One of the saddest effects of the coronavirus lockdown has been the number of people who have lost their jobs. Although the government did send many of them a stimulus check, that will only help for so long. Then what?

If you’ve lost your job, unless you work in a sector where you can always find work, you might want to consider downsizing to either a smaller house or a less expensive area. When we went through our business loss several years ago, we found that downsizing was the perfect solution to our dilemma of an unemployed breadwinner in a career field that was disappearing. All of our financial pressure disappeared once we did that. It was amazing how well it worked out for us.

Of course it’s not for the faint-hearted. If you can’t find more affordable housing in your area, you have to leave town or even leave the state. It’s not easy to start over, especially when you’re, um, older. But the freedom and peace you can find by downsizing makes it worth the trade-off.

Consider also that downsizing is much easier when done voluntarily as opposed to waiting until you’re forced to do so. You can read stories of other people who downsized proactively in my book Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace.

See more downsizing posts here.