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Our moving experience and why you should declutter NOW!

Our moving experience and why you should declutter NOW!

Recently we moved out of our 2-bedroom apartment and back to Amy’s parents’ house in preparation for our round-the-world adventure. Without going into too much detail and transforming this blog post into an extended rant about why moving sucks, let’s just say that this experience wasn’t easy!

If we could do it all over again, we would change a lot of things. While our overall plans and intentions were good, we made plenty of mistakes that ended up being quite costly both time-wise and financially. For those of you who will soon go through a similar experience and have to sell the majority of your belongings before traveling, if we could give you one tip and one tip only it’s this…

Declutter early!

For the love of god, please start sorting through your possessions at least 2-3 months before you move, if not earlier! We left it way too late and as a result we’re still stuck with at least 20 boxes of stuff (mostly crap we’re assuming), a full wardrobe of clothes and a few of our appliances.

Clutter

Declutter before you move, not after!

Fortunately we have somewhere to put all of that excess stuff for now but most of you won’t have that luxury. Hopefully our mistake is enough to scare you into decluttering immediately but if you still need further convincing on why you shouldn’t leave it until the last minute, here are a few more reasons:

You’re moving on. Travel is your new lifestyle, consumerism is in the past. While we haven’t heeded this advice yet (yes, we plan to shortly!), ask yourself whether you really need that item or can it be sold or thrown away? When in doubt, remember that you’re going to be living out of a single suitcase/backpack for an indefinite period of time very soon! Did that make throwing away that favorite old jumper slightly easier? We hope so!

Don’t let your possessions control you. We’re living amongst mess at the moment and still can’t seem to find anything! Why? Because we’ve still got too many possessions. It took me 3 days to find my phone charger after we moved (another not so fun experience), just because it was buried amongst all our crap! Free yourself now and start purging early.

Save on moving costs. We paid nearly $500 to move 10 items – while our situation was extreme (we lived in a first floor apartment at the very back of a large complex), the more items you can get rid of earlier, the less it costs to move regardless of whether you’re using a moving company or doing the job yourself.

Moving out takes less time. The less possessions you have when the moving out date finally arrives, the quicker the whole process will be. We had to make multiple car trips to move boxes and several smaller items to their new home. What a time killer that was!

Moving becomes less stressful and you can relax. This reason is a direct result of the 4 reasons listed above – if you declutter now you’ll be more prepared for travel, you will be able to find what’s important to you and ultimately you will save money and time.

If we still haven’t convinced you to declutter then we sincerely hope you enjoy buying even more worthless crap at the post-Christmas sales (if you’re going to buy things for travel, that’s a completely different story!). For those of you still with us, stop reading and start planning how you can declutter now!

Feel free to start your decluttering journey in the comments below and share any valuable advice you might have if you’ve gone through it already.

Flickr Photos: aeminphilly, kb-monkeywrench

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