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I have written earlier and recently a couple of times about downsizing from a three times larger home to a much smaller retirement home in a managed community for seniors. Now that we have "moved out" of our old home for 56 years and "settled in" our new home for over 1.5 month, I wish to report on our experience for our north american readers who may be faced similar situations.

First, we said that there are merchants who specialize in selling your extra/unwanted possessions for a fee (usually 35 to 50%). While this is true, these merchants are rather picky. They only want things which are easy to sell/store. For example we had a perfectly good and working massage chair that originally cost $1300. But the merchant did not want to sell the chair for us since he believe it is too burky and not in great demand. Thus, we had to find ways to dsipose it ourselves. Secondly, we reported that there are junk dealer who will take your unwanted stuff and donate/dispose them for you. However, they charge a stiff fee for the service (in thousand dollars or more ). Third, we can sell each of the items one-by-one that we don't wish to move to our new home oursleves. But such are tasks we cannot do at our age.

Thus, finally we decided to post a oipen-house period of three hours on a particularly day to the local Chinese America e-mail list stating that we are giving away for free anything and everything in our old home people can carry away. Amazingly and unexpectedly we in fact cleared out our entire house this way in three hours. Is this Chinese culture? Refugee mentality? never pass up things that are free? or what? 

So, here are our experience in disposing an estate or large possessions.