What you left in storage is a statement about whether you are coming back

A decision made in a hurry and never reopened

Almost everybody who leaves for a long stay leaves something behind: a unit paid for monthly, a stack of boxes in a parent’s spare room, a garage full of furniture belonging to a household that no longer exists. The decision is made in the last fortnight before departure, under time pressure, and it is essentially a decision not to decide.

That is a reasonable move at the time. Nobody can sensibly sort a life into keep and discard while also ending a lease and packing a suitcase, and paying a small monthly amount to postpone the question is cheap relief.

What makes it worth revisiting is that the postponement quietly becomes permanent. A temporary arrangement made for six months routinely runs for years, and the sum involved stops being noticed at about the same time it starts being significant.

The arithmetic is worse than it looks

Storage is priced monthly, which is exactly the way to make an expensive thing feel small, and the total is rarely computed. Over several years the cumulative cost frequently exceeds what the contents would fetch, and sometimes what they would cost to replace.

The test that cuts through it is direct: would you buy these things again, today, at this price. Applied honestly to a unit containing a sofa, a set of dining chairs and eleven boxes of unlabelled kitchen equipment, the answer is usually no.

The exception is the category that has no price. Photographs, letters, a few objects with a history, work that took years, anything belonging to somebody who has died. Those justify almost any storage cost, and they are usually a small fraction of the volume.

What is in there says what you expect to happen

The contents are unusually revealing about intention. Somebody storing furniture, appliances and the full apparatus of a household is holding the equipment for resuming a life in that country. Somebody storing four boxes of books and a bicycle has effectively decided, without having said so.

This is worth looking at directly, because plenty of people describe an odd sense of being tethered without knowing why, and the answer is sometimes a room of furniture waiting for them eight time zones away. A storage unit can function as a hedge that nobody has priced.

It works the other way too. Some people find that keeping a small amount is precisely what allows them to stay away comfortably, because the option of returning is not foreclosed. That is a legitimate thing to buy, provided you know that you are buying it.

The favour that becomes an imposition

Storage in a relative’s house is free in money and not free in everything else. A spare room lost for years, a garage that cannot be used, and the mild ongoing resentment that nobody mentions because the arrangement was generous in the first place.

The person who left rarely appreciates the scale of this, because from a distance it is an abstraction and from close up it is a room. The considerate move is to ask directly, at intervals, whether the arrangement still suits, and to accept that the polite answer may not be the true one.

It is also a risk. Nobody insures somebody else’s boxes, houses get damp, families move, and things stored informally have a way of being reorganised, borrowed or discarded with entirely good intentions. Anything you would be upset to lose should not be there.

Deal with it while you can still get at it

The practical recommendation is to set a review point rather than a decision. Once a year, or on some anniversary of the move, look at what is stored, what it costs, and what it is for, and either confirm the arrangement or end it.

When the moment to clear it comes, do it while you are physically present. Sorting a lifetime of objects remotely, or by telephone with a relative describing boxes, is slow, expensive and produces bad decisions in both directions.

And keep a list of what is in there, made when it went in, with photographs. It converts a vague anxiety about a room full of unknown things into an inventory, and an inventory can be reasoned about. Most people find, on reading one, that they had forgotten roughly half of it, which is itself the answer to the question.