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Let me tell you that moving to Hawaii is not easy. And it is not for the faint of heart. If you don’t have a strong personality and good problem solving skills along with a lot of patience I suggest you don’t even consider it. And on top of that it is VERY costly to make the move if you move all of your stuff over.

I had a lot of questions about moving. Even though it is now 2008 I had started my search for answers on how to move to Hawaii back in 2005. Back then I found a website related to Kona that had a moving to Hawaii forum. I created an account and registered for the forum and asked my questions. As is typical of forums I got back many answers. Some helpful, some not so much. Some answers were answers to questions I didn’t ask. While most answers were helpful, the best answers I got came from a guy named John Rabi. John Rabi has lived on the Big Island for over 20 years and is an expert in the real estate market there. His answers to me were always thoughtful and honest. Sometimes brutally honest. I would rather have brutally honest answers than answers that try and keep from hurting my feelings. I guess I am a no BS kinda guy. Sometimes John would give some witty answers. Most of which were sarcastic but never mean. During my quest to get my questions answered some poor woman posted that she was being physically abused by her husband. She was asking for referrals for a good divorce lawyer. John Rabi answered her and told her she could save a lot of money and trouble if she would just hire some Tongans with baseball bats instead. While I found his answer to be quite funny (The majority of the participants on the forum did as well), a select few people found his answer in poor taste. I personally did not find it in poor taste but some people complained mercilessly. So John did what I thought was a nice thing and he publicly apologized to the woman and all the people who complained. After that the owner of the forum decided to kick John off of the forum forever.

There were 30-40 of us that were outraged that the owner of that website would kick John off after he graciously apologized. Especially considering there were so few who were offended. And there were even fewer who supported the owner’s actions. It was obvious that his move to remove John was political. After posting numerous times that I felt the owner did the wrong thing and having all my posts erased, I did what I thought was the right thing to do at that time. I started my own forum and invited John and all of the 30-40 protesters to come to my forum and participate without fear of being removed. My forum name is The Kona Forum and you can click here: Kona Forum to see it. The actual forums are here: Forums and as you can see the forums are quite active and full of great moving, real estate and local information. John has been a big part of providing answers to many of the questions and providing his own brand of humor that makes the board a lot more personal. The rest of the website is a huge resource for everyone who is moving to Hawaii and wants a one stop website to get the answer to all the questions they may have. You can search for anything Hawaii and Kona related. And if you can’t find your answers then all you have to do is register in the forum and ask your own questions. I guarantee you will get many useful and honest answers.

Now back to the year 2008. Thanks to John and the Kona Forum I already have most of my questions answered. But I still need to make out my list of things to do. Here is my master list in no particular order:

1. Make a list of all unneeded items that I want to sell off or give away.
2. Make a list of all unneeded items that I want to keep.
3. Make a list of all items I intend to move/take with me to Hawaii.
4. Use the list of movers found on the Kona Forum to call around to find movers for household items.
5. Use the list of car movers (found on the Kona Forum) and call around to find the best price/service.
6. Sell or trade in our BMW’s.
7. Buy new/used cars for use on the Big island.
8. Fix up our house (Painting inside and out, new carpet, etc.).
9. Find a renter for the house (call my realtor in SoCal).
10. Purchase one way airline tickets.
11. Rent a car for the last day(s) in SoCal.
12. Rent a car for the first few days on the Big Island.
13. Find a place to stay for a couple of weeks in Hawaii.
14. Start looking for permanent housing.
15. Call gas company, power company and trash to cut off service.

This is not a complete list and it is not prioritized yet. It sort of became a living document as I went along. The first thing I did was to make a list of items I absolutely had to bring with me to Hawaii. I had things like computers and parts, guns and ammo, coins and stamps, kitchen items, cars (not our BMW’s). I decided to sell off all of my model trains and all other collectible items and collections. My thinking behind all of this is that homes in Hawaii are smaller and have less storage space than houses on the mainland. So I felt that I should really only bring what I need and cannot live without. So I went through this list again and again and decided to sell or give away all of my computer parts but keep my 3 computers. I decided to sell off most of my gun collection and keep only a my self defense guns and a couple with sentimental value. I decided to sell off all of my coin collection and my stamp collection. I sold everything I could before I moved. I decided to keep only my bedroom furniture and sell/give away all the furniture in the spare bedroom. I decided to sell/give away all my old living room furniture and buy new and bring it with me. I kept all of my kitchen and bathroom items. We gave away our dining room furniture and everything in our den. In hind sight we could have given away or sold another 25% of our stuff and we would never have missed it.

It takes a tremendous amount of work to sell off collections of things. I spent almost every waking hour working on selling everything I ever collected. And it turned out I realized it was going to take more time than I had to sell everything. So I decided to prioritize which collections to sell first. I started with the collections that took up the most room and worked my way down to the collections that took up the least amount of room. I was so busy putting my coin and stamp collections up on eBay that I hradly had time for anything else. All of my stuff sold well and I put up every auction starting at $0.99 and no reserve. I had to get rid of it all! And get rid of it I did. I sold my guns through a local dealer. I asked full retail and got it for every gun. It pays to keep your firearms in good shape no matter how old they are. The dealer took his cut and I was satisfied with what I made on them.

The next thing I did was to start bagging and boxing everything that went to charities. Most of what I gave away was old clothes. I gave away all my clothes that didn’t fit anymore. I gave away all long sleeve shirts, dress items like suits, ties, socks and shoes. I kept one pair sneakers (which I have worn a total of 3 times in 2 years), one pair of slippahs, and my work boots. I kept a pair of dress shoes but they got lost in the move. I kept all my short pants and t-shirts, blue jeans and sweat socks for work. I kept one flannel shirt and one sweatshirt for those few cool nights. You won’t believe that I had to make two trips to the Goodwill drop off using my new pickup truck that I filled to the max! I never in my wildest imagination realized that I had that many clothes!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 13th, 2011 at 4:38 pm and is filed under DreamKona. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.