How do you downsize to travel the world full-time when you have 20 plus years of accumulated stuff? Is it possible to go from a 3,100-square-foot home to a 285-square-foot travel trailer? It is if you downsize! How did we make a complete life change in order to live our dream? By deciding that it was more important to us to travel the world and collect memories than to collect stuff. In order to make Hinton the Trail a reality, we had to downsize BIG TIME. We had to sell everything…and do it all in about 7 months.   

Sell Everything??

The overall task was to sell everything except the memories. The task didn’t seem hard at first, sell some stuff, make some money, repeat.  It’s pretty easy to downsize, right?  WRONG!  There were challenges throughout the process and the hours and hours of sorting, pricing, and re-sorting drained us.  Staring into the abyss of stuff could have easily caused us to throw up our arms and quit, but we didn’t.  With one goal in mind, “Traveling the World, One Hop at a Time”, we could make it happen.

If the object wasn’t a keepsake, something collected from our travels, or a treasured item our kids refused to part with, it was going.  This meant getting rid of about 95% of our things.  There isn’t one easy way to get rid of all your worldly possessions (unless you want to donate everything).  What worked for us was a mix of online selling, yard sales, and lots of donating. 

SORTING YOUR LIFE AND DEALING WITH CHILDREN’S TOYS

In order to downsize we had to start by sorting all of our possessions. Opening box after box of items, going through every closet, and trying to get kids to part with forgotten toys was a challenge.  Initially we set a goal of sorting a room each week, and while we mostly stuck to that, there were times when we wanted nothing to do with it and needed a break.  The key to all of the sorting was saying “if we don’t know why we have it, or can’t decide quickly if we want or need it…it goes”. 

This proved difficult for our youngest son who felt every toy, regardless of its condition, was his favorite.  How do you convince a 6-year-old that getting rid of a broken Hotwheel isn’t the end of the world and that we need to downsize?? Lots and lots of talking and ensuring that he understood where our life was headed made it easier. Corbin finally removed all his broken toys, and after many conversations about helping less fortunate children, he gave a lot of toys to new homes. 

We also got Corbin involved in the yard sales by letting him sell his items and keep the money for things he wanted to do while we travel.  Oh, and we kept all of the Legos (Dad gave in and now we have roughly eight million Legos in storage).  Finally, we ended up building three tubs of toys for Corbin to bring in the trailer, along with about 30 stuffed animals, making his bed look like a zoo.  But children need their things, they need a sense of home wherever they go, and if a few toys help with the adjustment then we’re all for it. 

SELLING ONLINE

Technology is wonderful and if you’re looking to downsize, using online sales is a great way to get rid of items. We tried a few different sites and overall had a lot of luck with clearing things out. Some of the sites worked better than others for us and we learned quite a bit about online selling.  

Letgo

The first site we used was Letgo*. It was easy to post our items by adding a photo, description, and price. Often times we’d start receiving questions and offers within a short amount of time. It started off great and seemed to be a smooth process. We had a lot of interest in our items but at times people wouldn’t come or showed up long after the agreed-upon times. A few people showed up only to say they didn’t have all the money and then request a lower price. It aggravated us to say the least and after a while we decided to let go of Letgo. (Disclaimer, we are NOT saying Letgo is a bad site, in fact it’s easy to use. We just didn’t have a great experience with it.)

Mercari

The next one we tried was Mercari* which is a very interesting app.  You post your item, set your price, and wait for people to message you. The buyer purchases the item and you get a notification that it is sold and ready for shipment.  Next, you receive a shipping slip (which comes out of your profit) or you can go to the post office and ship it yourself.  Once the buyer receives the item, they do a review of the item to ensure it’s as they expected and a review of the seller.  The seller also does a review of the buyer and then the funds are released. It’s a relatively simple process but not as fast and the constant trips to the post office became inconvenient. It’s a great site for selling a few things at a time, not so much for selling hundreds of items in a short amount of time.

Facebook Marketplace

We finally decided to try Facebook. It has local selling groups, Marketplace* and a lot of local Facebook “yard sale” pages to join.  These work well because you can join the ones that match up with the category of items you’re trying to sell (i.e. electronics, automotive, yard sale, etc). Folks still didn’t show at some of the meetups, however, significantly less than we experienced with Letgo. Overall we sold a lot of items over the course of a few months AND it was a great way to advertise our yard sales and generate a lot of foot traffic for them.

*We are not affiliated with any of these apps or sites and are not providing a full review, merely sharing our experiences with using them.

YARD SALES

In the beginning we expected to downsize with a yard sale every few weeks.  That idea was thrown out the window after our first 2-day event over a holiday weekend.  The amount of work that goes into pricing, advertising, organizing, and staging items overwhelmed us and we decided to just do one more about 6 months later. 

We advertised the yard sales on Facebook, in a local newspaper, and on about every telephone pole within a mile radius of our house.  The advertising paid off and we generated a ton of foot traffic on day one of each sale.  In fact, for our first sale we had buyers from thrift shops and resell stores standing in our yard in the pouring rain an hour before we opened.  It was complete mayhem yet awesome and we sold a LOT.  Yard sales were hands down the biggest source of downsizing our house.  The second was donations.

DONATING ITEMS

Donating items to Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc., is another great way to downsize your home fast and to help others at the same time. I can’t tell you how many trips we took to Goodwill, but it was at least once a month. As Air Force members, we donated a lot to the Airman’s Attic which is an on-base program that provides free items to service members and their dependents. (Note: Some bases have different criteria but most only allow members in the paygrade of E-6 and below to get free items.)

Another way we donated was by calling people that we knew could use something and to come see what we had. We did this with a lot of young service members just starting out on their own with new spouses or moving into their first apartment. Suzannah and I both had supervisors and leaders who helped us out when we were young Airman. It was important to us to do the same.

WE DID IT!

Downsizing from a 3,100-square-foot home to a 285-square-foot travel trailer was hard. All the sorting, pricing, re-sorting, and selling was draining. But whenever we wanted to throw up our hands and quit, we talked about how important it was for us to travel the world and collect memories. On 24 May 2019 we reached that goal and we drove out on our adventure and started “Traveling the World, One Hop at a Time”.

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