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    Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace
    Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace
    Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace

    By Claire Middleton

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    About this ebook

    Attention, Baby Boomers and anyone else who’s:

    •Stuck in a rut and wishes for freedom...
    •Unemployed and needs to move to a cheaper place...
    •Overwhelmed and wants to simplify...

    ...but has too much stuff to go through first.

    In Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace, you’ll learn about the joys of the downsized life:

    •Lower personal expenses,
    •Flexibility to move to wherever your career takes you,
    •Clutter-free living, and
    •More time to do what you love to do!

    Thanks to the economic downturn, Claire Middleton and her family lost their business and had to sell their spacious home. They sold or gave away more than half of their possessions to comfortably fit into the little house where they now live (quite happily). And they learned that downsizing, even forced downsizing, can be a blessing in disguise.

    In Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace, Claire shares her story as well as those of others who learned the truth about possessions and freedom after downsizing their lives (voluntarily or not).

    Is your lifetime’s worth of stuff holding you back? Are you missing out on dreams and opportunities because the burden of your possessions weighs you down?

    It’s never too late to free yourself! Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace will show you how: just click the “Buy Now” button at the top of this page to get started.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherClaire Middleton
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781310026379
    Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace

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      Book preview

      Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace - Claire Middleton

      Downsizing Your Life for 

      Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace

      Claire Middleton

      Copyright 2014 by Claire Middleton

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Published by:

      Parker-Elgin Press, an imprint of Cardamom Publishers

      www.Claire-Middleton.com

      Cover illustration used with permission of Shutterstock.com.

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the copyright owner and publisher of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at the time of initial publication; however, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

      Names and identifying details of some persons described in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Why You Need To Downsize Your Life

      Reason #1 for Downsizing Your Life: You Get To Decide What Happens to Your Stuff

      The Importance (and Burden) of Our Stuff

      But I Kept It for a Reason!

      Reason #2 for Downsizing Your Life: You Can Live More Inexpensively

      Living Cheaper Means More Choices

      Learning to Live Less Expensively Can Be Fun

      How Downsizing Can Help Your Budget

      Reason #3 for Downsizing Your Life: It Can Free You from What’s Holding You Back, from the Rut You Didn’t Even Know You Were In

      When Your Stuff Keeps You in a Rut

      When Your Stuff Serves a Purpose (Whether You Realize it or Not!)

      Are You Hiding Behind Your Stuff?

      When the Stuff Isn’t Yours

      Reason #4 for Downsizing Your Life: You’ll Be Able to Pursue New Employment, Volunteer, or Fun Opportunities

      Reason #5 for Downsizing Your Life: You’ll Be Doing Your Loved Ones a Big Favor

      Why Do We Have So Much Stuff, And Why Is It So Hard To Give Up?

      Why Do We Do It?

      Downsizing Your Life is Very Doable

      How to Downsize Your Life

      Should You Move?

      Consider Other Housing Options

      Take a Job that Offers Housing

      Back to School

      When Your Kids are Being Downsized, Too

      Purging Your Stuff

      Donate or Sell?

      Paper to Go Through Later

      Shrink Your Collections

      What About the Furniture?

      The Burden of Family Heirlooms

      As for the Storage Unit(s)…

      After the Purge

      Your New, Downsized Life

      Moving Into New (Smaller) Digs

      Life After Downsizing

      Processing Your Emotions

      A note from Claire

      Excerpt: Secrets of Small-House Living

      Introduction

      Consider the snail. A cute little hairless guy sentenced to go through life dragging his home on his back. While he might dream of being free to slither along at top speed, he can only creep along, weighed down by his enormous shell.

      There’s another creature even more burdened by the load they’re dragging through life. It’s the Baby Boomer. Having grown up during one of the most prosperous periods in history, Boomers are burdened by more clothes, books, furniture, entertainment options and personal memorabilia than can fit in one house, hence the popularity of storage units. Add to that the burden left to them by their parents, Depression-era babies who learned to keep everything just in case they needed it someday, and guilted their children into keeping it all after they passed on, and you have a burden far greater than just carrying your shell house on your back.

      I was one of the burdened. Like my fellow Boomers, I understand only too well the sentimental value of the program from Elvis’ last concert, or boxes of 1960s baseball cards, or a complete collection of Beatles albums. And that’s just from our youth. What about our massive collections of photos and videos of our children, who must be the most documented children ever? Then there’s the evidence of their accomplishments: the soccer trophies, dance recital videos and cute little kindergarten graduation diplomas.

      Let’s face it, we Baby Boomers make snails look like amateurs. We have so much stuff that some of us even qualify as hoarders, making us part of that phenomenon peculiar to affluent societies which is now the basis for horrifying television reality shows.

      But as much as we young-at-heart Boomers hate to admit it, we’re getting older. We can’t take this stuff with us. And like the snail, we often dream of being freed from our burden so we can enjoy life unencumbered…..while we can.

      Even if you’re not a Baby Boomer, you may have already accumulated more stuff than you could ever have imagined, and you’re starting to realize it’s holding you back.

      Perhaps you fantasize about spending your three-week vacation traveling the country in an R.V. or camping in national parks, enjoying all the natural beauty your daily life as a working adult keeps you from seeing. But you hear about people whose homes are robbed during an extended vacation, and realize your fun would be marred by worries about leaving your home and belongings unattended. So you put that dream on the shelf.

      Maybe you’ve been offered a year’s worth of temporary work overseas, a great career-advancing opportunity if you can be there in a month. How can you possibly take such a wonderful job when you have a house full of stuff to consider? Four weeks isn’t enough time to empty the house so a renter can move in; on the other

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