The great purge 2008, part 1

Photo by: Roxanne

With something like 40 days or so before I leave France and head back across the Atlantic, I am really starting to feel the pressure on what to do with my 3+ years worth of acquisitions. Shipping overseas is expensive and in all honesty do I really need everything I have now? No. With this in mind, I've been trying brainstorm and organize how I could objectively go through EVERYTHING and discard what I really don't need.

About five years ago my parents decided to move out of California after living in the house I called home for 20 years. I was going to be traveling in Europe during the move, so prior to my departure I went on a rather eclectic attempt to downsize years upon years of possessions. During my adolescence I stayed in the bedroom that had a rather large walk-in closet. That led to never really needing to get rid of anything. Though I considered my efforts to downsize to be admirable (I sold clothes mostly for .50 or $1 each and earned almost $400 at the family garage sale), after the move both myself and my parents found ourselves unpacking boxes of things that in hindsight, we did not really need.

With that lesson learned, I've come up with three general rules:

1. Don't move anything that I can live without
2. I might need it NOW but will I need it where I'm moving to?
3. If it costs more (or equal) to transport than I could buy that item again for, is it still worth moving?

Next post, I will delve deeper into my musings on applying the aforementioned rules to my purge.