Personal downsizing involves reducing the size of your home, car, and workload. By doing so, you greatly reduce your expenses and impact on the planet while increasing your financial security, free time, and fitness.
Through advertising and social conditioning, we’ve been taught that we need a certain size home, car, and workweek. We’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated about these issues that it’s very difficult to imagine the possibilities for extreme personal downsizing.
The benefits and advantages of personal downsizing are enormous. For example, your insurance, utilities/fuel, and maintenance costs are greatly reduced if you have a small home and car. The smaller they are, the greater the savings. With a small to tiny home, you’ll also need to reduce the size and amount of your home furnishings, personal belongings, and electronics. This will also decrease your expenses both short and long-term. They’ll be reduced short-term by the decreased cost to run and maintain them and long-term by the greatly decreased number of items you’ll need to replace as they wear out.
Once your monthly expenses are significantly reduced, you’ll be able to decrease the number of hours you work. You can also take a less stressful position or a part-time job instead.
These personal downsizing changes will result in less stress and more free time to do what you enjoy and maintain your health and fitness at peak levels.
I discuss many of these issues in more detail in an article entitled “Living with Less to Have More.” In this article, I will take it one step further and discuss the ultimate personal downsizing.
Part of the goal of ultimate personal downsizing is to reduce expenses to the bare minimum so that you have more financial security and greatly increase your freedom. Here are the two components.
The first component is to give up your stationary housing in favor of mobile housing. This means getting a motorhome! Or a land yacht, as some people like to call them. The motorhome lifestyle enables you to reduce your monthly expenses and home maintenance duties while enabling you to travel and/or live in many new and incredibly beautiful locations. Motorhome living also gives you complete freedom and control over where you live and how long you stay there. If you have a noisy neighbor, an annoying relative close by, or the area has become unattractive, you can simply walk a few feet to your motorhome’s driver’s seat, start the engine, and move to a new city without delay!
Motorhome design, technology, and gas mileage have advanced greatly in recent years. Considering how real estate values can sometimes drop dramatically, a land-based home purchase isn’t the guaranteed investment that it once was.
This lifestyle clearly favors free spirits, singles, and couples. But adventuresome families with only 1 or 2 children could also pull it off with homeschooling or by limiting travel to periods when school is not in session. Imagine the education and character-building experiences your children would get from this lifestyle.
The second component is income generation. You should be able to make a considerable amount of money by selling your stationary home, most of the “stuff” inside with a garage sale, and any vehicles you’ll no longer need.
If you’ve retired and you receive income from Social Security, a pension, and/or savings income, you should be able to enjoy this lifestyle comfortably.
If you still need to work to support yourself and secure your retirement, then you’ll need to be able to generate income alongside the motorhome lifestyle. Creating income using the Internet is the perfect match. The Internet and wireless technology enable us to have a level of freedom not enjoyed by human beings since the days when we were hunter-gatherers.
There are many possibilities for generating income using the Internet. You can telecommute to your job via the Internet. You can manage your own land-based business via the Internet. Or you can become completely independent and create your own income-generating website(s).
If you have little or no knowledge of how to create an income-generating website or have tried and failed, I strongly recommend you look at SBI. If you have a substantial amount of knowledge about how to build a profitable online business, I recommend DH, which this site uses.
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The goal of personal downsizing can be to cut expenses during difficult economic times. But the ultimate goal is to create more financial security and especially freedom! You do this by fulfilling your housing, transportation, and income needs in smart and uncommon ways.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did not follow the latest fads or traditional thinking when they created the personal computer (Apple). And they were handsomely rewarded with great wealth. You can do the same and build a rich life by not following the heavily traveled path but by creating your own. Your reward will be extraordinary freedom!