-free and defends that seriously. The state quarantine program sets out a 120-day quarantine as the default, with a 5-Day-Or-Less pathway available only if you complete a specific sequence of vaccinations and blood tests in advance — and all required documents must reach the Animal Quarantine Station at least ten days before your pet arrives.
Miss the paperwork window and your animal sits in quarantine for four months. Not as a penalty. Just as the default.
For a puppy or kitten the preparation timeline alone runs the better part of a year. This is not a thing you can decide to do in March for a move in May.
What it costs once you’re actually standing there
Here is the number that made me close the spreadsheet.
EIA figures show Hawaii households had the highest average monthly electricity bills in the country in 2024, at $213 a month — and that’s while consuming less grid electricity than anyone else, because most of the state’s power comes from petroleum-fired generation and the fuel arrives by tanker.
Read that twice. Using the least, paying the most.
And it’s not just power. Almost everything on a shelf in Kahului crossed an ocean to get there, and that cost sits inside the price of milk, lumber, a bicycle tire. Berlin is cheap in a way I have completely stopped noticing after nine years, and pricing this out was a decent reminder of that.
The running total, and the honest verdict
I’m not publishing a final figure, because any number I gave you would be wrong by the time you read it and wrong again by your postcode.
What I can tell you is the shape of it. The visa is the gate. The shipping is the largest single line and the most controllable, because it scales with how much you refuse to sell first. The pets are a timeline problem more than a money problem. And the cost of living is the part that doesn’t stop after the move is over.
If I were doing it for real, I’d sell everything except books, tools and the things that genuinely can’t be replaced, and I’d get quotes from three carriers rather than three brokers.
Why I do this at all
Because the exercise is genuinely clarifying, even when the answer is no.
Pricing a move you’re not making tells you what you’d actually carry across an ocean, which is a surprisingly short list. Mine came to about eight boxes and a bike. Everything else turned out to be furniture I’d apparently just been standing near for a decade.
So no, I’m not moving to Maui. But I did give away two chairs, and I’ve stopped pretending the grey doesn’t get to me.
DO YOU PRICE OUT MOVES YOU’RE NOT MAKING? OR IS THIS JUST ME.
Disclaimer: This post includes affiliate links which give me a small cut if you make a booking. This comes at no cost to you and helps keep this blog running.
Amélie is a health and wellness junky. Certified yoga instructor with Yoga Alliance in the Vinyasa and Ashtanga styles, she has a Yoga Instructor Certification – Level I (300 hours) and Yoga Instructor Certification – Level II (200 hours) under her belt. She also has a certified Open Water Diver certification with PADI and SSI Scuba Schools International Freediving Level I certification with SSI Scuba Schools International. She’s been vegan for over 15 years and is obsessed with anything wellness-related.