Tag Archives: moving

A Decluttering Fish Tale

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

I think this article is supposed to be non-fiction, but I found an awful lot of fiction in it.

The author has to move in two weeks but once she hired a woman to help her, they decluttered her whole house in a day, and still had time for tea?

She kept entire boxes of things to go through after her move, even though she was moving in with her mother?

Did I mention she was moving out of a five-bedroom home where she lived with her four children whose stuff also had to be gone through?

Yep, my BS detector went rat-a-tat-tat after I read that article. As I’ve described here and in my latest book, Memoirs of a Downsized Declutterer, we spent months moving things out of our five-bedroom house, and two weeks frantically packing up the rest once we finally had a buyer. It took us two more years to go through everything we had stored in two storage units and one rental house after we left our home of nearly 20 years. So you understand why I might be a wee bit skeptical about her story.

If you find yourself in the same boat, moving on a deadline with way too much clutter to deal with, go easy on yourself. Find one or more places to store your excess possessions until you can go through them mindfully. And know that it’s not possible to do it all in one day. (But I hope you don’t take as long to do it as we did!)

Let’s Pretend We’re Moving

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Simpler Living Tagged ,

As you might have read in the top right corner of this blog, we moved three times in four years. That was eight years ago, but the memories are still fresh….ugh! It makes me tired just thinking about it.

But there was something good to come out of it. When you move, you’re forced to go through all of your things and get rid of anything you don’t use anymore in order to reduce the number of things you’re going to have to pack, move and unpack. So you end up in new decluttered digs, and it feels good!

That said, the converse is also true. When you don’t move for a long time, it’s very easy to let the number of your belongings increase, slowly and quietly, until you start tripping on things, or you run out of room in closets, or you just start to feel kind of cramped in your home. That’s how you know it’s time to move again.

Of course, you probably like where you live and don’t want to move. No worries! What I’m talking about is pretending that you have to move. What would you take with? What would you get rid of?

Once you really get into this act of imagination, you’ll start to realize how much stuff has been building up around your home. Use the insight created by your pretend move to give up items you don’t use anymore. Then enjoy the extra space that’s created in your home.

Do this every year or so, and if or when you do actually move again, it will be a much easier experience than what we went through years ago. Just the mere memory of those days revs up my declutter meter and I start assembling boxes to donate to Goodwill.

Where Should You Go When You Downsize Your Life?

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

For some, downsizing their life is simply a matter of finding more affordable and smaller digs within commuting distance of their job. But if you don’t have a job or you’re about to lose yours, it’s possible you may need to find a new town to live in, possibly even a new state.

Yes, I’m aware of the increasing number of ex-pats out there (people who have left the U.S.), But I’m assuming most people, like me, want to stay in this country. They just need to know how to find a good place to live that doesn’t cost as much as where they live now.

I shared a great tool for discovering your perfect new town in Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace. Now I have two great links to share, which I’ll probably have my publisher add to my book, but that you can check out right now.

First off, here’s a wonderful document (PDF) that lists all the metropolitan areas of the U.S. in order of affordability. What a find! It starts with the most expensive areas. We moved from page 1 to page 5, making our lives so much more affordable in the process. Find your current town in the document and start looking further down to see where you might go to make your life easier, financially and otherwise.

Then, if you’re wondering where other people are moving, check out this interactive map, which shows who’s moving where and what the per-capita income is in every single county in the country. Be warned, though, you can waste a lot of time playing with this, it’s so interesting!

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.