What to do with your “Stuff”

For Dave and me the decision to go RVing full-time was a great decision! However, getting to full-timing was a long, long, long process. We called it our “Five-Year Plan”. We knew we wanted to live on the road and explore the country. When we started implementing our Five-Year Plan, we didn’t even have an RV!!!!

One part of our strategic Five-Year Plan was rightsizing all of our “stuff”. We had a four-bedroom house, a two-car garage and between us 120 years of accumulated “really important stuff”.

The following was our plan for eliminating most of our excess belongings in preparation for going full-time. In talking with others around the campfire, many who did not sell their primary homes, they liked our ideas for downsizing, too. Perhaps these ideas could be useful for you!

Ultimately our decision was to sell our house and to only keep what we could fit into our 35’ motorhome. No storage units for us. Of course, everyone will make different decisions for themselves.

Three Questions

In preparing for your Five-Year Plan, there should be three questions to ask yourself:

Question One: What is your ultimate goal?
Do you plan on keeping your house and traveling part-time? Do you plan on selling your house and traveling full-time? Will you be renting a storage unit? Are you condensing “stuff” from a four-bedroom house into a 35’ RV?

Question Two: What will you be transitioning into, a motorhome, 5th wheel, Class C, travel trailer or a van?
If you are keeping your primary home you may decide to keep everything! But if your decision is full-timing, the storage available to you on an RV is vastly different for a 42’ motorhome and a 17’ travel trailer. Knowing how much space you will have will determine how much “stuff” you will need to dispose of.

Question Three: What is your timeline?
How much time you have to move will determine the types of purging available to you. We have spoken to one couple whose house sold in 2 hours for cash, with a move out date of two weeks. They felt rushed and overwhelmed. They had one large yard sale and made very little money for their accumulation of belongings.

For us, we had our Five-Year Plan. We had a yard sale each year for three years. We sold items on all of the methods below. Getting the most money we could for the items was important.

Another option if the whole task seems too daunting is to hire someone to come in and either clean or organize your spaces (especially your garage and basement). A professional organizer can help you be objective about what to keep, donate or freecycle.

Things to Keep

There is something called the “80/20 Rule”. It goes something like this: you only use 20% of your belongings about 80% of the time. Meaning you will rarely use 80% of your accumulation of “stuff”. If you are not going to use it, why keep it?

What we have found in full-timing is that this 80/20 Rule continues to be true. For example, we only use about 20% of the clothes we still have onboard.

Sentimental Items

There will always be some things you will want to keep for sentimental reasons. One thing that we learned fairly quickly is that our adult children were not nearly as enamored with our sentimental belongings as we were!

One option is to take pictures of the items that mean something to you and then give away or sell the item. Another option is to keep only a part of the item. My Dad had a floor lamp he always had next to his recliner. When he passed away, I took possession of the lamp. It didn’t matter to me that the base was wobbly, the glass globe was chipped and the cloth lamp shade was filthy. No one else would want that lamp!! And I sure wasn’t going to bring it with me on the RV!! I kept the finial that screwed into the bulb frame and threw away the rest of the lamp.

Another idea is to put your pictures on DVD, a thumb drive or your computer. Distribute the hard copies of the pictures to the people who were in them.

Things to Sell

Probably the most difficult concept to wrap your head around when putting a financial value on your “stuff” is something called the “sunk cost”. Twenty years ago, you may have paid $300 each for those gorgeous solid maple Moosehead bed-side tables. Today, if you go to sell them, you may get $25 for both. This is what is considered the “sunk cost”. For most items, you will NEVER get out of them what you paid for them or what you think they are worth.

As I said previously with sentimental items, our adult children were not interested in our “precious” belongings. In reality, this is true for ANY of your belongings. There is a high likelihood that your family and friends do not want your stuff. They have their own. So please do not think this is where Grandma’s curio cabinet is going to end up.

If you have the time and the interest in selling your unwanted belongings, you have many options:

• Ebay
• Craig’s list
• Facebook marketplace
• Garage sales
• Auctions

What method you choose to sell your belongings will be determined by:

• The size, quality and value of the items you are selling
• The length of time you have to sell items
• Your level of comfort in participating in the sale of your items

Things to Donate or Freecycle

You may choose to donate your unwanted items to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. They will put your items up for sale. They will take the money from the sale of your items and will put it to use helping people in need.

Note: Please do not donate “junk”. If you don’t want an item because it is stained or missing a part, Goodwill or the Salvation Army doesn’t want it, either! It actually costs them money to get rid of your broken or unusable items! It is better for those items to go directly into the trash.

Another benefit of donating is that your donated items are tax deductible. If you need another benefit of donating, most organizations will go to your home and pick them up for you!

Another option is to donate or freecycle your unwanted items directly to a specific organization. Examples of these type of organizations include:

• Homeless shelters are always looking for warm clothing, hats, gloves, mittens, and backpacks.
• Shelters for victims of domestic abuse are always looking for furniture, blankets, towels and toiletries from your last hotel stay.
• Animal shelters are always in need of blankets and towels.
• The ReStore will take any of your tools and leftovers from your household projects, for example, paint and tiles.

Most items that you freecycle will also be eligible for a tax deduction.

Please note: Before dropping items off, always call first to see if they could use the items you have to freecycle!

Things to Throw Away (Trash)

After you have gone through all of your items, there will still be a pile (big or small!) of items you will need to throw away. Depending on the size of these items, you may not be able to put them out at curbside for the garbage truck. You may need to rent a dumpster. The dumpster company will drop a dumpster off at your house and then after a set amount of time they will return to pick up the dumpster. Frequently the cost is less than you think and certainly much less than the 25 trips to the transfer station.

Prevention

If you still are not physically or emotionally ready to start downsizing, there are two things you can do to make your life a little easier, right now. From this day forward:

• Instead of buying something new, see if you could rent it or borrow it from family, friends or neighbors. For example, if you need to cut down the broken limbs from a tree in the backyard, consider renting or borrowing a chainsaw instead of buying one!
• Make a new rule for EVERYONE in your house: if something comes in, something has to go. For example, if you decide to buy a new jacket, an old jacket needs to go. Donate it, freecycle it, or throw it away!

We continue to use this practice on the road. If we bring something new onto the RV, something has to come off! It works well.

Take-away Point

If you are trying to declutter your life in preparation for full-timing, there are many steps you can take to make life easier.

Our adult children are very grateful to us for eliminating 80% of our stuff. It is inevitable that at some point they will be responsible for going through the last 20%. One thing is for sure: they will not need to rent a dumpster!

Coming soon: There will be other blogs in the series of what to do in a Five-Year Plan.

Plus, check out our Great Service and Value page where we have listed businesses by state and provided a link to their website if available. These are business that we have visited and have used during our travels providing us great service for a reasonable cost. (We do not profit from these business by mentioning them.)

Your partners in travel,
Kathryn, Dave and Lucky
RVing Nomads
It’s a lifestyle

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