If the fees wouldn’t cover replacement of the contents within 6 months, they are too valuable to store in a storage unit.
Obviously it's up to you to figure out if it makes financial sense. But for people in urban areas with small apartments, it can be a heckuva lot cheaper than upgrading to an apartment with another bedroom.
On ebay? Sell the stuff now, buy it again if you need it. Doesn't work for everything, of course, and I don't practice it, I've got tons of space and tons of clutter.
Interestingly, I read a blog post where someone was using "fulfilled by amazon" as off-site storage, but I think it was a pseudo thought experiment more than an actual storage solution, similar to those folks who use data-as-video on YouTube as infinite backup storage
Sounds expensive.
Because yes, you have to pay sales tax on eBay, even for used items that already had sales tax paid on their original retail purchase.
You can rent skis for a season for $400, I suspect most rental places are than $100/month.
But skis especially can usually fit in the back of a closet or under a bed.
Kayak? Get a season pass for the rental place.
And the kinds of people who live in places where they don't have room to store a surfboard year-round, are the kinds of people who don't have a bunch of wall space for one either.
I think you might not be totally understanding the concept of small urban apartments. Putting skis in the closet or under the bed year-round doesn't work, because your closet and underneath the bed are already full. (And it's not just skis, obviously -- it's boots and poles and helmet and bulky jacket and snowpants and gloves and everything.)
And why would I want space for a vehicle when I have public transportation that is much faster?
When I left SF, I spent about 18 months traveling before permanently moving in anywhere. I did the math on "cost per cubic foot to store vs. cost to replace" then, and interestingly, furniture and most housewares didn't make the cut—except for a few sentimental items. An unexpected bonus of instead donating that stuff to Goodwill was that when I moved into my new place, I got to outfit my kitchen with much nicer stuff than what I had previously accumulated.
(Now I live in the Midwest and have a garage for the outdoor gear, which in addition to vehicle storage, also doubles as machine/metalworking/woodworking shops.)
The bottom line is, if you want to own stuff, then you must store it. You know what is more expensive than storage? Buying stuff you need or want and reselling it, again and again. Or leasing it in general. Some stuff has poor resale value, takes a lot of energy to choose and accumulate, and is not easy to replace.
But when you’re buying a place, you’re looking to have isolation from shared walls, and generally a larger property will appreciate more in value than a smaller property With some limits in both directions up and down in size.