The Facebook Groups Edition

On expats, furniture, and cycles.

Steve Bryant (SB) is a content strategist and the author of several WITIs (Jeep edition, Aguas edition, more). He currently lives in Mexico City, where he’s writing Julian’s, a handbook for curious travelers.

Steve here. Let’s say you’re tired of living where you live. Let’s say, too, that you not only want to decamp, you want to decamp to a foreign country several lines of latitude away. Now, for reasons financial or practical or romantic or otherwise, you aren’t going to be bringing your sofa, or your bed, or your TV. Should you find yourself in this situation the best thing to do is buy used furniture (on the cheap!) from expats who are about to leave the foreign country you want to move to. For this endeavor, you can find everything you need on Facebook Groups. Not Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Groups, which are still very much a thing beyond the fifty states. 

Take it from someone who’s done it: My entire apartment in Mexico City is furnished with other people’s discards. One expat’s garbage is another’s really cute mid-century modern lamp.

 Let there be (secondhand) light!

Why is this interesting?

For one, it makes furnishing an apartment in another country fairly affordable. Why buy new things when somebody else’s almost new things will suffice? “We’re leaving our beloved home of three years,” read a recent post in Expats and Foreigners in Mexico City (30k members), “Clothes, kitchen items, fridge, all available. Pickup in Roma Norte!” (That’s a thing about apartments in Latin America, by the way, if that’s the direction you’re heading: refrigerators not included.) 

Second, these online bargain bins connect you, via stuff, to the lived experiences of other wanderers. They’re like Woolf’s caves of experience, if those caves were filled with used bullet blenders, performatively purchased yoga blocks, lightly scuffed IKEA dinnerware, and artisanal macrame wall art which the owner knows won’t be as charming back in Echo Park. Also plants. You can get lots of plants. 

Third, and maybe most interesting to me, is how your relationship to stuff changes. When you move to another country you’re never quite sure how long you’re going to be there. You most likely didn’t bring your own furniture, those heavy things that would normally hold down the corners of your life. So with that altered sense of space and time, how do you consider new objects? What is their value? How long will you keep them? Will you pay to bring them back to your home country? Or to ship them to the next country you call home? Probably not. You’ll buy and sell them used in a Facebook Group. 

If you, dear reader, have recently made a cross-border move, simply search “Expats in {city name}” on Facebook to browse all the secondhand riches that can be yours. If you buy anything, remember, like free-spirited capri pants on a beach vacation, it likely won’t be a permanent possession.  Before you leave, you’ll sell them on a Facebook Group, probably to someone just like you: someone starting a new phase of their life, using old things of yours. (SB)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steve (SB)

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