Three reasons why you might want to downscale
Spend less time worrying about your home and more time living.
Bigger is not always better. The costs of maintaining a large property can be astronomical and becomes more of a burden year on year. Once the children have moved out of the big family home and you are near retirement age, your lifestyle demands and needs change.
Downscaling can be a very liberating process but one that should nevertheless be approached with care, consideration and a clear plan according to Leapfrog on the Sunshine Coast.
Here are three factors to consider:
Location and lifestyle
People tend to choose a smaller property in an area they really desire, such as a beachside property, rather than a larger place in a suburb that doesn’t suit their lifestyle as well. Pre-pandemic, location often outweighed lifestyle, as people wanted to live close to work to avoid sitting in traffic. Now that working from home has become a reality for many or if you are already retired, you can look at locations that are more desirable for your lifestyle, even if that means a smaller home.
The lock-up-and-go appeal
The responsibility of managing and maintaining a large property is often one of the main reasons for wanting to downscale. Fixing the gate, replacing the pool pump or pulling out weeds in a large garden are all time-consuming and money-gobbling realities that people often don’t want to deal with anymore. This, along with the growing global sentiment around the more meaningful use of our time and resources, makes the lock-up-and-go lifestyle so appealing.
The possessions problem
We’ve all heard organisational guru, Marie Kondo, preach the importance of only having possessions that “spark joy”…and she’s got a point! Going smaller may seem like an impossible task, purely because of all the stuff in your home. Having less space for your things in the new, smaller place, means you need to consciously get rid of things you no longer need or use. Take time to decide what brings you joy – if it does, it stays. if it doesn’t, it goes. You’ll be surprised how liberating this process can be.
