You can rid your life of clutter!
Do your material possessions enhance your lifestyle, or, drain your resources?
You can design a clutter-free lifestyle — based on quality, rather than quantity!
One of the differences between your home, and the items that you store inside your home, is that the home itself can appreciate in value, while the possessions inside the home will generally depreciate. This is in an important distinction.
The Hidden Dangers of Owning Too Much Stuff
Everything that we own, requires time, energy, and resources to maintain.
Things like real estate, human relationships, education, and exercise are a much wiser investment. These are things that tend to appreciate in value.
What we choose to possess in life weaves itself into the very fabric of our lifestyle. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with having “things” in this world.
“there is an energetic cost to excess.”
I am noticing that more people are taking a design inventory of their lives. They’re reassessing all they posses, and at least giving thought to the relief of a “lighter load” that owning less things might afford. They want a new design for their lives.
Lifestyle Design: Downsizing on Clutter
Some are yearning for the return of a time when there were less possessions to keep up with, and less mental bandwidth required to try to remember all the items that they own! Downsizing, we call it in the real estate business.
I’ve had many clients (my own family included) who have discussed with me their desire to move to a smaller, more easily manageable and size-appropriate space for their needs. Not all of them have wanted to do so to lessen their financial responsibilities. They also realize the possibility that there is an energetic cost to excess.
This is probably one of the reasons that my partner and I specialize in helping others find lifestyle properties. The whole definition of a “lifestyle property,” as I experience it, is that it adds a dimension of value to a home because it improves the owner’s quality of life, not diminishes it.
You could live in a studio apartment with a bike on your wall in a pedestrian-friendly historic downtown district. Or you could live in a large beachfront estate in Malibu with room for all of your grandkids to visit. These are obviously very different sizes and costs. Nevertheless, both of these are lifestyle properties because they add value. You can design your life to be about experiences, rather than materials. That’s what lifestyle properties emphasize.
If you love the Pacific Ocean, then living in a home directly on the beach is going to give you a daily joy that offsets the increased responsibility. If you hate to drive, then the pedestrian-friendly historic downtown is going to bring you bliss.
What’s been your experience in recent years? Have you or your friends and family considered how your possessions impact your lifestyle? Have you made, or are you considering making, changes to the design of your life that would alter how many belongings you possess?
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Thank you Dane. We are in the midst of downsizing our space and de-cluttering. Then, we plan on really assessing what we want our home to be. It is our sanctuary, entertaining space and place for our grandkids to come and play. It’s quite large though and we want to make sure we make good use of our space AND our time.
Kudos for helping to shed some light on this subject.
This post rings so true to me. we live in a very materialistic culture, so much so that obtaining possessions seems, for many, to be more enjoyable than using them. It can be very liberating to reduce one’s possessions down to to those which one has time to use, enjoy, and appreciate.