Selling It All – Our Road To A Nomadic Lifestyle
Was it difficult to sell everything you owned?
It’s a question we get asked many times about starting out on a nomadic lifestyle.
We can only ever answer from our point of view and realise that it may be different for everyone.
Once we knew we wanted to lead a nomadic lifestyle there really was no choice but to let go of everything we owned.
We couldn’t carry it with us so really the choice dictated the action.
But everyone has their own way of letting things go and we just had to work out our way.
For us, it was easier to do it in layers….
Let me explain, first we sold everything that we would probably sell if we had a normal clear out, the stuff that we never used.
You know the kind of stuff.
We all have those sorts of things, right?
That first step was pretty easy.
Next came the things that we rarely used, like Dvd’s that sat on the shelf, the books that we had read but hadn’t got rid of.
Then it was the turn of things that we did use but weren’t a necessity, so that was mostly everything.
Obviously, we kept hold of the very necessary items until last.
Let us not forget the house.
We kept good care of our home so it was in great condition to sell.
It went on sale in September 2015
The For Sale sign went up which felt like a massive step forward in our dream.
A potential sale fell through during the process which we were upset about but then a lady came to look around who was very interested.
She was so interested in fact, she wanted to buy not just the house but a lot of the big items like beds, the tv, wardrobes and kitchen equipment.
That suited us just fine.
We continued to sell items through facebook, ebay and car boot sales.
To be honest, as time went on it just got easier to let things go.
As it got nearer to our house selling date so we just let things go, donating them to charities etc.
What we did do that helped was any money we made from selling our stuff we put towards days out and treats for the three of us rather than let the money just disappear.
Annabel found it difficult to part with her toys and short of having to carry them around the world with us they had to go somehow so we found a local charity that cared for brain-damaged children.
We contacted them and they invited us to take a tour of their facility which we did and found that they were doing some amazing work of caring for the children.
Once Annabel had seen the good work they were doing she wanted to give all her stuff to them so we loaded the car with it all and took it to them.
Annabel was so happy that it went to somewhere meaningful for her.
Some of the last things to go were the bikes that we sold on the day before we moved out of our house and our car that we kept until the day before we flew out of the country.
All we have left is what we travel with and a couple of small plastic containers with keepsake items left in the UK with a friend.
But letting go of possessions is a constant thing we do, leading a nomadic lifestyle.
Sometimes we might stay in one place for a longer period of time so we may buy things we need particular to that place like clothing we need or books etc but constantly go through and donate things we won’t need in the next destination.
It was a lot easier to let go of our possessions than we thought it may have been.
Our relationship with stuff has changed.
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