There are many people who would love to take an extended vacation, or even move overseas for a time, but the logistics of planning the trip are too overwhelming. In addition to everything else, there is the little problem of what to do with your belongings. Some of them can go with you, but moving an entire house full of furniture would be far too expensive. If you have ever considered taking an extended vacation, or if you have considered moving to a new country for a few years, here are some things to keep in mind when it comes to your apartment or home.
Keep the apartment
If you live in an area where rentals are hard to come by, or you have a fantastic apartment that you really don’t want to give up, hang on to it. You can hire a rental agency to manage the property while you are gone and you shouldn’t have to worry about a thing. Work with the agency to determine how much you should charge for rent; you may even come out ahead in the deal. This works especially well if you own the property and you don’t want to go through the trouble of trying to sell it.
Move the furniture
If you are not especially attached to the furniture in the house or apartment, you can rent it out fully furnished. However, there will be some items that you would rather not see broken or otherwise destroyed by a renter. For those, find a low cost storage facility, and set it up so that the rent for your unit is paid automatically (it would be unpleasant at best to return from a trip around the world to find that your belongings have been auctioned off). If you have the time you could rent a truck and move everything yourself. If not it is pretty easy to find the best movers wherever you may live.
Lose the worries
With your keepsakes safely packed away, and a trusted rental agency watching out for your property, what you have to do is focus on your trip. If you’re traveling for fun, don’t worry about your property back home and enjoy the sites and experiences. If you are moving to a new country, immerse yourself in the culture and don’t worry about the stuff back home.
Wrapping it up
Planning an extended trip around the world, or moving overseas, can be a daunting task. But taking it one step at a time will help you enjoy your trip or move all the more. Keeping your apartment, and letting it out fully furnished, will cut back on some of the headache when you return. But if you would rather just move it all to storage and find somewhere new when you’re done, that works too. Just make sure you either prepay or set those storage facility payments to come out automatically so you can return to your belongings at the end of the voyage.
We have been thinking about taking a long trip, but we just lost our full-time dog sitter because she is moving to a different state (my sister haha). We are now in the process of trying to find someone else to house sit and dog sit for us so that we can take some long trips.
We decided to drop everything including our rental house (which was cold and damp and we were glad to get out). Stayed with my parents for the first few weeks after returning from our RTW trip, and moved into a new place about a month after touching back down. We didn’t have much stuff so wound up ditching the plan to hire a storage facility and just kept stuff at our families’ places.