But wait... there's less!

"Less is More" is one of the catch-cries of downsizing. Often the fewer things we have the more we value them. So it's a great title for a book that's basically a manual for how to de-clutter your home. The introductory chapter of Less is More: How to De-clutter Your Life gives some great insights into why we find it so hard to reduce our stuff. Here are 5 of them - the last one is one of the biggest for me. 1. The cost of holding on. We were raised by our parents and grandparents and in their day items were expensive and space was cheap. It made sense in those days to hold onto stuff just in case you ever needed it. But today housing is expensive and items are cheap. It's hard to change a habit, but now we save much more by downsizing. 2. Keeping it in the family. For some reason we prefer to give things to those close to us. Again this was viable in the days of big families and lots of children to receive hand-me-downs. But these days we have smaller fa...

One of the tangible benefits of downsizing is the money from selling the things you no longer want/need. We've just hit $1,000 - yippee! I made a note of each item we sold. Only 4 of them were over $30. So it's not like we had big valuable items. It's just lots of medium and small things. Some for as little as $1. We weren't using them, so to us they were just taking up space. But to someone else they were valuable items. We did a garage sale early on. It took up about a day, including preparation, and we made $24. It's a nice way to meet a few neighbours, but we didn't do much downsizing. That's when we went online. We have a bunch of stuff listed on gumtree. It's like an ongoing garage sale but much less work. People can browse at any time of the day or night. All we do is chat online if they're interested - and collect the cash when they come by. (Which has also saved a few trips to the ATM). It's a quadruple win. Less clutter. Cash ...