Living the Simple Life

‘Downsizing’ as a lifestyle concept has grown out of the increasing pressure placed upon people by their hectic, fast paced, consumer driven lives.  Living the simple life is now not just an ideal it is an actively pursued dream for so many people who have grown dissatisfied, disappointed and ill by their lives in the fast lane.

These people realise that the pursuit of happiness is futile because to believe in the pursuit is to believe that you cannot be happy with what you have right here and right now - and that is completely untrue!  While it’s important to have goals and targets in life it is a waste of your life not to find immediate peace and satisfaction, and this article is all about how to successfully downsize.

Living the simple life and downsizing will mean very different things to many different people.  Where you start from and your ultimate end goal will determine what the concepts mean for you.  If you have a 110% mortgage and both you and your husband work all the hours God sends to ‘just’ afford your day to day living costs, your ideal life could be one where you live in a low cost country and both you and your husband work part time and have more time to spend with your children. 

If on the other hand you have a very successful but demanding business, the house bought and paid for and the children already having flown the nest, your concept of a simple life may be stepping back from hands on management and spending more time on your yacht! 

The very first step towards successfully downsizing is sitting down with your partner and together making a list of all your dreams for a simple life.  After all, if you don’t ultimately know where you’re going in life how on earth do you expect to get there!  This list should be unrestricted by thoughts of money, time or practicality and should be your ideal downsized or simplified life.  This is the life that you need to actively think about every day and see in your mind in vivid colour.  The more you focus on the finer details of your perfect life through visualisation the quicker this ‘dream’ will become your reality.  Make sure both you and your partner are in agreement about the fundamentals of your new life and that you both actively think about this every day.

You now need to begin putting the practical steps in place to achieve your ideal - I don’t know how visualisation works but it does work and if you keep focusing on what you want you will find the practical aspects of achieving your simple life easier!  Work out where in the world you want to live, examine property prices in your ideal location and find out what you can afford.  Think about the money you have in the bank and how much you will need to live on.  Be realistic about all the financial areas of your new life - downsizing is of course all about living on less - but you will still need money to afford to live!  Will this money come from savings, the sale of your house, a part time job, a new business?  Be hard on yourself and very realistic when it comes to every financial aspect of your new life because it is always, always money that lets people down.  And I don’t mean it’s a case of not having enough, it can be a case of imagining you will not encounter high costs of living in your ideal country and then moving there and discovering your assumptions were wrong and the cost of living is higher than anticipated and will require a readjustment of your new life plan.

Take the planning of your new life seriously and cover every angle, the more effort you put into the planning and visualisation the quicker and easier the new life will come and the sooner you will be living the simple life of your dreams.