I bet you can’t, or at least I bet it’s going to cost you more than you think it will.

I’ve moved four times since 1992, which was the last time I had to pay for the move. My companies have always shouldered the tab. This move we’re about to make to south Louisiana is on my own dime. I had no idea how expensive it was going to be! We don’t have a lot of stuff — we’re living in a fairly compact three-bedroom apartment now. Don’t be fooled by “three-bedroom;” it’s not that big. And yet, when we got estimates from various moving companies, the rock-bottom cheapest was $8,000.

Eight thousand dollars, just to transport our stuff from here to there. And that was the best bid. Did you know that states impose tariffs to move your stuff into and out of particular states? We discovered that to hire someone to cart our stuff over the Pennsylvania state lines adds something like $1,300 to the cost of the move, because of a state-imposed tariff. And moving into Louisiana adds $300 to the bill, because of state tariffs. I had no idea.

So, for the first time in nearly 20 years, Your Working Boy is going to pilot a Ryder truck full of furniture halfway across the country. A 22-hour trip. The cost of truck rental plus gas is going to be about $2,000, give or take. We figure we can hire a crew in Philly to load the truck, and a crew in Louisiana to unload it, for $1,000 or less. I’m going to have to get my Jerry Reed on, and Roscoe is going to have to be Flash.

Thank God we have the resources in the bank to pull this off, though. Let’s say I’d lost my job, we were being evicted, and our credit cards were tapped out. What would we do? Too broke to move — I had never thought about that before.