One step at a time

I love how the internet can connect people with similar dreams, goals and interests.  I spend ages on the internet (really?  You're surpised aren't you?  ;o) ) and mostly it's due to finding blogs or forums with people who are interested in what my current obsession is ;o)  As you can imagine there are a fair few blogs related to travel and decluttering and simplifying so when I've had a minute I've been having a read around and getting inspiration.

Inspiration is very much needed when I look around the house at the amount of stuff we have.  This is not helped by almost everyone I speak to asking what we're doing with all our things when we leave to which I reply 'oh we won't have much stuff left, we have a few furniture items we'll keep but other than that we'll get rid of most of the stuff.  I'm not really sentimental.'  Sounds perfect doesn't it?  An empty house and maybe a few boxes with photos and other such stuff left?  In my head I think I will be able to do it, but in practice it is so difficult!  I wonder whether I should keep things, if it will come in useful, etc etc.  You get the idea.

We're going round the house mentally thinking what we'll sell, give away and keep.  But the keep list is getting longer by the day!  It's very worrying although I'm sure as d-day approaches we'll be more ruthless.  Well I can hope can't I? 

A friend is also hoping to get rid of stuff this year and has set herself a challenge like mine to get rid of stuff and build up a pot of money for things she wants to do.  Excellent - always good to have others doing similar crazy challenges so we can cheer each other on!

There is another thing that is making it all hard though.  It's still 11 months until we go so there is no real point in going crazy with getting rid of stuff that we'll still use (take note James!), but at the same time, if we do nothing, in 8 months time or so we'll have a mountain to climb.  So I'd been thinking that we need to find a way to give us a boost so we feel like we're doing something, have a head start on when we *have* to make these final decisions about things, and don't get burnout.

Enter more internet inspiration ;o)

So I was reading a couple of blogs and this post jumped out at me.  It's an old post, but isn't it funny how sometimes you come across these things?  So the idea that this family did was for each of them to get rid of 4 things each day.  We can do this!  It won't feel too hard, we all will have an easily reachable target for each day and hopefully by the end of May we'll have purged the house from a good proportion of things we don't need now, are broken, and are useless.

Once I'd put the idea to the family, who are thankfully fully behind the idea, I then saw this blog post from the fabulously inspirational Family on Bikes blog (in awe - I so could not bike that far!  I love the idea of it though) about how to eat an elephant.  Sometimes that is how this part of our adventure is feeling.  Huge, too much, not fun, never ending, overwhelming.  It needs to be done though, so we'll have to take it one step at a time.

Wish us luck!

April goal round-up

We're not quite at the end of the month, but today is our last pay day so number crunching day it is!

• We have 11 months, 2 weeks and 5 days until we go!

• I have cleared 9 items (9!!!!!) from the house in April with a total amount made of £70.12.  I also managed to get more stuff on ebay last week and most have bids but I'll add those in to next months totals.  So:  9/1000 and £70.12/£1000.  ;o)  Quite a way to go still!

• Overall at the beginning of April we had £673 saved up and at the end we have £1212 so we nearly doubled our money!

I'm not sure how figures will add up next month.  We've had a minor setback in that I no longer have my job at my dad's shop (long story!).  It wasn't a lot of money coming in but was enough to add up to a decent amount over a year and it's gone now so I need to think about alternative income and ramp up any online money making I can.

I am not mentioning the ticker counting my weight loss ;o)  Maybe next month I can report some good there!

1 year to go! Meeep!

15th April 2013 is our planned leaving date.  I wanted to wait until the school Easter holidays had finished so looking ahead that was the Monday after that.  I'm quite glad we have a planned date, makes it feel real somehow!

So for the next 6 months we'll be saying 'this time next year we'll be doing xyz and this time next year we'll be sat on a beach'.  I may bore people before long ;o)








Ooh beaches :O)

A year still feels so long away but when I think about clearing the house of all the stuff then I know it will go by soon enough and I'll feel like I want more time!  This will be the hard bit when we're going without and keeping all our money to one side and trying to declutter.  Yawn ;o)

Speaking of which, I made a bit of progress with my crud clearing venture (CCV :o)) and sold 5 things on a home ed buy and sell group.  So that is 5/1000 and £21/£1000 ;o)   I'm laughing at the notion that I have 1000 things I could sell, 1000 bits of rubbish I could throw out maybe, but to sell?  I'm pretty sure I will struggle, but it might be an interesting thing to track!  James is up for doing some car boots (I'm not sure he's *ever* done one in his life!) so we'll try and get one in for maybe June and then another at the end of Summer.  There are a few all year round ones so might fit in a third before we leave the house.  I have lots of local friends who know all about car boot sales round here so I shall have to pick their brains.  Any money we make is going to be extra towards a better campervan and isn't being counted on.  I might even make a page on here with things to sell, which might work if I start plugging the blog and sharing it round.  Something to work on.

10% woohoo!!!!

Today we have reached 10% of our savings goal as per our ticker on the side of the page.  Our rough target is £10,000 and today we went past £1000  in our savings account.  Those people who know will know this is no mean feat for us!  We are people who live each day as it comes and we are not savers at all.  We do have to be for the next year though.

(A thousand pounds?  It's not worth it.  I won't save it.  I'll go the royal mint and print my own money.  Humph!)   (Sorry I've got no head thousand pound sketch if you've never heard of it!  A daft kids programme that is a bit like marmite ;)

In order to start bumping up this total I need to be getting going on removing and selling some of the rubbish in this house.  It needs to be gone anyway for us to leave.  I'm hoping we may be able to store some of our precious things with my parents and also J's dad, but really I want this to be a few boxes not hoards!!   We've been talking with the kids lots about thinking carefully about purchases they might make as we'll need to either get rid of them or store them next year so no point buying huge teddies for example (not looking at anyone here dear daughter!)  It's making me think much more about what I bring into the house too.  But not bringing stuff in is just one side of it, I need to get stuff out!  I was thinking that what would be a good challenge is to sell 1000 things.  In my head this sounds great, 1000 things at say an average of £1 each (my house if full of crud!!) is another £1000.  But then I realised I'd need to sell 100 things a month for the next 10 months - arrrrghhh!  Doesn't sound quite so doable now!  Anyway, I made a start listing some things on a home ed list and hopefully will sell some things there and I stuck a grand total of 3 things on ebay.  Ugh I hate selling on ebay!!!  Needs must though :)