Purging the Refridgerator

We purged the refrigerator yesterday. Not because we wanted to... a car hit a telephone pole, which sent an electrical surge and damaged the refrigerator. We threw away old stuff from the freezer and moved the rest to a snow bank outside to keep it cold.

Not exactly the kind of purging we were planning!

Purging paperwork

We are taking advantage of the three day weekend to purge the many boxes of papers we have. We have all the information for when we were shopping for a house and ultimately built one. I have all my old files from all my old jobs, as does my wife. And we have collected a lot of documents over the years.

We went through the boxes and looked at every piece of paper and put each in one of four piles: throw away, shred, scan, keep. We decided to shred anything that had confidential information on it. Anything that held a memory or important information got scanned and stored digitally into our family drive. Other things like certificates or special cards went into the keep pile.

We managed to discard almost everything! I can’t believe we held onto all this stuff for so long just so we could throw it away at a later time. 

Update

Here is an update: we finished purging the kitchen and it feels great that the cupboards aren’t stuffed full anymore. We plan to do at least one more purging before the end of the year.

We have started making plans for saving money for the move. I think the move is going to be very expensive:

A friend told me to plan $8-12,000 just in moving expenses

We will need a home down payment because I don’t know when our existing home will sell

The new home mortgage will likely be more expensive than our old. 

We may have to pay two mortgages for a while until the old home sells

My wife doesn’t want to work the first year

I don’t know what I will be doing for work (continue working from home or will I need a new job?)

We will loose our rental income

We may have to facilitate any other family members that want to move down with us

Buying whatever furniture we don’t take with us

Just registering our three cars will be $1200. It costs $500 to drive each one down and then the cost to fly back for the next car

I am looking at all these expenses and thinking I had better have $40,000 cash in my hand to make this move successful. Wow. 

I have a plan to raise the cash... but the best laid plans often fall to God’s humor. 

That’s our update for now!