LOL.Originally Posted by kcowan
LOL.
A financial advisor/so called retirement specialist at our bank in Calgary told us that her experience in Calgary is that when boomers retire and change houses they actually move up pricewise, ie no equity recapture as it were. We were surprised at this. We sold our house last summer. It was too big for us and we had no emotional attachment to it. At the time we did not see anything that appealed to us so everything went into storage and we have been travelling since the end of August.
What is interesting is that during the intervening six months or so, we find that there is a change in the type of home that we may be looking for and rental is a real option. Not sure if this is attributable to travel, not having to pay the usual bills associated with maintaining a large home, or just getting used to living in smaller quarters. We downsized our belongings as well and looking back we feel that it was a great thing to do. Even though, at first, it was difficult to decide what we kept and what we discarded. Now, we are really glad that we did not sell and buy at the same time. It has given us time to consider our options, and our preferences.
My parents (in Calgary, not Boomers) bought a new, slightly smaller, more expensive house...and then fixed up their PR to sell. Once they'd completed the fixes on their "old" house they decided to keep it and stay put; and sold the other house at a gain.
We downsized so that we could home swap. It was very worthwhile to get rid of anything that we had not used for a year or more. It relieves a load. Makes us feel nimble.
(I have also gotten rid of all the stuff from 2 family homes. Why they leave it all is amazing to me. I found my mother's wedding dress... and FILs golf clubs. He had not golfed in more than 20 years.)
Had a similar mid career experience in downsizing when I got a job in Switzerland. Fat contract but came with not much of a moving allowance. It meant we packed what mattered into four suitcases and a hockey bag. We had a 9 mth old at the time and friends and family thought we were mad.
Over the next four years we never bought anything we couldn't walk away from. My wife furnished a four bedroom flat for under 1000 francs -- the transient expat pop fuels an active used IKEA market. When we decided to return to Canada we just gave everything away.
As kcowan says, it was amazingly freeing. We didn't worry about stuff (of course, we found other things to worry about). Once back in canada the accumulation resumed, unfortunately. But I'm looking forward to finding another forced simplification of my life. great way to live.
When my late wife and I sold our house, and most of our 'stuff', on SSI to go fulltime RVing, we found it most cathartic.............we stored (what we considered at the time) our 'treasures', but later, when unpacking back in Ontario, I wondered why we had kept a lot of those.
One of the biggest money making businesses is renting off-site storage to people who cannot get rid of stuff. They rent for years then finally the stuff gets sold off for pennies.
i would have a terrible, terrible time getting rid of any ancestor's wedding dress (what about your daughters or granddaughters ? they'd have loved it.)
i hear my grandmother's wedding dress is still floating around somewhere with the cuz. I've never even seen it, but i'm glad it survived.
I sold it to a nice lady who had plans to reuse it. My sons did not come to the sale even though it was in their town. They offered to help but I declined. The dress was in the bottom of the cedar chest. I suppose if I had known, I could have offered it to the 2 grand daughters. But I was intent on decluttering.
The only thing I saved was the family photos. They have all been scanned now.
It took us nine months to downsize our belongings, and those of others who viewed our basement as a storage area.
Kijiji and Women in Need Agency were our best friends. I am absolutely certain that we will discard things that are in currently in storage when we return. Our outlook has changed very much and we are at the opposite end of the accumulator stage. We came to realize that we just had too much stuff, too many clothes, and too much trash and trinkets.
It is no wonder that people retire with consumer debt. They just buy too much junk and most of it is it the form of depreciable assets that have little or no monetary value the day after they are brought home.
We gave our niece one of those fancy Keureg coffee makers for her wedding. That is what she wanted. So now she pays something like 80 cents for a cup of weak coffee and has created a mountain of plastic garbage. What a waste of money and polluter of our environment. We do something similar, only it is our trusty Melita cone filter that we have had for years.. We get to select the coffee that we want, grind the beans fresh and it costs much, much less per cup with no plastic to dispose of. I guess that is one reason why we were able to retire early.
Last edited by fraser; 2013-01-28 at 11:19 AM.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote