Tag Archives: downsizing

An Eavesdropped Story

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, My Books, Personal, Retirement, Simpler Living Tagged , , ,

Overheard while looking at cards in the store the other day:

Couple in their 80s: How are you? I haven’t seen you in ages!

Woman around 70: I’m fine. I’m moving in two weeks. Have you heard?

Couple in their 80s: No. Where are you moving to?

Woman around 70: Oh, we’re staying in town but we’re downsizing to a much smaller place. I think we’ll be really happy once this is over and we’re settled in.

Couple in their 80s: I’m sure you will be. I’ve heard it’s a lot of work, going through everything.

Woman around 70: Oh yes. So much stuff from 40 years. But it had to go, and we’re even down to just one car and one truck. Our son finally took his motorcycles!

Couple in their 80s: We’ve had friends who downsized and they’re very happy they did.

Woman around 70: I’m already feeling better without all that stuff around me. I can’t wait to get into our new place.

Couple in their 80s: Who did you hire to move everything?

And the conversation went on in that vein, while I kept looking at cards. Then my antenna went back up when I heard the wife in the elderly couple say:

“You’re so wise to downsize. We’re thinking about doing it someday.”

Right. They’re already in their 80s. I’m thinking that line really means “We’ll let our kids worry about it after we’re gone.”

That’s not a very nice thing to do to their kids, who are clearly gonna need How to Clean Out Your Parent’s House (Without Filling Up Your Own).

Finally Decluttering

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

Our neighbors at the house we had to sell have just sold their house after three decades of raising a large family in it. Now their kids are all on their own and they don’t need all that space anymore.

If you’ve been reading here any length of time at all, you know I looked up their house on realtor.com and checked out all the photos. Wow, did that ever bring back memories of happy times when my kids and theirs were young, and “going next door to play” was big excitement for them.

They still have a fair amount of furniture to deal with, but that’s to be expected. It looks like they’ve already dealt with a lot of the stuff because the rooms are fairly empty.

This is going on all over the country. Baby boomers who never bothered to downsize are finally doing so, often lured by the high selling prices that have resulted from the housing bubble. If they never knew how to declutter, they’re learning it now!

Memoirs of a Downsized Declutterer is here!

By Claire Posted in My Books Tagged ,

Now you know what I’ve been doing during the pandemic since I clearly haven’t been blogging. Memoirs of a Downsized Declutterer is the true story of why and how we had to sell our large paid-off home and find affordable housing in another state, all the while dragging our enormous amount of possessions with us because we didn’t have time to go through it all. There is a happy ending: we now live very happily with minimal clutter in a much smaller house than the one we gave up.

I hope you’ll enjoy this book, especially if you need to either downsize or declutter your life. If you need to do both, this book will encourage you that it can be done, and will show you how to do so. Just click HERE to get started.

Downsizing: A Great Solution to Job Loss

By Claire Posted in downsizing, My Books, Personal Tagged , ,

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.