If a home with lower maintenance sounds like bliss to you, you’ll be happy to know your new home can be big on style (or bigger) than the larger home you’re leaving behind.
There is an art to living simply and reducing what you accumulate. The decision to right size is a major one. After decades of home ownership, the thought of making the move to a 55+ apartment community can be both exhilarating and daunting.
While you long for a carefree, maintenance-free lifestyle for this phase of your life, you face a myriad of decisions. Let us help you navigate this process and realize your dream of a simpler, more full-filled life.
The Right Questions
- When should I list my house for sale?
- What is it worth today?
- Does my current home need sprucing up in order to sell it?
- How do I condense a house full of my belongings into an apartment?
- What do I do with the rest of my treasured things?
- What are the tax and financial implications?
The Right Decisions
- List all the things you absolutely can live without and are willing to work around – like books, dishes, art.
- Re-think your decorating style.
- Only keep pieces you absolutely love. Get rid of the rest.
- Enlist your loved ones to help go through the memories.
- Give things to loved ones and donate to nonprofit organizations. Many of them will pick up from you for free.
- Sell things on Craigslist & Ebay. Or put things in storage.
- Use every inch of your space. Items that are just for show don’t have a place any more. Things should be either loved so dearly they are a necessity or functional.
- Sentimental pieces are the hardest to give up, so try to find ways to work them in, converting a special armoire intended for the large television -- now replaced by a flat screen TV -- into some kind of storage, for instance.
The Right Place to Start
- Room by room.
- Day by day.
- Item by item.
- Start with the easy things like clothes that have not been worn in years, dishes that are only used once in a blue moon, furniture that would obviously not fit into your new life.
The Right Reasons
- What is on your “bucket list”? Travel? Relaxing? Adventure? New experiences and new friends?
- You’ve grown impatient with waiting for a plumber or electrician to arrive and fix the latest household woe…
- Or maybe it’s just time to live MORE with LESS stuff…
No matter the reasoning, deciding to rent can be a very positive alternative to home ownership – both for your wallet and for your well-being. Our time in this world is so precious – why not spend less time dealing with the upkeep of owning a home, and more time surrounding yourself with life’s little pleasures. Right sizing may just be the answer you’ve been looking for.
