I agree with you 100%. My wife and I are both on the same page that we’re going to downsize when we next move. If I relocate with my work, this could be before the year is out. We plan to try and reduce our square footage by almost 50%! We should experience all the benefits you mentioned as well as saving a boat load of $$$!

If you know you want to sell, it seems like putting money into renovations would be hard to get a ROI. Besides installing a new bathroom, I thought most types of renovations were break even at best?!?

I find our home too large and would like to downsize but can’t convince my husband to do this. The problem is we are not mortgage free yet and would like to do some renovations before we sell. At least my husband (who works in the industry) strongly believes we should do this. We’ve agreed to go one year at a time and reevaluate.

Thanks for commenting! I think you’re 100% right on the money 🙂 I really don’t know what we were thinking when we got such a large house. I guess we were semi-brainwashed at the time or something…

Excellent points that you raise. We love the neighborhood we are in and we have nice neighbors. Sure, adjusting to a smaller home would be difficult at first, but I think we’d be fine with it in the long run.

I really got to thinking more about the whole thing when we used a friends apartment in New York for a couple of days. It was a one bedroom, one bath apartment that was basically three rooms (kitchen/table, bathroom, and bedroom/TV area). It was probably 700 sqft total. We got along just fine. It really made me realize that having extra space is definitely a need vs a want.

It’s basically the same argument as purchasing a new BMW vs a used Corolla. Both will get you where you’re going, but one is much fancier, and pricier 🙂 I think you’re exactly right on the money though, we’d have to find a nice and safe neighborhood with good schools if we were going to make the transition.