Selling all your life’s possessions…

I’m moving from Canada to Australia. I basically can’t move much farther away from my current location without starting to come back.

We have a few choices.

1) Move everything. Can be expensive. Or the moving could, like our moving company in Mississauga accidentally ‘lose’ items (just the expensive items like camera, computer, etc.)

2) Move some things.

3) Sell everything and start over.

We’ve done this move before and this time we’ve opted for step number 3. Sell everything. At first this seems quite frightening. Obviously I can’t sell things like family pictures and I have to keep a few small items, but for the most part, everything must go. We had a yard sale this weekend (more on yard sales in another post) and it was interesting to see how much stuff sold. It was quite liberating really.

However, you have to realize that if you paid $100 for something, no one is going to ever give you anywhere near that. It’s strange that people, for some reason, think something is more valuable when it comes out of a store. It’s also amazing the things you accumulate… and for what reason? Do we really need all the stuff we have? No.

I think things we own fall in the (overgeneralized) 80/20 rule. I think that we use 20% of our possessions 80% of the time. The other 80% of our stuff we use 20% of the time? What do you think about that?

Anyhow, I’m keeping the laptop, but the house is getting progressively emptier as the days go by. In Australia I need to keep it really, really simple.

After all, a change in EVERYTHING ought to bring about a change in me too.

And selling all my stuff was bound to happen at my funeral (or at least after the funeral). This way I get to see that everyone thought my stuff was worth much less than I ever considered it.