In my line of work, it's critical that you look at all the risks involved, figure out what level of risk you can live with and mitigate all others to a point where you can live with them. Applying this mindset to the move has brought up some scary "what if" scenarios:
What if we hate it and want to head back in 6 months?
I like having backup plans. I like knowing that I can salvage something from a situation that doesn't work out as I expected.
With the move, there's a lot of what I'd consider sunk costs. That is money that I will be spending on this thing, regardless of the outcome. Plane tickets, costs associated to selling the house, hotels once there all fall into this category. Usually, you would add "cost to ship all our worldly possessions over" to that list, but lately I've been concocting a plan that would avoid / delay that. See, my current hypothesis is that we'll either really like the change within the first year or we'll be ready to give up and come back. The packing / shipping is the single largest cost associated to the move (in the 10000$ range) and that's not an amount of money I'm willing to throw away. Combine that with the loss we'd take selling all our stuff over there so as not to have to move it back and we're easily looking at 20000$ for the whole transaction. Not life altering by any chance, but it'll definitely put a big dent in our budgets for years to come.
So my current plan is to split all our stuff into 4 categories, depending on when we'd like to have access to them again:
- Essential stuff comes with us on the plane, in 1 or 2 extra suitcases.
- Close at Hand stuff would be stored with trusted people in Canada that could send it to us if need be later (6-8 week surface shipping)
- To be Stored stuff would only come over once we've decided we're staying long term
- Junk is just that, crud we've accumulated that we can easily live without.
Of course, all plans have downsides:
- We'll be living w/o many of our creature comforts we've grown accustomed to.
- Storage may damage many of our things.
- There's going to be some unplanned costs (insurance, inconvenience etc)
- How much of our stuff are we going to have to buy short term to go about our day to day in NZ?
It seems to be pretty widely acknowledged that we can live with a lot less Stuff than we generally think. It gets to be a habit and most of it isn't really that necessary to a comfortable existence. I think your idea of taking only what fits in suitcases is wise. It makes sense financially and also leaves you open to the mysterious and excellent surprises that await you.
ReplyDeleteYou just have to change your expectation of how you will set up house. It won't have all your books and kitchen equipment and what-not that you've gotten used to at home. But that can be part of the adventure ... living on a smaller, simpler scale.
I would personally leave anything of sentimental value with family or friends (and this goes for any books because they'll be destroyed in storage). I would honestly sell just about everything else... if you imagine replacement cost of furniture and kitchen items in Canada, you pretty quickly will spend that on the storage fees. I would use what you made from selling stuff to buy only what you need, once you're in NZ.
You may also discover once you're there that your N. American sized things wouldn't fit so well in a NZ space (e.g. are sheet sizes the same? are apartments generally laid out differently). You probably won't really know what of your stuff you actually want/need until you've lived there 6 months.
if replacement costs in New Zealand were anything close to Canada, it would in fact be a pretty easy decision. Unfortunately, most things are anywhere between 150% - 300 % more expensive (especially furniture and kitchen stuff). Also, no IKEA in the country means that we wouldn't be able to get many of the things we'd need (bookcases).
ReplyDeleteLiving the adventure works well for a while (6 months+) but at one point I figure we'll want to make it our home, in which case, having all our stuff ready to go would be a very nice thing to have.
Shocking as it sounds, my suggestion is that you probably shouldn't replace your things in NZ. I was referring to if you came back to Canada. Obviously, you'll want some furniture, but I think flea markets and boot sales are the way to go there and still probably cheaper than shipping from here. It seems insane to me to suggest that it's financially sound to ship particleboard bookcases to NZ... not that I've done any research or anything. (How expensive is lumber there.? D and I built our cookbook shelf in a couple hours for the cost of an IKEA one, except it's solid wood).
ReplyDeleteYou'll also need to consider the possibility of things being damaged in shipping and the hassles involved therein.
it's actually not shocking, and part of the idea of storing the stuff is to see what we can live without. However some items like futons, couches and beds are significantly more expensive. A 3 person couch is at least 1500$ NZ for a basic one, and we just spent 900$ CDN on the one we have. even assuming we get 400$ for it (unlikely), the cost of replacement in NZ makes it not worth it.
ReplyDeleteYes there's a thriving market for used goods, but some stuff I wouldn't buy used (bed, couch, futon).
Part of the big problem i have is its very much an all or nothing scenario. we can't just send a few things, because we rent the container regardless of what's in it, so we might as well bring it all if we move there full time.
Though i do laugh at the concept of sending particle board over :) when you think about it though, we have over a dozen book shelves, which, if we bring over the books, are required. if the books stay in canada, no point sending the shelves over :)
I think I'm pretty much convinced that we're going to store everything, assuming Carly doesn't object. If / when we get to the point of shipping, the situation will likely have changed considerably, and we'll be able to make a more intelligent decision. It's soooo far away...