How to Get Rid of All Your Things
In preparation for nomadic living, you’ll need to keep a few important things in mind:
How long will you travel?
Will you come back to a home base or home storage unit?
What is your exit plan after nomadic living?
The answers may not come to you immediately. In our case, we decided keep just as much as it would take to furnish a studio apartment or one bedroom apartment or condo. For most people that would be a 10 x 12 or 10 x 10 storage unit.
This approach gave us some flexibility. If nomadic living ended up not working for us, we would not need to rebuy everything in one year’s time. And if we fell in love with nomadic living, clearing out a 10 x 10 storage unit would not take too much time.
In this article, we will share what we kept and our process for getting rid of everything else before living for eight months out of two suitcases.
What Items We Kept
We did keep some key items from our previous lives, but we had to be pragmatic and strategic to get these items to fit in the 10 x 10 storage unit. Here’s what we kept:
Items associated with portable hobbies, such as guitar, upland game bird hunting items, suitcases, hiking equipment, saltwater fishing equipment, outdoor clothes, farm tools, and beer brewing equipment.
Handmade items with personal value, such as quilts, art, and jewelry.
Utilitarian items that we would use if we opted out of nomadic living OR found a home base, such as essential kitchen items, one loveseat and three chairs, one table, two bicycles, one desk, and one office chair.
Personal items, such books, wedding album, and college diplomas. We decided to set a quota for personal items— each of us got six small UHaul boxes of personal effects.
What Items We Got Rid Of
Everything. Else.
And whew…it was a little overwhelming. We went from a 4,400 square foot house to a ~1800 square foot rental. Now we were going to a 1200 cubic foot storage unit!
Starting out, we knew this process could take days, months, or years. That’s why we recommend doing what we did, and starting with some solid research. Before taking on this giant downsizing task, we got online and followed The Minimalists or Becoming Minimalist or your other favorite minimalist guru to get some inspiration from folks who have gone through the process or are going through downsizing.
After a couple weeks of consuming content, we had a plan and got down to the business of downsizing.
What Items We Sold
Here’s how we made decisions about what to sell during our downsizing for nomadic living:
We sold things we hadn’t used after living in our rental home for three months. If we hadn’t used it by then, we likely didn’t really need it in our lives!
We also sold our “someday when” items, the ones we were keeping for “someday when we have more time …” For example, we sold many of our gardening items.
Other items we sold: things we didn’t see ourselves using again in the next five years, all our excess furniture, most of our tools, any “bulky” hobby supplies.
We sold these items primarily on Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and by consignment.
What Items We Gave Away
We did not try to sell every item, especially items worth $20 or less. If a more expensive item (let’s say $50) did not sell, we donated it after trying to sell it for 30 days.
We gave away most of our items to Goodwill or Dress for Success. We also offered additional items for free to folks who came by to pick up items they had purchased.
We did give away some handmade items and gardening tools to family. We limited the number of these items, however, as several of our family members have or are on their own minimalism journeys.
What To Do With Important Documents When Downsizing
We had a large amount of paperwork from our corporate jobs and side hustles, much of which needed to be shredded. And as GenXers, we had a lot of printed-out photos from high school, college, and the first few years of marriage (before iPhones) that we wanted to scan. Our favorite tip on dealing with important documents was from the Minimalists Podcast on paper clutter & scanning: throw a “paper clutter party.”
We used an existing paper shredding machine from my home office and purchased a high quality scanner. On a few rainy days at the beach we sat down with some beer and pizza and scanned, shredded. and discarded 95% of the paper, photos, documents in our possession.
Lessons Learned While Getting Rid of (Almost) All Our Things
We learned a few tips and tricks, and these may apply more to aspiring or current nomads, so we list them here.
The money was spent when you purchased the item. When you go to resell it, you will get pennies on the dollar for 95% of the items you sell.
By scanning important documents, you’ll have access to them in your data cloud while you travel.
Keep a spreadsheet of items you have with consignment places and make sure that the payments are going to your forwarding address.
Some friends and family members will judge you because you are disposing of things, or selling them for a loss.
Only you and the members of your household should decide what you want to keep.
Don’t take on storage of items for other people.
Memories are not in the items, they are in our heads. Take a photo of something that you don’t want to keep to trigger the memories. You don’t need the item to have the memories.
With fewer things, you don’t have to worry about what will happen to your stuff while you are on the road.
You can re-accumulate more mindfully in your slow-go or no-go years.
If you are taking on this downsizing task in your 40s or 50s, you won’t have to do it in your 60s, 70s, or 80s.
Technology changes quickly, so don’t bother storing electronic items.
Plastic items can degrade, even after a short time in climate-controlled storage. Consider not storing plastic items.
Purge as many clothes as possible. The clothing one wears in a nomadic lifestyle is quite different (i.e. more casual) than corporate attire.
Take comfort that items you give away may go to someone else who really needs your item, but realize that most of what you donate will end up in a landfill.
Getting rid of almost everything happens in stages for most people. In fact, when pursuing a truly nomadic lifestyle, it may take one or two years to fully downsize from a large suburban home to a small condo or storage unit.
If you are getting rid of (almost) all your things prior to a move-out, assign rooms (or sections of your apartment) to final destinations like: storage unit, family, donation, recycling, trash.
Our Conclusion on Getting Rid of (Almost) Everything
In a nutshell, getting rid of almost all our things has been liberating. We haven’t worried about our things in our 10 x 10 storage unit. In fact, one month into our nomadic living we talked about getting rid of even more things when we got back to the storage unit in the summer.
One week before we returned to our storage unit to get rid of everything else, we unexpectedly purchased a 1091 square foot home in Kansas near our farm to serve as our “home base” between travels. This small change of plans made our downsizing efforts all worthwhile! We’ve decided to not re-accumulate things in this home and still maintain a minimalist and nomadic lifestyle.
More on our small home and future travels soon!
