Question Sell all, put in storage, keep your home?

[Neal]

No, I'm not going fulltiming right now but someday I need to de-hoard and going fulltiming even if for a short period of time may help me make that transition. Right now I can't imagine how I'd get rid of everything I've accumulated in this house over the past 20 years. It is nice keeping the house if only for storage and also an asset but that comes with the responsibility of maintaining it and avoiding any HOA threats for it being unoccupied which thankfully hasn't happened to date even with being out 7 months. I don't know if there are even rules about that but guessing there are.

For those that made the jump to fulltiming, what did you do and how did you do it? Did you put your stuff in storage? All or some? Did you have some type of sale to let people come in and take what they want? How do you handle this and any regrets?

 

[punkinhead]

We're not full time but my parents were. When they sold the house they tried hauling stuff to mine for storage. I told them "you've got curbside trash pickup same as me." I didn't want their 30+ years of accumulated stuff cluttering up my house. I allowed them to store one large tote of photo albums and stuff like that. They ended up on the road for almost 20 years. Anything they'd have stored would have been outdated and almost useless by then. Plus when they settled down again it was in a much smaller place where most of their old stuff wouldn't have fit. Unless you've got priceless antiques you're better off selling/donating rather than paying for storage. I imagine there's something very freeing about getting rid of everything.

They sold or donated anything of value then turned the house contents over to an auctioneer. Their agreement was for him to sell anything he could then he had to remove anything left over. It's great way to empty a house.

 

[Our Coddiwomple Journey]

Our transition into full timing took over a year. We sold (garage sales) / donated (local charities)/ gave away (family and friends) everything, including the cars we owned at the time. When our house went on the market, we moved over to a local campground and began selling, or giving away the furniture we used to "stage" the house. Once we had an accepted offer, we pre-signed the closing documents, which allowed us to hit the road. Once the funds were transferred into our account we paid off the new Canyon Star, Jeep, and credit cards, and by the time we landed in South Dakota to change residency, we were debt free.
This is our eighth year on the road and we'll never go back to a sticks and bricks. when it's time to leave the road our plan is to find two sites, one in the north for summer, and one in the south for winter. Believe it or not, that is becoming a harder decision than when we decided to go full time in the first place.

 

[Our Coddiwomple Journey]

Our transition into full timing took over a year. We sold (garage sales) / donated (local charities)/ gave away (family and friends) everything, including the cars we owned at the time. When our house went on the market, we moved over to a local campground and began selling, or giving away the furniture we used to "stage" the house. Once we had an accepted offer, we pre-signed the closing documents, which allowed us to hit the road. Once the funds were transferred into our account we paid off the new Canyon Star, Jeep, and credit cards, and by the time we landed in South Dakota to change residency, we were debt free.
This is our eighth year on the road and we'll never go back to a sticks and bricks. when it's time to leave the road our plan is to find two sites, one in the north for summer, and one in the south for winter. Believe it or not, that is becoming a harder decision than when we decided to go full time in the first place.

I forgot to mention that I still work full time 40+ hours a week, so that has allowed us to travel where we want and stay for as long as we want.

 

[Joe Hogan]

Having researched the storage facilities business for years, many things became obvious. Human Nature abhors a vacuum. If there is space you WILL fill it. As we all have done with our Stick and Brick homes.
Homes or Storage units will be filled with Stuff. Much of what is in storage units today is mostly old or outdated junk. This is one of the reasons will never wanted to get in that very lucrative business of owning and running a storage facility. Most Storage facility owners will just auction off the contents of abandoned or delinquent units. Nasty part of the business worse than chasing delinquent rents.
People put the most outrageous things in store units.

We moved my now deceased brother in law, wife's brother, out of an apartment in NYC where he lived for over 50+ years. Thank God he didn't have more space. You accumulate allot over your life. We moved only key items and let the rest go through sale, donation, trash.

Long way of saying, if you are considering going full time, IMHO just auction off, sell, donate, or scrap anything other than key Keepsakes.

 

[Magua]

We had a hard time “downsizing “ to go full time. It was when the Covid crisis was just beginning. As we procrastinated on which items to keep, Covid became a huge issue. No garage sales, no auctions, no anything. My daughter came home, informed us that neither she nor my son wanted anything and had no attachment to anything. She helped us unload 30 years of what I thought were treasures in 4 days. We have a climate controlled storage shed (10X15) that houses what we kept. Hard to do, but they are very thankful that they will not have to do it later in life. They have thanked us many times. Hopefully when we go back to a permanent location, we can accumulate another 20 years of treasures for them to deal with!!
Richard

 

[Russellvh]

We dreamed and discussed going full time for several years but kids, jobs etc. kept delaying actually pulling the trigger. Then in 2021 I watched our house’s value increase from a wishful $300,000. To an easy $350,000. + over just 6 months. We decided it was time.

We told the kids they had 2 weeks to come and get anything they wanted. Then we contracted with an estate auction company. They came in, tagged everything, took pictures and set up an online sell. About 10 days later the house was empty except a little “staging” furniture.

We put the house on market for $375,000. We had full bids before any postings, the realtor held a weekend open house and we accepted an offer for $415,000. 30 days later we closed.

Never regretted. We move every 2 - 3 weeks. Pretty much winters in south Texas and summers in New England area.

 

[Kevin D Pem]

I took a month to downsize. The first time. Armed with time spent watching shows like storage wars I was sure storage was a bad idea.

This is how to downsize.

Rent a one bedroom apartment/or space for your RV. And move in. Bring your stuff that you just can't do without, and find places for those items. A couple months and you will realize how much you have that doesn't mean that much to you!

Then offer a dealer the chance to buy your excess, or have an estate sale.

Word of caution! Don't look back!

 

[DennisT]

Long but detailed for info.

It is difficult but things we learned…..
1. If you think you can sell it, you probably can't
2. If you think your kids want it, most likely they don't
3. If you think it is worth anything, it is probably not

We discussed full timing with quite a few people prior to making the move.

A lot of them initially did the storage thing for items they could not bear to part with. After years of paying for storage, and not needing or wanting anything from there, they finally cleared it out and stopped paying that expense.

When we made the move (after switching the plan from downsizing to a property with storage for the old coach) we started with clothing. This helped get in the mode of getting rid of things.

Checked with relatives for some of the items we had - grandparents dining set, crystal glasses etc, full set of old china from a grandparent and a lot of other items.
- nobody wanted any of those things.

For the old china set, we had a setting for 12 complete with saucers, cups, gravy boats, everything. Found it online where you could buy replacement pieces and they were quite expensive. Hurray, this may be worth something - well after getting the price sheet for what they would pay us for the set - it would have cost more to ship it to them than they would pay us. I get it, will sit in the warehouse for a long time until someone needs to replace a plate or another piece.

We had JDog come in to clean out the basement of items that were not worth donating, etc. They are veteran owned and run. 19 years of stuff in the basement gone in an hour and a half - just point and it went away. Anything they grabbed that they thought someone could use went in a different pile in the truck / trailer.

We made a lot of donations to Good Will and the town we lived in had a “free” store where people that needed items could get them for free.

Helped a friend's kids get started with a trailer load of furniture etc. One just got married and the other was starting over after moving back home during Covid. Didn’t want anything for the items as they were in good shape but 19 years old. Friend had them buy a ladder we carry in the new coach as payment.

The rest of the furniture was going to be picked up by Habitat for Humanity as a donation. They won’t come in the house so everything we didn’t have in the garage, that was left for staging while house was on the market, would have had to be moved out after the sale.

Young family purchased the house and didn’t have a lot. They asked about things like the bar stools in the kitchen, etc. We told them setup a time and we can go through what you want us to leave (anything they wanted we didn’t have to move out of the house for pickup). They started going through and putting stickers on things for us to leave and finally said “just leave it all and if we don’t want it we’ll figure out what to do with it” - score, no more work for us. They did buy the one table we wanted to sell.

I did sell a few things on Marketplace, 2 Kitchen Aid mixers and attachments, etc. since we knew those would probably go.

Everything we actually kept is in the coach with us. We did keep some items for decorations and those are displayed while we are parked for a period of time so we have the memories.

Old photographs were kept and have been scanned to digital so they are no longer taking up room in the coach.

We had some nice bird figurines and those ended up being donated to a bird sanctuary for display and auctioned off to help with finances for the sanctuary.

After getting over the emotional attachment to items it was more time consuming than anything else.

Been two years since we purchased the coach and have been full time in it since (retired 9 days after we picked it up).

House was paid off in prep for retirement so we used a home equity loan (interest only payments) to pay cash for the coach and that was paid off when the house sold. Remaining into savings.

So within 6 months of retiring we were again debt free and retired.

Have enjoyed every minute and no regrets on the process or the downsizing part. Much simpler lifestyle now without property taxes, etc.

We like having a “home base” so we have an annual site in FL for the winter and wander around the country the rest of the year.

 

[Oregon Camper]

No, I'm not going fulltiming right now but someday I need to de-hoard and going fulltiming even if for a short period of time may help me make that transition. Right now I can't imagine how I'd get rid of everything I've accumulated in this house over the past 20 years. It is nice keeping the house if only for storage and also an asset but that comes with the responsibility of maintaining it and avoiding any HOA threats for it being unoccupied which thankfully hasn't happened to date even with being out 7 months. I don't know if there are even rules about that but guessing there are.

For those that made the jump to fulltiming, what did you do and how did you do it? Did you put your stuff in storage? All or some? Did you have some type of sale to let people come in and take what they want? How do you handle this and any regrets?

Spending $6000.00 a year to store $3000.00 worth of crap in a storage facility

 

[Alan_Hepburn]

Homes or Storage units will be filled with Stuff. Much of what is in storage units today is mostly old or outdated junk.

The difference between "stuff" and "junk": stuff is the junk you keep, and junk is the stuff you throw away...