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Comment by adreamingsoul | Hacker News Reader

My partner and I moved from the US to Scandinavia in 2019. We decided to sell everything (house, cars, items) and only take the most essential and sentimental items with us as checked luggage.

We arrived to a new country with literally everything that we owned. That was a complex feeling that I hope to never forget.

We could have shipped our belongings, or placed them long-term storage, but the cost and complexity didn’t seem advantageous. It was challenging and emotional to sell everything. But we did and I think we are better people for having chosen to go through that experience.

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My wife and I have been living like this for the last 10+ years; furnished apartments, short-term contracts, day-to-day essentials purchased locally and sold secondhand when we move.

At first I found it incredibly freeing - and I still do, mostly - but over time I’ve developed this almost nostalgic feeling for a home. Some place that’s filled with my own stuff where I can at least mentally ground myself. The idea of actually having one still seems almost overwhelming, but the concept sounds nice.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, or because my family is, or maybe an unsettled life just gets to you after a while.

I've been living the same way for much of the past 30 years. I don't want to completely give up my globetrotting lifestyle, but I crave a home base now. I plan to buy something modest to store things in and use as a primary home, but not so expensive that it precludes locking the doors for a year while I travel or live somewhere else.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you do that allows you to live this kind of lifestyle? Travelling has always been a big goal for me, but making it work with a stable job, and having enough disposable income to afford it is nigh on impossible.

In the post-COVID world many companies (at least in the tech industry) are moving to flexible office policies where full remote is possible.

You don't have to be a youtuber to have that lifestyle.

Maybe not but you do still have to be in a pretty niche industry.

Be careful to clear this with your company first. It can become a tax nightmare and could lead to termination if you’re working at a large organization that doesn’t have a presence where you want to work.

Even within the US, you can't legally just have a nominal postal address somewhere and then live wherever you want. States want their money. A friend of mine was telling me their company is going to start auditing business travel records to make sure that appropriate tax filings are made.

If you're not filing expense reports, will a company "know"? Possibly not. But it seems pretty precarious to expose yourself and the company at risk this way.

They will know through VPN logs - security groups look for anomalous login activity and will want to know why you’re logging in from Detroit when your work location says San Jose.

It also puts your manager at risk to do it - if you tell them, then they know it’s happening and have to do something about it.

I guess you need a VPN for your VPN

People log in from all over the place because of business travel. I doubt that many companies are aggressively data mining where employees are located.

The second point is more significant. Even with almost 100% remote work it's hard to systematically hide where you are from everyone--especially if you do any business travel or expense reimbursement or are in a materially different timezone or climate.

It's true that things are difficult if you don't have primary residency somewhere, but I'm unaware of any obligation to actually stay at the primary residence, so long as you're not de facto residing somewhere else and avoiding legal residency there for tax evasion purposes. Like, you can have a primary residence in NY state, and travel all year long, and so long as you're not actually spending >6 months at a specific residence in another state, and are still paying your NY and federal taxes, I don't think there's any problem. Where things get sketchy is if you're trying to claim NY is your primary residence while living in CA for 9 months of the year. I'm not a lawyer though.

What I'm more familiar with is overseas residency and federal taxes. There are benefits to establishing legal residency outside the US, if you really do live and work outside the US. But then you have to be able to prove it to the IRS. If you can establish a bona fide overseas residency, you get substantial federal tax discounts (like ~$100k tax-free income), and don't have to pay state tax anywhere. But if you spend more than 33 days per year in the US, the burden of proof for establishing a bona fide foreign residency are higher[1].

Edit: update since I can't nest any more replies (to @dragonwriter) below: I sorta changed topics; my paragraph above about foreign residency is only relevant if you're earning foreign income. If you're a US citizen working for a US company, you're not getting away from taxes that way. But you can still save yourself from some personal obligation by setting up a company.

[1]: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...

> you can establish a bona fide overseas residency, you get substantial federal tax discounts (like ~$100k tax-free income), and don't have to pay state tax anywhere.

That’s...not true. State income tax is usually due on dollars earned in the state — it used to be usually the union of (dollars earned by residents) and (dollars earned by work in the state) but a 2015 federal court decision required it to be one or the other, and AFAIK every state with an income tax has chosen the latter over the former because, basically, resident citizens vote in the state while citizens resident in other states, the most common nonresident citizen workers, don’t. So, a bona fide overseas residence doesn't have any effect on state income tax liability.

I'm not a lawyer (or an accountant) either. I believe the threshold varies by state but I don't know if there's anywhere that it's at a level where "normal" transient travel would expose you. I assume the biggest issue is people like consultants who may travel to a work site during the week for months at a time. (Or, as you say, someone who has a permanent address of some sort in a low/no tax state but actually lives most of the time somewhere else.)

ADDED: It appears that the threshold is essentially non-existent in many states. https://www.concur.com/newsroom/article/what-are-state-tax-i... (I think this is the solution my friend's company is actually using.)

I didn't mean to imply that I've been living out of a suitcase for 30 years. I move frequently (every 1-2 years on average; longest stint in one town for the past 30 years was three years); rent furnished houses more often than not; regularly take a year or more off between jobs; travel for months at a time every few years. I don't have or want a stable job (longest job was a little over three years).

I've never had a mortgage; I generally have zero debt (not even car payments); no dependents; usually no pets (I miss having pets, though). I don't own much of anything that I'm not willing to get rid of. I like the idea of having a home base and some permanent material items, but so far I don't like it as much as I like being flexible.

Working in tech offers the option of remotely working from anywhere. I've worked from home (or wherever) at a number of places, going back to the early 90s. I've still spent more time in normal office jobs than remote. Now that covid has permanently altered the landscape, I expect to do it a lot more.

There are unhealthy psychological aspects to all this. I avoid commitment, I feel trapped by obligations and responsibilities, I'm always thinking about what's next instead of being content with what I have. It's not for everyone.

Wow, you're actually the real life version of George Clooney's character in "Up in the Air".

I always thought it was an exaggerated portrayal, but it seems your ways are even more extreme than in the movie.

Such lifestyle is so completely foreign to me, that I'm fascinated. If an alien landed on my lawn tomorrow and said "I fart gold coins", I would have an easier time believing such a thing exists than your lifestyle.

How do you make friends? Can't employers sense that you're going to leave soon? Or is that specifically what they're looking for?

My life isn't glamorous, and much of my itinerant lifestyle has been lonely and depressing. A few times, I moved to cities where I had an established base of friends. A couple times, I managed to make new lifelong friends. Many times, I moved somewhere and never made good friends. It gets harder the older I get, but I think I'd have similar problems even if I hadn't moved as much. As I get older, the biggest challenge with friendships is that people my age have spouses and children. They've grown up and in many ways I haven't. I'm slowing down lately. I used to think I was exploring and trying new things, maybe looking for my place. Now I'm more aware of the negative aspects, like that I'm afraid of commitment, unwilling to settle, unwilling to accept that "this is the rest of my life". I'm still not ready to do that, but I no longer think that it's a universally good thing.

I job-hop more than most people, but it's not completely out of the ordinary in tech work. Many people stay in one area but still change jobs every few years. People used to occasionally question some shorter (1-2 year) job stints on my resume, but I haven't been asked about it in over a decade. I don't think that particular aspect raises eyebrows anymore. There are more tech jobs than people to fill them; it's a job-searcher's market and has been for a long time.

Check out my area, near the XNA airport. Away from Bentonville unless you want to pay more.

XNA has the worst TSA though historically. I’ve flown out of there over a dozen times and only during Covid times did they not practically want to do a body cavity search. It’s a combination of carrying too much electronics when I fly, with machines which give flakey readings with the swabs, to what seems like trainees who are strict by the letter when it comes to protocol, even when it’s inappropriate to do so. It’s a nice airport otherwise, especially where it’s located, but there’s only so many times you can endure that and not start to hate it.

It's also an unusually expensive airport to fly in and out of (https://www.fayettevilleflyer.com/2011/04/07/nytimes-blog-na...). I was flying for business, like most of the traffic, so everyone is price insensitive.

If you travel enough that you find it to be a burden, just pay for prescreening. If you get TSA PreCheck, which is pretty cheap and easy, you'll get waved-through all the domestic stuff (plus you get to cut in line). If you're primarily concerned with international travel, then Global Entry is amazing. You won't even have to talk to anyone from customs or immigration, and you'll never see a line. Just walk up and slap your hand on the kiosk and off you go. Global Entry is also pretty cheap ($100 for five years), but is more of a pain in the ass to get; you have to schedule an interview, which will take a couple months, pass more-strict background checks, and visit an airport for the interview itself, but all of that will take less time than 1-2 stints in line at the JFK immigration queue.

I already have that, but neither help when they do an ETD swab on your bags and gets a false positive from the machine as I was describing in my reply.

We also have been living like this for about 6 years. The main difference is we have a home in a very low cost of living place where we can keep "home". It's cheap enough that we just spend a few months a year there, but when we're there we can work through those nesting instincts.

I live out of a single backpack and carry-on. Nothing I carry with me is precious. It could all be replaced in an afternoon with Amazon. I rely on furnished rentals and a couple of "stuff caches" in family closets and garages here and there, mostly with things that make life in that specific place a bit nicer. I've also "bought" family things that we get to enjoy while we are there. I own and also don't own a kayak that I use a few weeks a year and a surfboard I use for a few months.

Where do you get furnished short-term apartments at competitive price? Airbnb or something else? Living in furnished apartments has always been my dream (for one reason or another I moved eleven places in the last ten years, even if I’m not a digital nomad at all), but in the US you pay easily a 50%+ premium over a standard yearly lease for an empty apartment.

Not OP, but I’ve been doing this and found that contacting people on AirBNB and making an offer often (after a bit of haggling and false starts) will land a great place for not much more than a regular unfurnished rental. I think a lot of people get into AirBNB dreaming of big $$ but then realize how much work it is to coordinate dozens of different guests each month to maximize $$ and then ultimately like the idea of one renter for a few months to give some relief.

Also, the market of people specifically trying to rent furnished long term rentals is very small and they tend to aim to “executives” that are in town for a period of time before buying their own place. They charge accordingly. It is a big red flag for me to see someone or a company marketing their furnished rental as “executive suites” or similar

The availability of furnished rental depends on local market.

For example in France students need lodging during their studies. So France cities with universities have a strong unfurnished rental market. Of course that's mostly small surfaces.

Note also that in France taxes are different for owners when renting unfurnished.

I rented a room in my house on Airbnb for about two years. Each time a guest leaves we need to clean, switch bedsheets, restock amenities; creating overhead. If done efficiently it cost us 30 minutes of time which was still worth it, but of course we glad to get the occasional renter who wanted to stay for a week or month.

Yes one bedroom would be quick but a lot of people having to clean multiple bedrooms, living rooms, kitchen (!!), etc it can be laborious.

We don't move quite that often - we're usually on two-year cycles, so we just sign standard 1+1 leases. As one of the sibling comments said, the local market heavily influences the housing stock and we've always been in big expat-heavy cities where renting furnished places is pretty common.

It's also a thing to negotiate furnishing with the landlord, e.g. I'll pay an extra $100/mo in rent if you agree to do an Ikea run and you can keep it at the end of the lease.

If I need to be somewhere for <1y but >1m, I'll try to deal directly with AirBnB hosts but sometimes you just have to eat the borderline usurious serviced apartment fees.

When I've needed a furnished apartment, I've done it separately -- rented an apartment, then rented furniture separately. They'll come in and set up the furniture and come and pick it up when you move out.

Last time I rented furniture, it cost around $250/month to furnish a one bedroom apartment. They supplied all of the furniture, we supplied dishes and cookware.

For a longer term lease, it may be cheaper to buy cheap furniture from Ikea, but it's a lot more hassle, it's so much easier to let the rental company come in and set up, then take it all away when you leave.

My current place is rented unfurnished. So I had to buy a sofa so that I could actually entertain guests. Now I have a quite expensive large, sofa that may not fit into my next place and so I'll either have to hope that I can sell it or just end up giving it away to a furniture charity.

Having my own mattress is a must though.

If you’re in the US, just put it on Craigslist. I have always been surprised about what people are willing to buy.

I had an incredibly damaged couch that I was ready to throw in the dumpster, and a young dude happily gave me $100 and picked it up with his truck, with no effort from my part.

I got rid of hundreds of items over the years on CL, and I don’t think I ever failed to sell any!

Why not buy a sofa second hand through a thrift store or charity shop? Costs tend to be lower and you can always donate it back when you're done with it.

OP didn't specify the sofa was new but this is a great point that I think about a lot. People talk about rescue dogs and make a big deal out of it but then refuse to buy anything secondhand. My "new" car has 190k miles on it and I love it.

Couches tend to fall in the same category as mattresses for a lot of people.

I did this for 6 years and eventually craved a home as well. I agree that it's incredibly freeing in some ways, but every time you buy something you have to consider what happens when you move and that isn't freeing at all.

I like to be able to buy items for projects that enrich me mentally or physically. E.g. I recently bought a 3D printer, I buy kitchen tools to cook more interesting recipes. If I moved abroad now, I'd likely do a big clear out but also ship a lot with me.

Selling the 3D printer during my international move was definitely something I regretted.

There's a distinction to be made for tools vs consumerist items.

What is the distinction? Is a kitchen gizmo a tool or a consumerist item? What hobbies use tools (e.g. building birdhouses) vs consumerist items (snowboarding)?

So I've had a 3D printer for about a year and I haven't gotten into it like I thought I would. Printed a handful of things (a N64 logo, a pikachu-naruto, a few other figures, a couple gifts) but that's about it.

Do you have any recommendations for resources that might get me into it more? I'm not aware of too much outside of just searching for things on Thingiverse.

My suggestion is to get into an unrelated hobby, and you’ll find small opportunities to print things useful to that hobby. Dice shakers or holders for Dungeon and dragons, pick holders for guitar, a case for my belay glasses for climbing, etc

Yeah, my rule of thumb for tools is that I don't get one unless I feel a strong need for one at least twice. This has worked out well. (Although I haven't come to grips with how to do "tool decay" so that they don't pile up. That's a problem for future me to deal with!)

I do have a board game hobby, and keep meaning to print out some card and token holder inserts for several of my games, but just haven't been motivated enough to do that. Good thought, though.

https://www.prusaprinters.org/ has some curated competitions for designs. I've printed several winners. (I have a Prusa, but it's obviously not required.)

I have an RSS feed on the most popular Thingiverse models.

Mind sharing the RSS feed link, please?

https://www.thingiverse.com/rss/popular

https://www.thingiverse.com/rss/featured

It looks like I've changed the default update interval on the second link to 12 hours; perhaps it was producing too much stuff otherwise.

The true value in a 3D printer lies in its ability to prototype a something that you cannot readily buy, something that only exists in your head.

Printing out random doodads from Thingiverse is not only wasteful but unfulfilling. You might as well go raid the dollar store toy aisle.

I would recommend spending some time and learning how to use a CAD software. Fusion360 is a popular choice, although with a bit of a learning curve. TinkerCAD is a good browser based option as well, excellent starting point for beginners.

I know the basics of Blender, which I use for pretty simple models for video game development also, but still pretty basic skills so far. I don't know how well Blender models translate into printable models.

pretty well, just setup units into something usable first. you will be able to see the quality of your model and export settings in the slicer

Stuff breaks, see if you can fix it by 3D printing it. I’ve done cupboard handles, window shutter lock handles, belt connectors etc. Also creative objects are fun to do. Get some cheap callipers - they help out.

Design stuff in modeling software. Printing premade models is basically the same as just buying something on Amazon. You have zero control over how it turns out, and you can't iterate through adjustments. That being said, unless you actually have protects that require physical structures, it's going to be hard finding good uses.

To be clear, we do have some stuff that will move with us - coincidentally, one piece of it is a Prusa MK3S and most of the rest would probably be kitchen gear - but if we really wanted to we could get it all in one large checked bag.

> every time you buy something you have to consider what happens when you move

I actually enjoy this part of it. It forces me to be a more thoughtful consumer.

It can get expensive depending on where you go. For example, Costa Rica will tax your used goods that you ship in.

Can confirm. Costa Rica import taxes are very high. We decided to just live with fewer things. I love it, my wife doesn’t.

Have you moved around a lot? My partner and I have started doing this. Using airbnb for housing. The experience has been good so far but staying somewhere for less than 60 days seems to be too much moving. It's also made work/taxes a bit complicated since we both work remotely.

We operate on two-year cycles now; the first year or so we did the month-to-month digital nomad thing accidentally because our plans changed at the last minute, and you’re right that it’s just too much.

Taxes are another matter entirely since we do this internationally, but there’s a pretty well-developed network of expat accountants that make it as painless as it can be.

My wife and I did this for 7 years as well. I had a strict "one item in, one item out" rule where for each new item we acquired, one had to be let go. She was not fond of this rule, and I can't say we followed it fully, especially as her photography career (and the amount of equipment it required) took off.

Eventually, we bought a house. It felt like a huge shift from the vagabond lifestyle, but I don't regret it. We still travel a lot, and rent our house out on AirBnb while we are gone.

I think in the end, traveling full time was too much for me. Having a home to go back to and recharge before planning the next trip seems more balanced.

George Carlin had something to say about "stuff" and houses.

https://youtu.be/3jus-OaJV8E?t=400

Don’t worry. You’ll never forget that feeling of showing up at the airport with all of (what’s left of) your possessions. My wife and I did that ten years ago. I remember those final hours in San Francisco and SFO as crisply as the birth of a child.

Emigrating is one of those adulting on steroids things. For those who’ve never done it, there no way to describe how intense it is: the highs, the lows, etc. Doesn’t matter if you are fluent in the destination language; it just is.

> Emigrating is one of those adulting on steroids things. For those who’ve never done it, there no way to describe how intense it is: the highs, the lows, etc.

For a long time I’ve wondered if something inside me is wired incorrectly, because I always hear this sentiment among my friends but I have never felt it.

Not on the first move from the US to China a decade ago, not on the last one from Hong Kong to Singapore a couple of years ago, and not right now as I think about going to Europe. It just has never struck me as a particularly big thing to move somewhere else.

It's a deeply personal thing.

I'm contemplating moving the family to another country and the biggest emotions I feel are connected to the financial freedom necessary to move.

I grew up in a low-income household, my grades weren't amazing, never got a stipend to study anywhere or go abroad, so being able to make this jump as a result of my own personal development is huge.

Luggage or not is beside the point for me though.

> being able to make this jump as a result of my own personal development is huge.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean here - I got the same "I made this happen" feeling when I boarded that first plane.

The part that I can't easily empathize with is the idea that leaving home and going somewhere else represents some kind of cosmic upheaval of your life. I get it, academically, but I just can't put myself in that headspace.

To give an example, one of my friends back home is going through a quarter-life career crisis. For a variety of reasons I suggested that he take a couple of months off and spend it in Amsterdam - this wouldn't be any problem for him financially or harm his career progression, but it's just a bridge too far for him personally.

When I brought it up, he said "I wouldn't even know where to start."

What seems natural to me - grab your passport, book an AirBnB and a plane ticket - is for many people an emotionally overwhelming roadblock.

I think I do relate a little to you and also a lot more to the parent comment.

I've managed to emigrate due to my own personal development as well, my family didn't have the means for that and my home country's society is very geared to rich folks getting opportunities: in school, universities, time enough to go through a good higher education, etc. I had to fight against all that and other odds stacked against me and finally "made it" out.

At the same time I felt like you sometimes, people would be fretting a lot about how I'm going to move, all by myself, to a new country, continent, hemisphere, culture and language. And it never phased me, I knew I wanted to do it and the thought that someone would be even a little reluctant on doing it was a bit alien.

Nowadays I can empathise with both mindsets, I'm a bit stuck in the middle: moving out was definitely an amazing and enlightening experience over time but I didn't have that awe about it until hindsight kicked in. Most of the feelings I had when moving were all about excitement and getting to experience new things, people, places.

I share the feeling when boarding the plane for moving and thinking "I made this happen" but I feel it much more intensely and beautifully during moments in my new city (that I've been for about 6 years now) where I look around and realise "I'm here and it's surreal I've made it here". This is the feeling I love the most, and it's constant, since I moved I never stopped catching these moments.

I suppose it depends for how long. I do own a house and moved around a bit when I was younger. But I fairly routinely travel for 3 or 4 weeks and, while a couple months would be unusual for me, it wouldn't be anything remarkable and, work-wise, spending some of that time working from Europe wouldn't be an issue other than working some later hours.

> What seems natural to me - grab your passport, book an AirBnB and a plane ticket - is for many people an emotionally overwhelming roadblock.

I too find those 3 steps are pretty easy. The problem is that what comes next - "step out of AirBnB and go to a local restaurant" - is total mindkiller for me.

Because of social anxiety or some other reason?

I used to be pretty awkward about this too until I really got it through my head that we’re all just characters in someone else’s play.

I’m the same way. Big international moves were never that big of a thing. Why? Because you can always move back, either a week later or a decade later. It’s not a permanent change.

That is, until you realize it is becoming permanent…

I remember reading some research that suggested that for every year you were "away" from a place that had been home, it would take about a month to adjust when/if you moved back. This accumulated additively up to about 9 years, at which point, "home" would never feel the same again.

So in that sense, it can be a "permanent" change.

I've also found those numbers roughly accurate, even for sub-year extended travel. I spent 6 months teaching in Berlin, and it definitely took a couple of weeks after returning to feel normal again.

This type of lack of feeling of belonging (over things like race, nation and community) can manifest in schizoid personality disorder.

Did your family move around a lot as you were growing up? Anecdotally (sample size=2), people who lived in one home from birth to adulthood tend to be more "rooted" and more anxious about moving compared to "military brats" or others who moved a lot, who, when asked "What's your home town?" answer "It depends on what you mean by 'Home town'...".

Nope, I had a very stable home life and most of my family is firmly rooted (albeit in a few different places). I’ve just always had this restless part inside that wanted to get out into the world and was never particularly concerned with the concept of home.

You can also have this experience on a smaller scale without selling anything forever.

Ten years ago I did a 3 months backpack trip in South America with my girlfriend. We left almost everything at home, and during that trip all that mattered to us for the 3 months was in our backpack. Weight and volume was an issue. No room to bring objects unless they has a functional value too. We also experienced stuff being stolen (one camera with the digital pictures, one small bag) and this helps to think about your relationship to objects. That's the kind of life lessons that I did not expect from the trip.

I'd imagine you also got very good at the knapsack problem

I did this twice before, moving to Canada and then moving back to Europe. However now I've accumulated so much stuff it's hard for me to repeat that.

"The things you own end up owning you."

I'm beginning to understand this more and more lately. The problem is with owning things you can't just replace. This could be either because you can't afford to replace it, like many people's cars, or that it holds sentimental value. Those things end up owning you. If your car breaks down you have to fix it. If you break a cherished plate, you cry.

I'm 35 and I still use plates and cutlery that I took from my last student house I moved from when I was 25. The house had accumulated a ton of this stuff over the years and we'd put most of it away in a cupboard. I took some of the better looking stuff. I fully expect all of this stuff to last the rest of my life. If some disaster happens and they all break, I'll replace them with more generic plates and cutlery I don't care about.

I think if you can resist accumulating stuff you care about, you will be far happier. Don't attach sentimental value to things. They are just things. Don't buy things you can't afford to replace outright if you need to, like cars. They quickly become liabilities. A big loss of stuff can be very rewarding as it reminds you of what really matters in life. But you should resist getting into the same situation again.

As my parents are aging, I have bad dreams about what I will have to do with their home and all the stuff it contains as souvenirs are attached to each object as this is were I spent more than 20 years. I have my own home that is already full.

Pick out the most important / sentimental items. Have a yard/estate sale one morning. Hire some movers to load up and take a U-Haul to good will or a donation center, have the donation center pick up large furniture, rent a dumpster for the rest. This can be done over the course of a few days or a week if you want more time for any of the steps.

It’s better if they start doing it now, and clarify what is essential and “the important stuff they’d grab in a house fire” in step one.

I've been on the edges of three rounds of this--parents once, 2x in-laws. It's rough.

I reduced my cutlery to 1 cup, 1 spoon, 1 fork, 1 knife, 1 pot and 1 pan. It's amazing how much easier doing the dishes became when you only have one of each.

I am currently planning a move from Austria back the US and I have decided to sell or dispose of the vast majority of my belongings.

I did less of this moving from the US to Austria and when it came time to move this time I realised that I had a significant pile of boxes which, while opened, went unused in the twenty years I've lived here. I also have an extensive library which, while I read the books when I bought them, I have not returned to the vast majority of them.

I'm still sort of conflicted about this because it's provoking a lot of complex emotions that I was not particularly prepared for.

Books are nice to have on a shelf, but a pain to have to move around. I'll no longer buy books until I actually own my home.

I've spent a lot of effort moving physical media around that, today, could be digital. I still have a ton of books, most of which I'll never open again, but I like to think that starting over in today's world I'd have much less of that sort of thing.

Maybe you are like me and maybe you are not but I made the exact same decision about my library for the exact same reasons almost a decade ago and while it was liberating for a few years to not have to box and unbox them, I still to this day get sad when I think about it and regret it. I never realized how attached I was to my library, to browsing the labels and briefly remembering the story and its connection to that part of my youth where I read it. Good luck with your move.

My experience may be relevant: 23 years ago my wife and I moved from a fairly large house near the beach in San Diego to a fairly tiny house in the mountains in Central Arizona. Getting rid of excess furniture was easy (I gave my Eames Chair and standing teak chess board to people I really liked), but I had a huge library. For many years I bought about one book a week from the San Diego Technical Bookstore. I got rid of about 60% of my physical books, so I only had two large bookshelves in my home office. After temporarily moving for work, I cut my books down to half a large book shelf, my wife using the other half.

The trick that worked for me was to just keep books that I had a strong emotional attachment to. Some books that I want to refer to I simply re-purchase as eBooks from Google or Kindle. Now half my physical books non-technical (Joseph Campbell, spiritual stuff, favorite literature).

I moved from Scotland to Finland, which involved a few suitcases on a plane, and a pallet of stuff going by sea.

We sold almost everything we owned prior to the move. The things that were carried were things like personal possessions with significant history or memories. Sounds like we approached it in a very similar way to you.

There are definitely moments where I think "I need to repair this pipe, I have a pipe-cutter in my toolbox", then I recall that the toolbox didn't get moved with us. But there aren't many things that I miss.

I made the move from Australia to Germany with little more than a small suitcase and a hiking pack. Looking back it's not something I would repeat.

You've got to be absolutely ruthless about what you sell or dispose of but seriously consider getting a pallet. It took me a long time to replace the stuff I sold for pennies on the dollar.

In the end I didn't find it particularly liberating. Though I think part of that is I went from living independently to relying on furnished apartments for a couple years. Living in a place that's not your own can eventually become grating.

I'd agree with that. We spent a busy few weeks getting basic things setup (sofa, table, tv, book-cases, etc).

Over time I started to get annoyed that because we'd bought things used with no real planning we had different colours/styles/designs all mishmashed together.

There was nothing wrong with any of the things we bought, but over time it did become annoying to live in such a state. I can imagine that if we'd moved into a furnished house we'd have had similar views and even less control about replacing things to match. Feeling more like a caretaker than living in "our home".

Ye I don't get the liberating thing.

You need stuff. Screwdrivers, cloth hangers, spoons ...

I feel like just ditching it all and thinking of your self as unbound to earthly possesions is self-deception, since you just buy it again. It is acctually consumerism and spree shooping.

I think it’s an over correction from being too consumerist. You go from extreme to extreme. I see this with people who didn’t exercise, and now they are all in with the gear and the diets etc.

But I wish there were certain things and spaces that were able to be rented. I don’t need a drill all the time. Sometimes I need a workbench and more clamps.

There’s a lot of community level optimisation we could do.

Most hardware stores do rent tools.

And many towns and cities have tool lending libraries.

I think a drill is the one tool pretty much everyone could stand to have.

I own a drill and would probably advise the same thing. But I clearly don’t use it more than a few hours a year.

True. But also true that you can't really do quick, impromptu fixes if you have to rent the thing.

You need them sure, but you don't need them to be _new_ screwdrivers, clothing hangers or spoons.

When moving, I sell leftover things to people who need them. And then when I arrive, I buy things second hand from people who no longer have a need for them.

Sure, it was the "moving with just a briefcase" I was commenting on mainly, not getting rid of superfluous stuff - which of course by definition you don't need.

There's absolutely an element of truth here.

I was thinking about a job opportunity that would involve a move recently and started to feel ridiculous when I realized how much of my apprehension had to do with all my stuff, much of which was boxed up and hadn't been touched for years. Then I read the Kondo Marie book and started doing it. An unexpected side benefit is you come to appreciate the possessions you do want to keep a lot more when you separate them out from ones you're keeping around "just in case" that you didn't really want.

My definition of home after spending 9 months in a van travelling in Europe and the US was something along the lines of: the place where I can keep things that I don't use very often but that feel important to my sense of self.

For me personally, one good example of that would be my table saw. I don't use it often (and I certainly did not need it while travelling). But owning a table saw is a part of what makes me feel like me (not to mention it's history in removing part of one of my thumbs). Having a place where the table saw can just be (i.e. not a storage facility) is for me part of what "having a home" is all about.

The same would be true of things like my cookbooks. In the age of the internet, I don't even use them much anymore, and I certainly would not take them with me on any bounded-term move. Having on a shelf at home is part of what makes home actually be "home" rather than just "where I'm living".

I moved from the US to Norway in 2013. I brought nearly 2 suitcases and mailed a tea set. That's it. Everything else I gave away, and for the most part, I'm happy I did that.

But to be fair, I moved because I married a local, and they already had some stuff and I was able to replace other stuff as I wanted.

I did something similar, I didn't have any obligations, so I gave everything to my family/relatives, and just left. There have been lows and highs but it is also very exhilarating. Given, I was living in an island, so moving to anywhere else required airports, which I really dread, but the freedom is worth it. The Shengen Convention is probably one of the best things Europeans have done for the continent.

Moved from Bolivia to Miami with wife and kids with all I owned as well.

I recall that time as oddly freeing. I had my pick of how to build my new home. New beds, dining tables, the works.

We started out with salvation army stuff because we didn't want to commit to expensive things without even knowing the marketplace here. We were TRULY new to the US. Didn't know a single store except Walmart (from what we saw online).

Now we have a very comfortable life but some days I do wish I could light my belongings on fire and start fresh.

These days I see things I purchase as liabilities. I bought this super nintendo classic, oh now I have to take care of this thing. There it sits collecting dust. I don't buy many knick-knacks anymore.

I know this feeling, having moved from the US to Austria, where I lived for 3 years, and moved back, basically selling everything I had twice.

There's a shift in perspective with possessions. I'm less attached to anything, but at the same time, I appreciate the nice things I own more. And there's definitely a lot more, stronger opinions, on what I want, and what should be a part of my "home".

A bunch of opinions have sharpened unpredictably. Like, I hate grass. I don't want something I have to build an irrigation system to maintain. I like owning a single family home, but I don't want it do be this 'castle' where I'm totally isolated from my neighborhood. I hate big garage doors in front. The front of the house is for the doorway and a porch. The car has its place to the side.

Had I not had to rebuild from scratch a couple of times, not sure I'd be this focused.

I did the same five years ago (different locations). The one thing I miss was the blankets I had before moving, I just have never found great replacements. Is there anything you realized was harder to replace than you thought?

I did that moving from US to Switzerland for a postdoc with two children age 2 and 4. We did leave a tote or two of sentimental items at a relative's house. Good times haha.

Edit: And though stressful, it gave me a different perspective of, for instance, people who walk thousands of miles from Honduras with children.

Did the same sort of move in 2015 with a Suitcase, a backpack and a snowboard bag. Extremely liberating.

When people do these moves between countries and take their belongings (unlike the OP), do they have to pay tax or tariffs to the destination country? Or prove that they paid tax on their belongings already?

It's usually allowed to import personal possessions during a move tax-free.

This really depends on the country.

Often there are allowances for "reasonable" amounts of personal possessions but sometimes they have to be old enough. I hear some places don't have any allowance at all. And sometime specific things are too much hassle/cost to do at all (e.g. cars).

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