How do you keep track of all your things when you are constantly moving all over the world? Doesn’t it get exhausting?
This is solid question with PCS season upon us and our family being dead smack in the middle of a move.
Yes and no to it being exhausting. Life in the Foreign Service is really just a delicate dance of packing, moving, unpacking, purging, repacking, and moving. Every 2-3 years. Although it can be tiring, being disciplined also goes a long way in making the process a lot easier, and the State Department helps a lot too.
The most important thing to do when you know you will be moving soon is start categorizing your items into 3 categories: Permanent Storage, Unaccompanied Air Baggage (UAB), and Household Effects (HHE). The State Department loves a good acronym so I will use the above for the rest of the explanation.
Permanent Storage is the first category, and you are allowed about 18000lbs of your stuff to go to a warehouse outside of D.C., where your things will wait for you to either finish your career or serve a domestic tour. These are the items you don’t want going abroad, but don’t necessarily want to get rid of. It also changes from post to post. For example, you might put a huge dining room set in storage for a tour in a tiny Hong Kong apartment, but then decide you want it when you take a tour in Africa where housing sizes are huge. Each move you make gives you a choice in how much storage you may need to place or remove. It is also common for people to not have anything in storage. For example, I currently have nothing in storage because most of our stuff was within our Household Effect weight allowance and we did a good job of getting rid of things before we moved. Either way, make sure you really want to hold onto these things. Just about everyone that retires ends up receiving their stored items and does a lot of head scratching over the things they put in storage decades earlier, questioning what were they thinking?
Unaccompanied Air Baggage (UAB) are items that the State Department will ship to you via air freight shortly after you arrive to your new destination. Because it is expensive, UAB carries the lowest weight limit. A single individual gets 250lbs of UAB. A couple gets 450lbs. A family of 4 like my own gets 700lbs. UAB is probably the most difficult thing to decide what to pack because you have to weigh what you really want fast versus items you are okay waiting for. Outside of the luggage you arrive in country with, your UAB will typically arrive within the first few weeks at post, so its important to consider the items you want immediately. Common choices are electronics, kitchen items, and clothing (or if you are me…Warhammer). Once you know what you want, put it in a separate pile and write it all down.
Household Effects (HHE) – Are things you want at your next assignment, but they will take some time to get there. HHE travels by sea and it takes 3-4 months after you arrive at your next destination to get there. You get an allowance of about 7000lbs of HHE, but most posts come fully furnished so it isn’t very common to use your entire allotment. Like storage, it can be very post dependent. Big ticket items in our HHE have been our king size bed, art, and a few pieces of living room furniture.
Once you’ve decided what items go in each packing category, the easiest thing to do is make a list, and if possible arrange them in parts of your house so you know what is going where and the movers won’t accidently take something for storage and put it in HHE. You also want to make sure they don’t accidently pack up embassy owned furniture, as these packers are very good at their job and will pack EVERYTHING. Moving big furniture isn’t easy, so another common way to mark what goes where is color coded post-it notes. At the very least, put your UAB in a pile all on its own in its own room since that is arguably the most important shipment.
From there, whether domestic or overseas, contracted movers will come and pack up and move everything for you. For liability reasons, you aren’t allowed to pre-pack anything and it must 100% be done by the moving company. So although moving every couple of years can be stressful, the worst part of it (the physical labor), isn’t your job.
For Angeli and I, we quickly learned that less is more. That first move when you join the Foreign Service is a real wakeup call into how much crap you have. Even with us purging a lot before we moved to Africa, it was striking just how much stuff we had, and we spent a good chunk of our time in Mauritania giving away or selling even more stuff. We sent 7000lbs of items to our Mauritania home in our HHE and only 3700lbs of stuff went back to the U.S. at the end of our tour. We got rid of a bed and mattress, tons of clothes and shoes, exercise equipment, lots of baby items and kid toys, and some of our kitchen items. Even then, we took home local art and rugs, and upgraded a lot of our kitchen equipment, so it wasn’t all out and nothing in.
At the end of the day, moving does suck, but if you run a lean operation, and plan a little bit, it’s not so bad, and the department does most of the dirty work. If moving isn’t your thing, definitely factor that into you decision making if you are considering this career and lifestyle, because you will move a lot. -Nick
