After years of thinking about it, we're finally going to do it. 'It' being spend a year or two traveling the world in search of epic adventure. This is a big deal for us. Sure, when you're young and single, traveling is easy. And I did my fair share of traveling in my days sans wife and kids. But now with a family in tow, it's going to be a challenge. But we welcome this challenge knowing it could mean memories to last a lifetime. So stoked.

But alas, we have a lot of preparing to do before jumping on that first plane to somewhere else. The first obstacle is our stuff. Lots of stuff. You see, we've accumulated a lot of things in the last few years. A couple years ago we moved into a larger than average house and filled it with furniture. We have two fully furnished living rooms, seven bedrooms, a den, a full storage shed, a trampoline in the backyard, four vehicles in the driveway, and no room in the double garage to park any of them because it too is jam packed with even more stuff. You might assume because we live this way that I must be rolling in the dough, but I'm not. Yeah, we make enough to pay for it all, but it is a strain some months. As I sit here thinking about it all, I really can't think of any good reasons to continue living with this appearance of wealth. We've learned that living large is not necessarily living well.

So the next few months will be dedicated to operation eliminate! Here's my plan:

1. Stop buying stuff we dont need

Duh. We'll start with the obvious. It's time to break the consumer habit. Before opening the wallet think, "Is this going to help us travel more, or impede it?"

2. Minimize monthly expenses

I looked at all our monthly pre-authorized payments and got rid of all but the most necessary. I stopped auto renewing domain names I never use, stacks of them. Cancelled magazine subscriptions. Switched from Mediatemple to another web host, ezp.net, that offers better value.

One expense I'm happy to have cut out completely, effective December 1st is cable tv. I've grown to hate the whole cable tv industry. Being a technologist, I believe cable networks are a dinosaur, a behemoth thing of the past, at least in terms of their current business model. We'll move all our media consumption online.

Also effective December 1st, we cancelled our home telephone. Tegan and I both have cel phones. We don't need a land line.

3. Sort through all our stuff

Keep, chuck, sell or donate. Be ruthless.

4. Digitize as much as possible

Like probably every other family, we have a lot of souvenirs and momentos. We simply cannot keep them all and live our target lifestyle. So we'll be taking digital photos of them all, writing a short blurb about why they are special to us, and posting them on a private website. We'll then dispose or give away the actual hard goods.

I'm also currently going through the long and tedious process of ripping my entire CD and DVD collection to hard disk. Media geeks will want to know: Using Handbrake, MP4 format, H.264 codec.

5. Chuck out junk

Ever see that show 'Hoarders'? Frightening. Now we're nowhere near that obsessive of our stuff, we still hang on to things that we never use, and probably no one else would. Dump it and forget about it! I've already taken three van loads of stuff to the garbage dump and recyclers.

6. Sell stuff on Craig's List

We have a lot of stuff that is of some worth that "we might use some day", but if we haven't used it in years, we might as well sell it to someone who might put it to good use. We have way more than we could ever need.

7. My personal challenge: 100 things or less

Though I won't impose this on my wife or kids (as much), I'm going to try to only travel with one pack. I'm challenging myself to get down to 100 belongings or less. I'll be sharing a blog post soon that lists what those 100 things will be. Other people have done this. So can I.

Wish us luck! We welcome advice.