Getting Rid of Stuff to Travel is Hard!
One of the most difficult challenges in traveling full time is what to keep and what to let go of.
When you make the decision to get rid of most of your belongings and travel the road, it sounds like all fun and games — until you start going through it to get rid of it. And if you're sentimental about things like I am, tossing out things you love can be heartbreaking.
This is one challenge I'm glad we've had plenty of time to work through. It takes time to process getting rid of your stuff because it’s hard to do. Thankfully we haven't had rush to do it all quickly.
James however has done really well with this aspect of traveling full time. He dreams of minimalism so it’s not such a big deal to him.
Even though it’s been difficult for me, I do feel like it gets easier and easier as we get closer to leaving. It's also made me realize that people can save WAY too much stuff. EEEEK!
Don't save it all even when it’s sentimental.
When you have sentimental attachments to everything, it’s going to be really hard to part ways with it. Letting go can be painful.
I feel guilty for getting rid of some of those cute things our kids made when they were little. I want to keep all those toys or special items forever but it’s not beneficial. So my advice - don't save it all. If you have little ones, don't make it hard on your future self...save a few things and let the rest go.
And besides the sentimental things, what about all the regular household things we have -decorations, dishes, furniture, etc. Do we sell it or get rid of it? Do we store it and use it again later? All tough questions.
I feel like anyone who decides to embark on a traveling lifestyle needs to make those decisions for themselves, but we've decided we don't really want to pay to store things that we could easily replace later.
If we're going to be gone for a long time it just doesn't make financial sense to spend money to hold on to things that we aren't even using. So goodbye stuff.
Letting go is actually quite freeing!
Getting rid of stuff can be hard for sure but it's felt great to let stuff go, to have less clutter, to have a minimalist mindset, and to live with less. I mean that's what we're going to do from the road, right? ;)
We aren't quite there yet but we are getting closer every day to reducing the amount of stuff we have to a reasonable amount that we can deal with easily. It’s certainly an interesting time but I’ll let you know how it goes.