Hi, it’s me, Jessica Jean, and I forgot to pay the invoice to ship our stuff to Portugal.
Maybe it was mom brain, or overwhelm with navigating everything else.
I screwed up.
Where is our stuff you may ask? It’s somewhere in South Carolina.
I didn’t know that at the time though. I blissfully imagined our crates safely packed away on a ship somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Oh man, had I known.
We packed up our must keep items (sentimental things, English children’s books, clothes) into two shipping containers totaling 183 cubic feet. I paid a $1,500 deposit then never shipped our goods.
Our shipping company requires you to pay a deposit AND the final invoice BEFORE they put your crate on the ship (facepalm).
After 8 weeks of living in Portugal I began to think “hmmm maybe I should check the status of our household goods”. The estimated delivery time was 4-6 weeks so I figured we’d get a notification any day that our shipment arrived.
I searched through my email and my heart sank.
“At this time IF you have not paid your invoice, your shipment will be held in our warehouse pending payment and accruing $25 / week / pallet position for storage after 7 days from arrival at the terminal.”
Did I pay the invoice? I couldn’t remember. I checked all my emails and didn’t see any receipt for the payment. I checked my bank statements. Sure enough I dropped the ball and our shipment never made the ship. My husband and my childhood photo albums, both of our clothes, my wedding dress, and so much more irreplaceable items were unaccounted for.
Luckily, I found out they were safe in their storage facility in South Carolina. And my doomsday planning led me to scan ALL our photos (a weeks long process) just in case.
But here we are at week 8 of storing our crates with no projected shipment date or even the next location.
It’s kind of ironic though, how this mistake actually saved us money and trouble. We would eventually decide to nix our Portugal plan altogether so we’d be paying to ship everything back! This makes me feel better about my mistake.
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