For the last two or three years, I’ve been a little obsessed with the idea of mobility, the idea that my wife and I can simply pack up and move without too much trouble.

We’re nowhere near that point.  Unfortunately, I have been a pretty geeky guy for a lot of years, and that means that I have accumulated an awful lot of stuff that I look at now and wonder whether it was worth the credit card bills in the first place.

It’s all paid off, anyway.  The only debt we’re sitting on consists of (a) my student loans, which are more than halfway paid off and (b) a few thousand bucks of car loan, which is a pretty good state to be in.

Still, I’ve spent a couple of decades burying us in mountains of STUFF.  The last time we moved further than across town, it took 3 trips in U-haul trucks and a lot of smaller car loads to get us relocated, and that’s absurd for a couple.

Of course, it’s hard to throw things out when you’ve spent time & money to collect them, so I’ve had this vague sense of “someday, I need to get around to putting some of this stuff on eBay” nagging at me most of the time.

Back on July 31st, I finally just said “to heck with it” and started listing stuff on eBay a half-dozen items at a time.  Tiny things, like a single Game Boy Advance cartridge and bigger things like complete runs of hardcover books or boxed video game consoles… it’s all been adding up to a little more money in savings and fewer things to keep me stationary.

To give some history, I originally signed up for eBay in January of ’98, and I’d of course bought and sold a few things since then.  Had about 140 feedback which makes, oh, about ten transactions a year.

In the course of four or five months, then, I managed to double that feedback number AND just got an email from eBay that I was such a swell guy that they were upgrading me to a “Power Seller”, which is pretty cool.  It doesn’t really come with a lot of benefits – a small discount on shipping is about it, really, but it’s external recognition that, yeah, I am FINALLY getting some of this stuff moved out.

Maybe I can move in TWO U-hauls next time.