Irresponsibility is Hard Work
“No,” the speaker replied, “that’s not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is: If you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all.”
— Steven Covey (link)
If you’re going to fit your life on your back for any significant period of time, you’re going to have to get rid of a whole lot of things. Maybe not forever, but anything you keep needs to be found a home. Turns out, that’s a lot of work.
Here’s how I tackled that problem.
The Big Rocks
Home
The biggest objects in my life are my home and my car.
My home is relatively small: it’s a 800 sq. ft. condo. Financially though, it’s enormous. That mortgage needs to be paid. The bankers are not super chill about taking some time off to find yourself. And it’s just full of stuff. More stuff than I ever thought I had.
The obvious solution was to rent the place out. That lets me pay the mortgage and worry less (or maybe just worry differently) about it. So in October I cleaned it up enough to show and then posted my furnished condo for rent starting in November until March.
A few small bites. Those evaporated quickly.
As the days passed, the anxiety set in. What if it doesn’t rent? Tick-tock. The mortgage alone is approximately my monthly budget for SE Asia, never mind the condo fees, insurance, utilities…
Not only is there the stress of the uncertainty of renting, there’s also quite a lot of work to be done once the decision to rent is made. Minor maintenance needs to be performed: nicks and scratches and re-painting. Things I barely even noticed any more became embarrassing eyesores, open to public inspection. The home office needed to be turned back into a proper second bedroom. The bathrooms needed a few upgrades so, for instance, towels could be hanged. All my personal items, those not part of the furnishings I’d leave behind, needed to be packed and stored.
Change of plans. Let’s try AirBnB. That’s better. Got a few 3 day rentals rapidly. Pretty nice. Oops. Now I have to leave for impromptu mini vacations while the guests stay, in amidst the packing and cleaning and renovating. Nevertheless, it looks like I could pay my expenses with an occupancy rate of about 60%. It’s slow season, but I might get that…
So, AirBnB is a good option, but there’s a snag. There are cleanings and key exchanges to be managed for a series of guests. Emergencies need to be handled. Can’t do that so easily from the other side of the world!
Luckily a flyer came to a friend offering exactly the service I needed: AirBnB property management. In yet another coincidence, at the same time as I connected with urban innkeeper, someone serious finally contacted me looking for a long-term rental from craigslist. Bingo! Two options. And I chose both: long term rental, through AirBnB (which covers insurance!) along with emergency contact services from urban innkeeper. So I can relax about that.
And once the rental was assured, I bought my plane ticket.
Perfect.
Car
Storing a car sucks. It’s costly, and I’m vaguely aware you need to take some kinds of precautions to keep it working. Like disconnecting the battery maybe? Some kind of special juice poured into the gas thank? Before I go on Yahoo Answers 1 to find out, is there a better way?
It’s 2014! I have a car, someone needs a car… can’t we use technology to find each other? Like AirBnB, there must be a sharing economy solution to this problem. Turns out, there is. Flight Car just arrived in Seattle. They take your car and rent it out. You avoid storing it, and, if your lucky, maybe you get a little rental income from it.
Awesome.
The Little Rocks
So that covers the big pieces. Everything else, everything except what I’m carrying with me — clothing, tax documents, real estate papers, computer stuff, sports equipment, photos — needs to be stored. The problem with the little rocks is that there’s just so many of them, from pebbles to sand.
Packing and storing is a pain, and I’ve always been attracted to minimalism, so I decided on a purge to cut my possessions to the bone.
I failed at that. But I did make some progress. Here’s how.
Gifts
Everyone loves gifts! I’ve never been a huge fan of date-specific gifts. I prefer to give when I get a good idea rather than when the calendar tells me it’s time. So the first step was to look at everything I had and see if anyone I knew could use any of it.
This is a very satisfying way to reduce your stuff.
Craigslist
Why not sell the things you don’t need? Reduce your load and make some money. Our family never did this growing up. I always had a feeling of identification with objects; anything you buy is yours. It’s taken a while to get over that, but now I love Craigslist.
Here are some rules which let me feel ethical:
-
I normally will take a slightly lower price. Everyone wants to feel like they’re getting a deal
-
I never put stuff out ‘for free’ on Craigslist. There’re better solutions below. The folks looking for free on Craigslist are very aggressive and annoying in my experience. Like jackals
-
First to my place with cash wins. There are no ‘dibs’
-
I use textexpander snippets to do easy form-letter responses to email inquires. They have my number and address. I then fill in my schedule availability
Ebay
Some items don’t sell so well on Craigslist. For example, I had an awesome Arc’Teryx trench coat. It was a Gore-Tex beauty, and very costly. Very valuable to the right buyer. Pointless to almost everyone else. With Craigslist, you only have the local market, and anything exotic might take a long time to find a home. So Ebay is a good option for those. It’s more of a burden due to the slice of selling price they take and there’s shipping to pay and to arrange. So I like it for these expensive, special interest goods.
Buy Nothing
The Buy Nothing Project is a movement devoted to sharing goods locally. They operate a bunch of groups on Facebook, and folks post what they have and what they need. People there — presumably because they’re in the same neighborhood — are much friendlier than free-Craigslisters. Typically you post what you have, get a number of responses, use random.org to select a winner, then put out the goods for pick-up. Simple. The advantage of giving these things is that the idea of theft doesn’t worry you, and since there’s no money being exchanged, you don’t need to be present.
The flip-side is asking for what you need, something I haven’t done. Perhaps I will when I get back and complete the circle.
Since everything in Craiglist, Ebay and Buy Nothing required a photo I have a nice record of this purge. Here’s everything I found a home for by giving or selling one-on-one:
Goodwill
Finally, donating to Goodwill is a great way to get rid of stuff you can’t find a better home for. Though honestly, with all the options above, they didn’t get much.
Storage
After all that, everything else needs to be stored. And everything I had that was personal — not part of my furnished condo — fit in a 5ft X 5ft unit at the local Public Storage.
And that’s it. Ready to go. In a few posts I’ll talk about what little remains: what I’ll carry with me for the next 3+ months.
1:
No, not really.
How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to feel the straps on your shoulders. Feel ‘em? Now I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life. You start with the little things. The things on shelves and in drawers, the knick-knacks, the collectibles. Feel the weight as that adds up. Then you start adding larger stuff, clothes, table-top appliances, lamps, linens, your TV. The backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. And you go bigger. Your couch, bed, your kitchen table. Stuff it all in there. Your car, get it in there. Your home, whether it’s a studio apartment or a two bedroom house. I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now try to walk. It’s kind of hard, isn’t it? This is what we do to ourselves on a daily basis. We weigh ourselves down until we can’t even move. And make no mistake, moving is living.
— Up In The Air, 2009 Movie, Novel by Walter Kirn