Almost Everything You Own Is Cheaper Here. That Is the Whole Calculation.

There is a specific evening in every relocation, usually about six weeks out, when somebody stands in a living room in Hamburg or Melbourne or Dublin and tries to decide what a sofa is worth.

The honest answer, in almost every case, is less than the cost of moving it, and the sooner you accept that the cheaper and calmer the next two months become.

But "ship nothing" is also wrong, and the people who arrive with two suitcases spend their first year slowly and expensively rebuying things they already owned. So here is the actual calculation.

Start with what things cost at the other end

Furniture in Davao is inexpensive and perfectly good. A furnished apartment at normal Davao rental levels already comes with a bed, a wardrobe, a sofa, a table and often a fridge and a washing machine, which removes the entire question for most arrivals. Unfurnished units exist, and furnishing one to a comfortable standard costs a fraction of what it costs in Europe.

Electronics, by contrast, are not cheaper here. Laptops, cameras, phones and specialist equipment often cost more in the Philippines than in Europe or the US, because they are imported and taxed. That inverts the usual logic in an important way.

So the shape of a sensible decision is already visible: leave the heavy, replaceable things. Bring the light, expensive, specific things.

The voltage trap that ruins appliances

The Philippines runs on 220 volts at 60 hertz, with a plug landscape that includes flat American-style pins and, in many buildings, European round pins as well.

For anything with a switching power supply, which is most modern electronics, this is a non-event. Laptops, phone chargers, cameras, monitors and routers handle 100 to 240 volts and either frequency.

For anything with a motor or a mechanical timer, it is not a non-event. A European appliance designed for 50 hertz will run about twenty per cent fast on 60 hertz. Old-style timers drift. Some motors run hot. Anything with a heating element and a European voltage assumption needs checking rather than hoping.

Practical rule: read the label. If it says 100 to 240 volts and 50 to 60 hertz, bring it. If it says 230 volts and 50 hertz only, leave it, whatever it cost you.

The balikbayan box, and who can actually use it

You will hear about balikbayan boxes constantly, and there is a widespread misunderstanding about who they are for.

The duty and tax exemption under the Customs Modernisation and Tariff Act applies to boxes sent or brought by Filipinos abroad, sent to family or relatives in the Philippines. The value of the goods must not exceed PHP 150,000, the privilege may be used up to three times in a calendar year, and the contents must be personal and household effects rather than commercial quantities.

A foreign national is not a qualified sender. If you are married to a Filipina, she may be, and that is a legitimate and widely used route for the small stuff. If you are not, the balikbayan box is not your instrument and a freight forwarder is.

There is a separate customs provision covering the personal and household effects of people arriving to settle in the Philippines, with its own conditions. Confirm your exact position with a broker before you pack, because the difference between the right classification and the wrong one on a container of household goods is a great deal of money.

If you do ship a container

Two realities to plan around.

Time. Sea freight from Northern Europe to Mindanao runs to a couple of months door to door, and that assumes clean paperwork. Some routes discharge in Manila or Cebu and move on by domestic feeder, which adds handling and time.

Clearance. Philippine customs clearance is a specialist activity. Use a licensed customs broker, and use one your shipper has actually worked with, not one found on the internet. A container sitting at a port accruing demurrage while a document is corrected is the single most expensive form of impatience available in this process.

An itemised inventory, in English, with values, prepared honestly, is the thing that makes clearance boring. Boring is the goal.

Things not to bother trying

Your car. Importing a private vehicle into the Philippines is subject to a tax regime that makes it uneconomic in almost every case, on top of restrictions on used vehicle importation generally. Buy here.

Firearms. No. Whatever the arrangement is at home, the answer here is a licensing regime you do not want to be on the wrong side of as a foreign national.

Medicines in quantity. Personal supply with a prescription is fine. A year of something is a customs conversation, and some substances that are ordinary prescriptions in Europe are controlled here.

Your bulky furniture. Unless a piece is genuinely irreplaceable to you, the freight cost exceeds its replacement value here. This includes, especially, the sofa.

The actual list worth shipping

After watching a lot of people do this, the same items keep earning their freight:

• •Tools. Good hand tools and power tools are expensive and patchy here, and if you are the sort of person who owns them you will want them.
• •Kitchen knives and good cookware. Genuinely hard to replace at quality, light, and used every day.
• •Books, photographs, documents, anything with memory attached. This is the real answer to the whole question. Ship what cannot be rebought.
• •Specialist equipment. Diving gear, cameras, musical instruments, medical or professional kit.
• •Clothing you actually wear here, which is far less than you own. Bring the shoes, leave the coats. All of the coats.
• •A year of anything you are particular about, if it is small: coffee, a specific medication brand, a skincare product. Then you will find the local equivalent and stop caring.

The paperwork that matters more than the boxes

One thing genuinely worth doing before you leave, and almost nobody does it properly.

Get your important personal documents apostilled while you are still in the country that issued them. Birth certificate, marriage certificate, any divorce decree, police clearance, professional qualifications, and depending on your plans, pension documentation.

Obtaining an apostille from ten thousand kilometres away, through a consulate, on a document that needs to be requested from a registry office in a town you no longer live in, is a genuinely miserable experience that can add months to a residency application. Doing it in an afternoon before you fly is trivial.

Which documents you specifically need depends on the route you are taking, and the honest comparison of those routes is in three routes, one of them yours. If you are heading for the SRRV, pension documentation is the item that most often causes delay. If you are heading for the 13A, it is the civil status documents.

The reframe that makes this easy

Stop thinking of it as moving your possessions. Think of it as choosing which parts of a previous life get a seat on the plane.

Most of it does not need one. The apartment here will be lighter, cooler and simpler than the one you are leaving, because that is what the climate wants and because a life with a swim in it does not need three winter wardrobes.

Bring the photographs, the tools and the knives. Sell the sofa. And spend the money you saved on getting the first thirty days done properly instead.