HOUSEHOLD CONTENTS
I went into this thinking that it wouldn’t be such a big problem. We lived in a small house. The largest furniture we had was old and I decided could just be given away. A number of other cabinets and shelves had been passed to us for free, so, again could just be given away. What we wanted to keep could for the most part be placed in boxes and packed into a storage unit.
Storage Unit
The part I did do well was to organize a storage unit way ahead of time, more than a year. Because southern California is expensive in every way, I decided to rent a storage unit in Arizona, where we often went to visit family, and where some family members also had storage units. I rented a large one, moved everyone else’s stuff into it, and split the cost. Every time we went for a visit, the car went packed with stuff for storage. I figured I was well ahead of the game by the final months.
What I underestimated was how much volume remained in the house. Our trips did not make a significant dent on the massive task of boxing everything else up. I calculated that the large unit I had rented was not enough, and had to rent an additional space. The final three weeks were spent almost continually making decisions about what was worth storing and what should be done away with. Bags and bags of stuff was thrown away, so much that I had to find other ways to dispose of trash besides our own dumpster.
Selling and Giving Away
I found that the process of selling off or giving away household items takes a lot of time and energy. Smaller items are practical for sale on eBay, but larger stuff really only makes sense to sell locally. Most of our initial leads on people who were interested in this or that came to nothing, and a lot ended up happening very last minute. I would not choose to do it this way again. In retrospect, I should have concentrated on getting rid of stuff months earlier. This includes the effort to get furniture hauled away for free (a service provided by the city we moved from). Scheduling a pickup of oversized items (like a sofa or washing machine) takes time, so anything that isn’t specifically needed is best gotten rid of as early as possible. Facebook marketplace (you can geographically limit where your item is visible) is a good forum to sell things locally, but again takes effort and negotiation. Many people express interest, but very few end up actually buying. All this consumes time answering questions online and organizing times and places for the transaction.
Not wanting to just leave old furniture in the alley behind our house, I ended up breaking up many pieces into fragments small enough to dispose of in trash bins. Clothing and books, unless donated to schools, ended up going to Goodwill (at least three car loads worth).
The House
Our situation was simple, in that we just cancelled our rent agreement. Since it ran month-to-month, there was nothing overly strategic about when to inform the landlord. Obviously a longer term lease agreement would have required targeting a specific date for vacating the property well in advance. If we had owned a house, the option would have been there to rent it out ourselves. The downside to this would be the inevitable maintenance and/or renter issues that arise, given the difficulty in attending to them personally. Selling a house is another matter entirely, and would have been extremely difficult to coordinate with a launch date for the trip.
The Car
This was a lot easier than I expected, perhaps because prices for used cars in March 2022 were strong due to lingering supply chain issues for production of new vehicles. I felt I had a lot of good options, so I delayed selling until the last few days before moving. But this was something I knew only in the last few months. My contingency plan, had the selling market proved to be more challenging, was to sell the car earlier at the best possible price and use a rental car up until the last minute. It was important to strategize this sale, since the car constituted by far the largest cash gain of any potentially saleable items we owned.