What about all my stuff?
Why most relocation guides have it backwards.
It’s the question almost everyone asks within the first ten minutes of seriously considering the move. What do I do with all my stuff? The shipping containers, the storage units, the question of what to bring — every relocation guide on the internet has thousands of words on customs paperwork, freight forwarders, and the menaje de casa permit.
Most of them have it backwards.
The real question
The stuff isn’t the obstacle to moving. The stuff is the reason you haven’t.
Every box you can’t bear to part with is an anchor to a life you say you want to leave. The dining set from the marriage that ended. The bookshelves of books you’ll never re-read. The boxes of cables and adapters for devices you no longer own. The treadmill. The seasonal decor. The skis from the year you tried skiing. (The car!)
You already know this. It’s why the question feels so heavy.
And the heaviness is misplaced. People who have actually had to leave — for war, for politics, for safety, for a love that lived elsewhere — did not pack their dining sets. They went. The shape of every emigrant story across every century is the same: a small bag, a few photographs, a passport, a memory. When the reason to leave is real, the stuff stops being the question. The stuff is what we ask about when we don’t want to ask about the bigger thing.
A few voices worth listening to
George Carlin spent half his career on this. His A Place for My Stuff routine, first recorded in 1981, is the most clarifying ten minutes you can spend on the subject:
“That’s the meaning of life, trying to find a place to keep your stuff. That’s all your house is, think of it, that’s all your house is, it’s a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much goddamn stuff, you wouldn’t need a house.”
Henry David Thoreau, more austerely, in Walden:
“Our life is frittered away by detail. … Simplify, simplify.”
Pico Iyer has been based in western Japan since 1987 and writes about how the things you don’t bring are what give you room to become someone different. His The Art of Stillness is short, and worth the afternoon. So is the TED talk of the same name.
These aren’t ascetics. They’re people who noticed, somewhere along the way, that owning less was lighter, not poorer.
The self-storage trap
If the answer to what about my stuff is I’ll put it in storage back in the States — be honest with yourself about what that means.
A 10×10 unit in the US runs about $90 a month in cheaper cities and over $300 in Los Angeles or New York; the national average sits around $130. Over the first year of your new life in Mexico, that’s $1,500 to $3,600 you’re paying to not commit. Over five years it’s $7,500 to $18,000 — and at the end you’ll open the door and find boxes you haven’t touched, full of objects you’ve moved past.
Storage is where stuff goes to be paid rent for. It is the financial expression of I’m not sure.
If you’re not sure, that’s a real signal. Maybe don’t move yet. But don’t move and keep a storage unit. That’s both lives at once, and you’ll do neither well.
What I did
I sold or gave away everything that wouldn’t fit in a backpack. Left a small box of photographs and letters at my sister’s house. Hit the road.
Oddly cathartic.
There is something about starting fresh, especially in a city you don’t yet know. Coming with nothing gave me flexibility — to try neighborhoods, to change my mind, to move a few times in the first months without thinking about logistics. Just throw what little you have in an Uber.
Once I found my apartment in Condesa, I started acquiring things again. Slowly. A chair from La Lagunilla on a Sunday morning. A Huichol yarn painting I bought because I stood in front of it for ten minutes. A black ceramic planter, an alebrije stool, a kettle, a lamp. Each thing in the new apartment is here because I chose it in this life, not because I dragged it across a border out of inertia.
It turns out you don’t need the things you thought you did. And the joy of slowly refurnishing in a new city — at flea markets, at La Lagunilla on Sunday mornings, at San Ángel on Saturdays, at the artesanías markets in every barrio — is itself part of building a new life.
But if you insist
If you’ve read all of this and you’re still going to bring a meaningful amount — there is a way.
The Mexican government allows residents (Temporary or Permanent — not tourists) to import their used household goods duty-free, once, under a permit called the menaje de casa. The certificate is issued at a Mexican consulate while you’re still in the US, costs around USD $195, and is processed in person on weekday mornings. The shipment must arrive in Mexico within six months of your first entry on your residency card. The inventory has to itemize every box, the goods must be used (no new appliances), and a single mistake on the list will hold up the whole shipment at the border.
Most people who actually bring household goods use a professional cross-border moving company that handles the menaje de casa and the customs end-to-end. It’s not cheap — typically thousands of dollars for a household — and it’s not fast. If you decide this is your path, working through it is one of the things I do alongside my clients: the inventory list, the consulate appointment, the timing against your residency card, the company you’ll trust your boxes to.
A closing thought
You’re moving to Mexico because something in your old life wasn’t working anymore. The stuff is part of that old life. Most of it doesn’t deserve to ride along.
Bring the photos. Bring the letters. Bring two boxes of things that genuinely cannot be replaced. Leave the rest behind, with gratitude, and let yourself be light enough to enjoy where you’ve landed.
The other essays here are the digital and social versions of this same idea: Owning your identity on what to do about the email and websites you’ve been renting, and The fediverse on the social piece of leaving lightly.
I can help. Email me.
— uncle ❧
