It was mid June 2010, we were living in San Diego at the time. Our immigration lawyer called and gave us the news that our visa to stay in the US would not come in time and we could either become illegal or leave the US.

We made the decision to leave the US… the only issue was we had a lot of stuff and not a lot of time!

It was mid June 2010, we were living in San Diego at the time. Our immigration lawyer called and gave us the news that our visa to stay in the US would not come in time and we could either become illegal or leave the US.

We made the decision to leave the US… the only issue was we had a lot of stuff and not a lot of time!

July 4th, Independence day… aka: Independence From Stuff

The responsibility fell on me to declutter and organize our entire life and I only had about 30 days. I had to separate, sort, sell, and donate. I kept our valuables and threw the rest away.

The next 30 days of our life felt like chaos… but as we started to let go of stuff, something interested started to happen:

We had decided to take this opportunity to travel. Our first destination was India, but there was only one issue. Money! The previous few years had been challenging… Let’s just say my husband had some partnership issues which had left us close to broke. In 2009, we had just started to get our lives back on track, but we were just about getting by.

But as we started to declutter, small miracles started to happen.

I would spend the week sorting and selling stuff on craigslist, on the weekend we would do garage sales. We lived in an apartment and we were not able to do garage sales, but our friends let us do garage sales on their driveway.

Day by day we decluttered… day by day our bank account grew. Our friends and community rallied around us and we even did an auction event in which we raised the exact amount to the penny needed to buy our airline tickets to leave the US. It seemed like the universe had stepped in to support us. The more we let go, the more joy and flow we started to experience. It was as if letting go of material stuff, was helping us all let go of emotional and mental baggage.

Over the 30 days we ended up letting go of about 95% of our stuff. We left a few boxes of our belongings with a friend that had sentimental value to us and I left the US with 4 red bags, 3 laptops, 2 kids and 1 husband.