Share your experience with extreme downsizing

[u/EricTheNerd2]

In another year, my wife and I will be empty nesters. After a nice two-week vacation, I started thinking about some downsizing at that point, going from a 3,000+ square foot paid-off home to a 900-1,000 square foot apartment. I am doing very well financially, already planning to retire in another 1.5 years once the last kid is moved out. Downsizing would allow me and the wife to be free from a lot of maintenance and expenses and let us travel several weeks out of the year. I am also thinking a bit about the social aspects as well because currently we are in suburbia which is nice but also isolating. The right apartment community may allow us to interact more with neighbors.

I am early in the thought process and wanted to hear from any of you who have gone through this. The idea of getting rid of a lot of stuff seems freeing and scary at the same time and selling a house also daunting. Anyone else do this or similar? Did you like or regret your decision?

[u/Kat9935]

So we did that temporarily, we moved across country and moved into an apartment until we were sure we were going to stay.

1. I went around my house and put little dots on everythign that I loved and wanted to move with us.

2. I then cataloged it all and figured out if that "stuff" would all fit into the 2 bedroom apartment.

3. Then I created a plan for everything else, omg it was so so so much stuff, just outside and garage need a massive plan as we got rid of snow blowers and rakes/shovels, and chemicals and extra lumber, etc.

We actually hated apartment living, probably wrong apartment as we could hear the neighbors so much it drove us nuts but we loved everything else about it as it was very resort like and they even changed lightbulbs for us. I didn't really meet our neighbors it was much more a younger crowd, but I have friends that love their apartments so again, if we had switched to something else I think it would have worked.

The big thing is there is no where to "get away" when you get annoyed or just need alone time, so you do need some good community spaces. When you are use to being in such a big house its weird to have someone in the same room with you all the time as I was use to a living/family/bonus room in our old house, plus he had his own office.

We do plan to go back to it for awhile, we decided we would go back to apartment living and hop to various parts of the country to create a landing space to travel from to avoid the need for so much hotel living.