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You can call it a midlife crisis. I call it coming to your senses.
You’ve finally had it.
Your coworkers have stolen your last great idea. Your neighbor’s dog has done his last bit of business on your lawn. And your service provider has secretly overcharged you for the last time.
It’s time to pull the plug, pack your bags and put yourself on a one-way flight to a city whose name you can’t pronounce. So sell everything, cancel your subscriptions, and return every overdue library book.
You’ve threatened to do it so many times. “One more day like this and I quit! … If so-and-so gets elected we’re outta here!”
“Easier said than done,” you protest? Well, it’s easier than you think. If my family could do it, so can you. Let me tell you how.
12 steps to unloading your life and enjoying the kind of freedom you’ve always dreamed of
1. Announcements
Make it official and tell everyone, including your parents. The fewer people who know about your plan, the easier it will be to back out, give up and return to your ordinary life. And we are absolutely not going to let that happen.
2. Timeline
Sketch out a rough timeline and determine what will be the hardest thing(s) to do before you can leave. In our case, we had a business to sell and a house to deal with. We figured out that selling the business would be the most complicated and might take the longest, so our timeline basically centered on that. Once that was in motion, we would list our home for sale (we decided against renting it), and sell our cars, along with everything else. We started planning more than two years ahead of time.
3. Finances
Come up with some sort of financial plan. Will you find local work as you travel? Work in exchange for room and board? Maybe you can work remotely, or maybe you’ll need to acquire some new skills in order to do that. Perhaps you have a house or other property you can rent, or enough investments to live off once you’ve sold everything. Our plan included a combination of work-exchange, online income, and some modest investments.
You’ll need to formulate a budget of some kind. There’s no need to be precise, but give yourself some sort of window and allow for unexpected expenses. Depending where you’re headed, the cost of living could be significantly lower (or a bit higher) than what you’re used to.
4. Sell, sell, sell
Sell everything you own, or almost everything. If you’re like me, there will be a good number of items in your life that you’re reluctant to part with. But once you start selling things and letting go, the process gets easier and easier. Before you know it, you‘ll find yourself getting rid of things you once believed had immeasurable value. Just realize it could be a slow process. We had our first garage sale more than a year before we sold our house, and three or four more after that. But we got much better results listing things individually on Craigslist, especially the higher value items.
5. Give it away
Start giving things away. No matter how many garage sales you hold, certain things just won’t move. We must have made at least 20 trips to the Goodwill. And I’m happy to say we only had to make one or two trips to the dump. But you’ll want to find the right home for certain treasures and heirlooms. In our case, we had heaps of canvases with my wife’s artwork. Some friends were interested enough to purchase paintings, and many friends received gifts of artwork to hang on their walls. But an ungodly quantity ended up in the dumpster. I still remember it vividly. There wasn’t a dry eye in the station wagon, but we got over it sooner than you’d think.
6. Storage
As your material possessions are whittled down to a smaller and smaller shadow of their former self, there will always be things you can neither sell nor give away. Important paperwork, family photos, precious belongings, and so on, will have to get stored somewhere. Maybe you have a friend with a large basement or a relative with a spacious attic. In most cases, you’ll probably need to find a storage unit and factor that into your monthly budget.
7. The Trip
With all of these tedious logistics, don’t forget to plan your trip. Surely, you’ll be thinking about this all along the way, and it will give you something amazing to look forward to as you patch up holes in your bedroom walls and prepare for the next garage sale. Eventually you need to narrow down the fantasies and come up with a real itinerary. Depending on your budget, you can keep it wide open or maintain a strict schedule.
At the very least, you’ll need to decide on one initial point-of-entry and purchase a bundle of one-way tickets to that destination. You’ll also need to think about where you’ll stay when you arrive, and how you’ll get around. Will you have friends or family there, or will you head straight to a hotel? You might want to spend your first few weeks in a long-term vacation rental while you get acclimated. Will you buy a car when you get there, or will you rely on public transportation? Will you need to bring car seats for the kids, or does it make more sense to buy new ones locally? Get busy on the Google and do your research.
REMINDER: Don’t forget to stop and relax. The harder you look, the more details you will find. But you can’t let that terrify you. Many of those details can be set aside and dealt with when the time comes. Remember, freedom comes from letting go, so this is an exercise in letting go, not only of possessions, but also control. Sometimes you’ll just have to trust your instincts and improvise. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a back-up plan.
8. Visas
Understand the visa requirements for the country you’re heading to. In many cases, an American passport will allow you to stay in a country for 3 to 6 months without a special visa. (But places like Russia and Brazil require you to obtain travel visas ahead of time.) What will you do or where will you go when your time is up? You don’t have to decide right away, but you’ll need to remember these dates and stay on top of it.
9. Farewell party
Definitely organize a going away party. You might have to do this at a friend’s house. As it happened, we held going away parties at a few friends’ houses after we sold our place. We even held one at the park. The more possessions you unload, the more you realize what’s really important and irreplaceable: the people in your life. So you can’t have too many going away parties. These are also excellent opportunities for gifting more of your personal treasures to your closest friends and family.
10. Departure logistics
As your liftoff date draws closer and closer, it becomes more and more difficult to get things done. Logistics can get pretty tricky once you’ve moved out of your house, sold your car and put everything you’re not bringing into storage. You might have to live in a hotel for a few days or weeks, and rent a car for a short time. Then you still have to get to the airport. And you’ll probably have a lot of luggage to keep track of, a lot of very carefully packed luggage.
11. Travel details
Time to tie up your loose ends and organize your details. You might want to get travel insurance. Make sure your credit cards and/or debit cards will work overseas, and figure out which ones will have the best international rates on withdrawals and exchanges. Will your phone work overseas, or will you get a new one when you land, or maybe just a new SIM card?
12. Travel documents and essentials
This is it. Double and triple check your your luggage and your travel documents. Pack your prescription drugs and copies of prescriptions if necessary. Pack some sort of family first aid kit, hoards of Advil and antibiotics, or phials of essential oils, whatever you’re into. Also make copies of passports and birth certificates and back up your all your data. And don’t worry; unless you’re heading to Antartica, you can always find a place to buy more toothpaste, extra socks, or whatever you might forget.
CLOSING REMINDER: Take another chance to relax. By this time you will have transformed your life and let go of things you probably thought you’d never let go of. In the process, you’ll come to realize what few things you really need, and what you truly cherish in life. Maybe there’s a lucky talisman or two packed away in your carry-on, next to your toothbrush and nail clippers. But ultimately, what really matters to you are the few family members who are coming with you on this trip.
For more details about the early steps of our radical departure, take a look at some of these previous blog posts.
To learn more about the lifestyle of freedom, check out these other articles.
