Is 38 Too Young To Downsize?

We all know the routine of life, right? When you first get out on your own, you start in the tiniest apartment you can find. Then, you might work your way up to a condo while building life, then to a house with the white picket fence and swing set out back. As more kids come along, you may even need a bigger home.

 

But, at some point, all that room you needed for raising kids and stuff isn’t so necessary. The kids are out on their own (hopefully) and couples start seeing a home as a lot of work. Hence, downsizing occurs.

 

I’m 38. And we don’t do things very traditionally around here. Like, I got married at 32 and, just about the time my dudes my age started having kids, I was dropping my stepson off at college and my stepdaughter was having her first baby. That’s how I got to be a grandfather at 36.

 

And, now? I’m trying to downsize. My business is exploding and, in all reality, we need more room, not less, just to run the Marcus machine. Instead, I want to downsize. Why?

 

Because we, like so many Americans, have too much crap. Our garage is stuffed with, well, we don’t even know what it’s been so long since it’s been used. My closet overfloweth with stuff that doesn’t fit and I don’t wear. I have three gigantic boxes of financial statements that are a minimum of 10 years old sitting next to my desk. All of it? Useless.

 

While we’re not considering moving to a smaller home, what we need is more white space. To get rid of stuff that is literally and figuratively keeping our lives at a certain level, just navigating around stuff that we don’t want nor need.

 

Now, if you watch Horders, you may think I’m describing a home like that. Negative. We don’t have dead cats and rotten food and broken junk laying around. We regularly entertain and have a gorgeous home. But, I want to downsize our stuff. So, I’m going through closets, drawers, the garage, etc. and, slowly but surely, creating white space.

 

My mission: every day, find three things to remove from our home. So far in 2014, I threw out a pair of over the ear headphones I got with (get this) a shirt at Burlington. About half a dozen chocolate cordials that have been rolling around my desk drawer for the last four years. Two pairs of boxers that don’t fit well and I never choose to wear. A stack of business cards advertising speaking services from the mid 2000s. A bag of four chair rollers that, sadly, I don’t even know what chair they go with. I’m not doing a full of Horders solution where we just throw out everything and start anew. We don’t even need that. But, I do, for my mental health, need to downsize “stuff.”

 

Life isn’t about stuff. It’s about experiences. If experiences are hampered due to the amount of stuff you have, it may be time to reevaluate.