I think there is a break-even point for those on a budget. A king-size bed is one thing I just wouldn't bring, not only volume versus value, but there is too much risk you'll never get it into a SGn apartment. > Pay to freight + pay again to chuck on arrival?
We also gave away our sofas, shame as they were $$$, and would go better in the new place that the LLs tacky tat. But they were big, so too risky. [We gave them away to some lucky F+F].
IKEA TV console, coffee table, dining table + chairs, bookshelves > out, and replaced as needs be. Shame about the chairs but that's pragmatism.
In an ideal world you'd re-flatpack any flatpack furniture before getting quotes, but as time flies that idea tends to get side-tracked.
Plus before we packed up we had two room-to-room spring-cleans, chucking out everything that was out of date (documents etc), surplus to needs (some books, clothes, shoes, a couple of old suitcases etc), or duplicated, like 101 drinking glasses, etc. Some of such stuff can be hard to chuck since 'it still works fine and has use!'. But once you get going in a semi-ruthless way you'll be surprised what you can accept ditching. In a strange way it comes to border on a cathartic process... we have used this two-step approach on our last few moves. You also find that between step 1 and 2 you remain in spring-clean mode, so daily you're still subconsciously judging stuff that might end up getting chucked in v2, or simply gets chucked out in the interim (try looking at the expiry dates in your spice/herb jar shelf and you'll see what I mean!
).
Spring clean no.2, a month or two after no.1 was interesting. At that point quite a lot of stuff that survived no.1, as we couldn't quite bear to let it go, went. By the end of the 2nd, we really had been through every single thing we owned down to kitchen utensils and socks!
A mistake we made was not starting the process long-enough in advance. I think we got our freight quotes part-way through no.1. And of course they will quote you based upon what is there today in front of them. We did point out that items X, Y, Z etc won't be coming but still they hugely over-quoted us. Add to that at least 10 metre/3 boxes were no more than 10-15% full... and we still went over our volume budget. Hence had to pay the increment to the employer. But if we hadn't been ruthless in the clear-outs, gawd knows what the excess volume would have been!