Downsizing Your Life

When women over 60 start looking for a home, they usually have a pretty good idea of what they want. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a garage, maybe a pool and a certain amount of square footage. Sometimes they tell me they want a condo. But do they really know what type of home they want?

Downsizing is on the minds of many baby boomers right now, but with that comes the concern that if you downsize your home, you might also be downgrading your life and your lifestyle. After all, you’ve become accustomed to more space…

Downsizing sounds wonderfully simple when you first start thinking about it. The kids are grown. There are rooms you barely use. The yard seems to require more work every year. You look around and wonder why two people (or one!) are still heating, cooling, cleaning, repairing, and paying taxes on so much house…

While sorting through my inbox, I came across one email with the subject line “Loving Life with Less.” Given my interest in downsizing, I was very excited to read it. Yes! I thought. That’s exactly the goal…

As we age, we are often looking to downsize or eliminate clutter and excess. Many of us embrace the concept of living with fewer things to maintain and that tie us down. The reality is that actually releasing our things can be challenging…

Even in the tidiest and most organised of homes, there is one thing that never ceases to cause problems and that is the dreaded paperwork. And half of it we never even asked for – we can’t even blame ourselves for the little piles everywhere!

As a real estate agent, I often talk to people who are thinking about downsizing in retirement. They are not always looking for something tiny. They are looking for a home that fits their life now, and the energy they have to keep it up. In their research journey, downsizing into a tiny home will come up as an option…

You can learn a lot about a woman by looking at her closet. Some closet spaces are tidy and arranged by color while others are in disarray with heaps of clothes that didn’t quite make it onto a hangar. I think that the way we feel about our aging bodies…

If there is one thing we all noticed a little more of during the Covid lockdown, it was the amount of clutter we had accumulated and the impact it can have on how we feel in our own homes. Perhaps for the first time, you clearly felt the impact…

The first time I tried No New Things was last December after reading Ashlee Piper’s book by the same name. Piper promises a simple 30-day guide to save money, be kind to the planet and protect your sanity. My first try did meet one of these goals. I saved more money than I expected. But, because I gave myself permission to buy holiday gifts, I was still shopping and didn’t feel the real impact of a commitment to no buying…