Packing Up: What We're Bringing to Paradise
The Great Purge
Moving to Belize means downsizing - big time. We’re going from a 2,000+ sq ft house to a much simpler lifestyle. Even more than just about the square footage, it’s thinking about life differently. Its part about lifestyle, it’s part cultural, its in large part self-discovery. What is actually important? Here’s what we learned about packing for paradise.
One of the main criteria for deciding like what we were gonna keep as far as normal sort of household goods, was looking into what would be readily available in Belize and how much would it cost to buy something their that would serve the same purpose as a replacement. Importing goods takes a long time and can be expensive, although we are not really sure how expensive the duties might be. Belize operates largely on duties. So anything imported is very expensive. While things that were built in country or made in country are pretty cost effective.
We also went through quite the process of do we really need this thing? Um, like small kitchen appliances are a good example where most of the things that we have are convenience items. It just makes doing some prep chore a little bit easier or faster. We decided that we didn’t need those items at all. One of the main reasons or one of the things that we hope to gain by moving to Belize is to slow down and enjoy those things more. So cooking and prepping is less of a rushed daily chore and more of a community gathering experience where we spend time together. Whether it’s as simple as coffee in the morning or cooking a meal with friends and family.
We are remote workers. So there are a certain small amount of things that are non negotiable. We decided we absolutely had to have our uplift standing desks, although We’re only shipping the base and the motors and stuff and not the tops. We’ll have the tops made in Belize. We also need a certain amount of electronics. Um laptops. I’m bringing some networking gear some home networking things. that we that we need, basically. We did however decide that we would not ship our monitors and that it was easy enough and cost effective enough to buy new monitors. You know our monitors were largely older already, but we really feared that it would be pretty expensive to ship and then pay duties on and the risk of them being damaged was relatively high. We still have the original packaging, but you still take that risk to ship a six year old monitor, you know. When you could have just bought one for two hundred dollars.
Clothing is another good one. Pretty much only need a few items. Um we’re probably bringing a few more than a few items in each category, but realistically we’re bringing a couple of pairs of travel pants and mostly T shirts, shorts and swimsuits. Don’t really take up much room. We’re I think we’ve packed our entire wardrobe into a single forty liter duffle bag ! The one caveat to clothing though is we are still bringing some heavier weight items. We have a heavy flannel and we have a wind and rainproof outer shell. We’re keeping a beanie and things that are very antithetical to the hot, humid, Caribbean environment. The reason is for travel. When we travel back to see friends and family, we travel back and want to go somewhere where it’s cooler, whether that’s back in the United States or in a different country or what have you. We need to be able to still have a certain amount of warm clothing and be able to layer that clothing for reasonable cool weather conditions.
Now for the hard stuff. What do you do with all your keepsakes, knick-knacks, things you’ve collected over a lifetime. And all those pictures hanging on the walls. Turns out the pictures are actually pretty easy. They’re a lot of work, but relatively easy as far as what to do. And what you do is scan them all in. So that you have them do digitally and make sure you keep them somewhere safe. And then you can get a couple of digital picture frames and you still have all of the photos. You can hang those picture frames on. on the walls if you like. And there you go.
Keepsakes were a lot harder. We actually ended up going through them very painstakingly several times over the course of a few months where you would sort of go through it and set it aside. and come back to it and be like, okay, how do I still feel about this? Go through it some more. Kind of rinse and repeat until you have what you feel like is a reasonable amount of important things that you want to keep and you have a good reason for keeping them. One of the exercises that we did that helped a lot was having an item that you think you want to keep and then trying to visualize where in your house and believe would you put this thing? Like where does it where would it go? Right? If the answer is I don’t know, it would just probably be in the closet in a box, then it’s not worth keeping. For us, we ended up with basically a tote full of important keepsakes. Things that we felt were worth keeping in Belize.
What We’re Bringing
- Electronics: Laptops, cameras for YouTube, solar chargers
- Clothes: Light, breathable fabrics (goodbye winter coats!), layering pieces and some heavier (by Belizean standards) pieces for travelling to cooler climates.
- Documents: All important papers, digitized and backed up
- Sentimental Items: Photos, a few keepsakes
What We’re Leaving Behind
- Most furniture (buying locally supports the community)
- Heavy appliances
- 80% of our clothes
- Randy’s snowboard collection (sad but necessary)
Pro tip: If you haven’t used it in 6 months, you probably don’t need it.
Lessons Learned
You don’t need as much as you think. It’s amazing how much ’lighter’ we feel! We didn’t realize all that stuff was weighing us down. Or that the stuff has weight, an emotional aspect to it. One of things we never really thought about. The freedom of living with less is already exciting!