4 Tips For Downsizing Your Life
A simple Google search for “Downsizing Your Life” will show many, many articles, filled with ideas on, not just how to downsize but why to downsize your life.
Six years ago I was asked to speak at the annual Domestic Estate Management Association convention. Since our company had already begun experiencing downsizing families (mostly octogenarians) I decided to do a Power Point presentation on the topic. Interestingly, 6 years ago while doing research on downsizing life, much of the Google searches had to do with corporate downsizing. In fact, Wikipedia’s definition of downsizing was all about corporate lay-offs. Needless to say, back then I was pretty much the only person who could see the coming wave of retiring Boomers and their parents.
Before we get into specific tips on how to downsize your life, let’s take a quick look at why we should downsize our lives.
For decades we “baby boomers” found our identity in our work, our families and in the things we collected. These things reflected our success as well as our families’ accomplishments (childhood memorabilia, sports trophies and photographs). Also, many baby boomers collected their parents’ and grandparents’ furniture and heirloom items. As a result, not too many baby boomers that I know, have a whole lot of empty spaces in their primary homes.
Now, as almost 77 million people face retirement (the largest segment of our adult population to do so) we realize that these “things” are not what we want to identify ourselves with. As we approach a new stage in our lives we are realizing that the things we own actually “own” us. As we evaluate our limited time to exist we can see that all our stuff requires time and we’d rather use our time to experience things we have not experienced before. This is one reason that the travel industry is exploding.
Now that we have an idea as to why we want to downsize our lives, let’s take a look at 4 solid tips for downsizing our lives.
Before we get into specific tips on how to downsize your life, let’s take a quick look at why we should downsize our lives.
For decades we “baby boomers” found our identity in our work, our families and in the things we collected. These things reflected our success as well as our families’ accomplishments (childhood memorabilia, sports trophies and photographs). Also, many baby boomers collected their parents’ and grandparents’ furniture and heirloom items. As a result, not too many baby boomers that I know, have a whole lot of empty spaces in their primary homes.
Now, as almost 77 million people face retirement (the largest segment of our adult population to do so) we realize that these “things” are not what we want to identify ourselves with. As we approach a new stage in our lives we are realizing that the things we own actually “own” us. As we evaluate our limited time to exist we can see that all our stuff requires time and we’d rather use our time to experience things we have not experienced before. This is one reason that the travel industry is exploding.
Now that we have an idea as to why we want to downsize our lives, let’s take a look at 4 solid tips for downsizing our lives.
- ASK YOURSELF, WHERE DO I WANT TO BE IN 10 YEARS?
- FAMILY INTERVENTION
- DOWNSIZING YOUR LIFE STARTS WITH DONATE, DONATE, DONATE!
- WHEN IN DOUBT…”THROW IT OUT!!!”
Posted by Jim Henderson
