Category Archives: Simpler Living

What Should You Keep? Well, Who Are You Now?

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, Personal, Simpler Living Tagged , , , ,

Like so many of our contemporaries, we were forced to downsize because of a big financial reversal: my husband’s industry shifted overseas, and he was left without a livelihood, not to mention his vocation of over 30 years.

At the same time, I was facing an empty nest. Even though I’ve been a writer for years, my primary occupation was full-time mom of a large family. By the time we downsized, some of our kids had already moved out, and the others were approaching that age.

So both my husband and I were faced with the thought, “Who am I now?” Aside from the philosophical side of that question was the very real issue of which of our things should we get rid of and which of our things should we keep because we might need/want them in the future. When you no longer know who you are, everything looks like something you might need down the road.

This partially explains why we didn’t get rid of hardly anything before we moved (the first of three moves in four years), and why we kept two storage units full of stuff before we finally settled in the little house we now call home.

I don’t recommend doing what we did. It was a big pain, as you can imagine. But we just didn’t know where we would end up or what we would be doing.

It took quite a bit of time before either of us began getting an idea of what we wanted to keep and what we could give up. Speaking only for myself, I found that as time passed and I stopped seeing myself primarily as Mom, I began to see myself as Claire again. Part of that process involved tapping into my desires regarding what I wanted to do.

I’m not talking about careers here. I can’t write 16 hours a day anyways. I’m talking about how I wanted to spend my free time. It had been so many years since I had the luxury of choosing how to spend my time that I was almost paralyzed by the freedom for a while. And even when I did do something I wanted to do, I felt guilty about spending time on myself like that.

But I’m getting over it 🙂 Since then, I’ve identified some areas of interest, things that I really enjoy doing, and as a result I was able to keep items I would need and pass along items that I no longer needed.

This may sound obvious, but when you’re faced with literally hundreds of cubic feet of stuff accumulated over a busy three or four decades, you either have to pitch it all at once or come up with a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Sentimental and frugal people like me can’t just toss it all in dumpsters, no matter how much we wish we could. We need some guidelines in order to begin the sorting routine.

Once I figured out what I wanted to do, I had my guidelines. Next time, I’ll share how that process happened for me.

 

Tiny House Living in Retirement

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Debt-Free, downsizing, Retirement, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , ,

I recently discovered a new book about tiny houses that’s packed with photos and interesting information from people who live in tiny houses; some of them even built their own tiny houses.

Now, while I don’t think a tiny house is for me (we use our basement almost every day for our work and our hobbies), I can see how well the concept works for some people. In the new book Tiny House Living: Ideas for Building & Living Well in Less than 400 Square Feet, author Ryan Mitchell shares the stories of a variety of tiny house residents.

My favorite is that of Kathy, a retiree whose son began building her a tiny house without her knowledge (“He knew if he told her ahead of time it would be a much harder sell, so he waited until it was almost done to show her.”) Kathy now lives in the tiny house with her husband, and has found that the tiny house has made some big positive changes in her life:

She can do all that she needs to do in her home, without a mortgage and with very low bills. Her power bill tops out at $25 a month and water is about $12—not because she uses that much, but because that’s the minimum charge to keep the service on….Since she is retired, it is very important to keep her living expenses low and it means that she can do much more, like visit her grandchildren more, go out to eat with her friends more, focus on her hobbies and simply not have to worry about the bills as much…..For the first time she has had the money and the time to visit her grandson for his birthday….

So many Baby Boomers don’t have big pensions waiting for them and were unable to save up much for retirement; a tiny house might be one answer to living successfully in retirement on only Social Security and some modest savings. If that sounds like you or someone you know, you should check out this book!

In the story about Kathy, she says that her friends with large houses are beginning to wish they had smaller homes to care for and more free time like Kathy does. But she says something holds them back:

“It’s because they don’t know what to do with all their stuff that they spent their whole lives trying to pay for. They are so inclined to having stuff that it’s scary for them to think of paring down.”

To Kathy’s friends, I say “Downsize, people, downsize! Lose the clutter and gain your freedom!”

One more thing: in most tiny houses, the sleeping area is always up in a loft. Who wants to risk falling down that tiny loft ladder in the middle of the night when they need a bathroom? But Kathy’s tiny house has a futon in the living area that turns into a bed, so she doesn’t climb up into a loft to sleep. Smart!

Downsizing for Freedom

By Claire Posted in Debt-Free, downsizing, Personal, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , , ,

Our downsizing experience was driven by a desire to regain financial peace, but another by-product of it is that we gained a lot of freedom.

Did you know that freedom is scary? At least it is after years and years of falling into a familiar pattern. In our case, we always had to live near my husband’s job. Even after he started his own business, we had to stay in the area because that’s where his contacts (potential clients) were. This meant that we lived in the same metropolitan area for nearly 30 years.

Then economic change reared its ugly head, his business closed and we had to find a new place to live. Where? Anywhere. Sounds great at first, but for us, having far too many choices was scary. How do you determine where to go when you don’t even know how to support yourself anymore?

We did have a couple of small Internet-based businesses, but we could live anywhere we could get Internet access, so that didn’t really help us narrow down our range of choices.

In the end, we chose to move to an area where we often went on vacation. We rented a lovely house (quite cheaply because we were signing a one-year lease instead of a summer lease), and figured we would eventually buy a house there. But while we loved living up the road from the beach, we learned that it was not the right place for us to live full-time. The natives weren’t very friendly to outsiders, and we got lonely.

We ended up leaving after two years, and we did so easily because we had the flexibility of being renters. The experience helped us see that our ensuing freedom was quite wonderful. Having had a few years to think, we were ready to take advantage of that freedom. We traveled to different places, looking for a new hometown, and finally found one.

That was over ten years ago. In the new town, we rented a lovely restored house from the 1920s. Both of us had always wanted to live in a historic house, but we weren’t crazy about the time and money involved in restoring and keeping up one. Instead we got to spend two years in an absolutely beautiful old house, and whenever something went wrong, we just called the landlord. Now that’s freedom!

While living there, we got to know the town and its people, and found that we were comfortable with both. When the landlords told us they wanted to put the house on the market, we used our recently gained knowledge of the town to find and buy a very small house in a great neighborhood for cash. Our utility costs (and our property taxes) are quite low, giving us the freedom to live on a relatively modest income in comfort. Should we decide to move elsewhere, this house shouldn’t be hard to sell, or we could rent it out for a few years. That flexibility, in addition to the financial peace we still have, is due to the freedom we found by downsizing.

 

What You Must Do If You Ever Hope to Retire

By Claire Posted in Debt-Free, Retirement, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , , , ,

The recent ups and downs of the stock market should be considered a warning to those of us in our 40s and 50s who intend to retire before long. If your retirement money is invested in the stock market, even in index funds, you could suddenly lose some or all of it, and your retirement plans will be postponed or might even be destroyed.

After reading this cautionary tale, I got to thinking about how even the best-prepared folks can be wiped out if they haven’t taken enough precautions. The fellow in the article has been a hard worker all of his life. He had a great job with a solid (and famous) company, and thought he had prepared well enough for retirement. But now, at age 70, he’s living in a leaky RV and working exhausting, low-paying jobs, like spending ten hours a day as a temporary worker in an Amazon warehouse.

Clearly, this man is smart, not lazy, and he’s had some hard luck (including the illness and death of his first wife). But after finding a new love (someone who also lost all her investments in the 2008 financial crisis) and marrying her, their lives together became even harder.

What else could they have done to prevent having to spend their so-called golden years keeping their ancient RV running while they travel around the country looking for work?

The clues lie in the sixth paragraph:

By the time Barb and Chuck got married in 2009, they were upside down on their mortgage and grappling with credit card debt.

This led to bankruptcy and a forced downsizing of almost all their possessions. We undertook a preventive downsizing, and that was painful enough. So I can imagine how much tougher a forced downsizing must have been for this couple. After I read this article, I told my husband, “There but for the grace of God go us.”

The first clue, being upside down on their mortgage, is common enough nowadays. But it used to be common wisdom that you always pay off your mortgage before you retire. That way you have a roof over your head, no matter what else happens. Middle-aged people who are upside down on their mortgage either financed more house than they could afford, or used their house to fund a lifestyle they couldn’t afford via a home equity line. The takeaway here is, pay off that house before you retire!

The second clue, grappling with credit card debt, is a problem for people of all ages. We’ve had a lousy economy for years, so many people put basic expenses on their credit cards and pay only the minimum monthly payments. Add in those who used credit cards to live beyond their means in order to impress themselves and others, and this couple has plenty of company. But if you plan to retire, having credit card debt is a very bad idea. Those who have never learned to “pay cash or live without the item you want to buy” need to do so ASAP, and long before they actually retire.

Ultimately, retiring with any debt at all is a risky proposition. In retirement, you can willingly live with far less and still be comfortable and secure. The couple in our cautionary tale shows you what could happen otherwise.