The Many Options of Downsizing

   What does downsizing actually mean?  For many it is just a matter of simplifying the existing living situation.  But others have taken it to the extreme, in my opinion.  A few years ago I read a book by Tammy Strobel.  The book documents her journey from living in a large apartment, to a smaller apartment, and then into a home built on a trailer.  Smaller than many people's storage shed.

   I don't want to go that far.  Here are the options I see:
1)  Sell or give away everything, nothing remains except the clothes we want to wear.
2)  Keep some things that mean something to one of us.  (Still no home.)
3)  Make the effort to identify items we will need when we are in one home.
4)  Sell the big ticket items and put everything else in storage.
5)  Sell what we can and keep what we don't give away, but do buy a place to live and setup a home.

Option 1:  This option gives us the freedom to travel and not have to worry about a house being left empty and if the money from the sale is invested wisely we can use the interest earnings to cover our rentals.  However, it means we need to be lean enough to bring all we keep in one car.

Option 2:  This is more practical, but requires us to find some storage.  We would be paying storage unit fees, but that would be less than maintaining a home.  We could travel as we like, and use our travels to find our eventual new home location.

Option 3:  This would probably take a bit longer as we would need to put more thought into what we keep and get rid of.  However, it would make it less expensive to setup home, when we eventually get to that point.  It would also necessitate a larger storage unit.

Option 4:  Yet a larger storage unit and it puts off deciding whether to keep something or not.  Not an option I like, because we would end up paying to store things we probably don't need or want.

Option 5:  This gives a place to move everything to, but we need to know where we want to live.  Kelly has only visited New Mexico for a week and half that time she was sick.  So, she doesn't know if she could live there or not.  We are also both interested in looking at Northern CA or Oregon.  Why buy a place before we know where we want to be.

   The kicker with any of these options is, what do we do with the pets while we travel?  If we are driving we can bring them with, but if it is a flight to Europe or Latin America, I would only bring the pets if we knew we were going for three months or longer.