How to move a household halfway around the world (and not die trying)

Right, so it's not EXACTLY halfway around the world, but Abu Dhabi is pretty far from the US East coast, and if the Pacific Ocean weren't so bloody big, I wouldn't actually have to exaggerate.

This will be our third transcontinental move in as many years and as before, we're doing it ourselves rather than hiring a full-service moving company.  I have a feeling this time around will be a bit more complicated than the last two, mostly due to the Procrustean policies of our respective employers.

To be fair, some of the complication arises from the fact that we've been given choices -- a good thing, since people vary in terms of what they want to bring with them when moving halfway across the world.  Some want their entire household, some want a subset of that, and some would prefer to arrive in their new home with nothing more than a suitcase full of clothing and purchase everything locally.  It's not the choices themselves that are maddening, it's the fact that the individual who came up with the relocation allowance policies doesn't seem to have made it past third grade math.  Here's why:

Take me, for example.  I've been offered the following options for my relocation allowance:

1.   sea freight of a 20-foot container
2.  air freight of 661.38 lbs
3.  cash of US $340.32

Based on our experience and research, we know the approximate cost of sea freight and air freight, so let me revise my relocation offer in terms of cost to the employer in dollars:

1.   $2,000
2.  $2,000
3.  $340.32

Huh?

But maybe that's just one company's weirdness and other employers have staff who are actually able to add.  Let's take a look at another relocation package:

1.  sea freight of 20-foot container + $5,000
2.  air freight of 1,000 lbs + $10,000

As before, I'll substitute the shipping costs with actual dollar amounts and restate the allowances to make comparison easier:

1.  $7,000
2.  $14,000

The reason this doesn't make a bit of sense is because air freight costs more than sea freight.  A lot more.  The average cost of shipping a 20-foot container with something like 4 or 5 tons of cargo is $2,000, the same as the average cost of shipping a half ton via air freight (and by the way, that half ton is volumetric weight, and therefore actually quite less than half a ton).  So why the cash incentive to ship LESS when the cost to the person paying is the SAME?  Imagine if the Sphinx had posed such a question to weary travellers instead of the four legs-two legs-three-legs riddle.  No one would have ever gotten anywhere.

So here we are, not only packing up half the house, but now running complicated Excel scenarios trying to optimise the volumetric weight allowances, segregate the packed boxes into air and sea freight groups, weigh EVERYTHING that's going by air, deal with two different freight forwarders, and schedule two separate moving exercises.

And all because someone can't add.