Chris and I work fairly well together, as long as we aren’t sharing the same task. So while he is purging the garage and attic, I am working on the to-do list and budget. He is the artistic one, writing entries for the blog, and taking photographs, I am the project manager and Excel spreadsheet master. Now if I can only get him to work on the items in the listed order!

The home tasks are organized by inside and outside (so we can prioritize based on weather), and things we want to get done before our “final” April Fools Party (a somewhat annual event to celebrate our wedding anniversary), and the final items to complete before we put the house on the market in June. (As a long time project planner who is accustomed to “crashing” the schedule, I am hoping we can be ready to list the house in May, and late April would be quite a feat! But I haven’t told him this yet.)

To keep in practice with Excel, I have extracted all spending data for 2013 from Quicken. I do love pivot tables! So I’m organizing the numbers to see what expenses will go away (car insurance, mortgage, property taxes…), estimate new costs (apartment, train/bus, US storage for belongings we keep, etc). Medical insurance is one of the more challenging items to determine what really is needed. How do we maintain basic coverage in the US, not knowing how often we’ll be back, and add international coverage including evacuation to cover us for an uncertain period of time and varying destinations.

I am also researching “capsule wardrobes” as shopping has been a serious hobby for me. I am trying to visualize traveling with one small suitcase and carryon bag, and living with a closet with no more than 2 feet of hanger space. But when I look inside my huge closet here at home, I realize this might be the big daddy task of them all!! So every week I challenge myself to pack the items I really don’t wear and won’t take, and then drop them at a charity shop or consignment, and resist the urge to stop at the mall (would kind of defeat the purpose!)

The web is a wonderful tool. Not only can we get the information needed, we can read the blogs of other nomads to learn how they have dealt with the same issues, and to learn from their experiences.

Time to get off the computer and to resume prepping and purging…