You can buy Michael Bowden’s life -- or at least all his worldly possessions -- today for $200,000 or best offer.
A Cape Breton Island, N.S., man is selling his home and everything in it (except his cat and a few changes of clothing) in a bid to “live simply.”
“I’ve come to the decision that in this point in my life a lot of it is just stuff, and it’s time to declutter,” he told CTV News Channel on Wednesday.
For sale: his five-bedroom, two-bathroom home, all the contents inside, and his two cars, a 2013 Hyundai Elantra and a 2007 Kia Sportage. “All in one shot,” he said.
Bids start at $200,000. Bidding is open until Sept. 19 at 9 p.m. AST.
Bowden created a Facebook event last week called the “Live simply so others can simply live sale,” inspired by the mantra he learned over the years volunteering. “You all may have heard of ‘mystery boxes’ on Ebay,” he said in a live video on Facebook that has been viewed more than 25,000 times.
“Well, guess what? I’m about to sell one of the biggest mystery boxes of all time -- everything that I own,” he said.
Inspiration for the sale came from an immaterial loss, Bowden said. His family recently buried his father’s ashes. “After my father passed, we sat down and had a discussion that everything we needed, memory-wise, was in our heart and everything was in our mind,” he told CTV News Channel. In addition to memories, his family still has photos, which Bowden digitized years ago in case of a fire.
“Everything else is immaterial,” he said. “It’s dust collectors, knickknacks from my travels. We have those memories in us. Those things are just things. If we were to lose them tomorrow, we would still have those memories.”
He doesn’t know what he’s going to do if someone actually does buy everything he owns. For now, he says he would go to his sister’s home and figure it out from there.
