Who Is Rightsizing? : Part 5

Rightsizing Your Life: Simplifying Your Surroundings While Keeping What Matters Most
by Ciji Ware

(Page 5 of 5)

Diane Barr and Ken Young were both challenged by several health problems and concerns that they might outlive their nest egg. For years they'd been drawn to the romantic rolling hills and magical lure of California's wine country, but there was no way they could buy into the area's million-dollar lifestyle, given their financial constraints.

After several fits and starts, they ultimately sold their family home in California's Central Valley and scaled down to a two-bedroom, two-bath modular home in the small town of St. Helena in Napa Valley, with a spectacular slice of the vineyards out their back window. They're both continuing to work as long they can, they say, "loving each and every day of our new lives in such a beautiful place."

But wasn't it hard for them to move into a much more modest home? Some might call their neighborhood a "trailer park," but "the word 'trailer park' never passes our lips," she says. "We call where we live now a 'cottage community.' After all, there are no wheels on our new home! It looks darling inside and out. We searched and searched until we found the perfect spot featuring this unique kind of housing." The price? Less than $200,000.

Was the transition for the Barr-Youngs easy? Diane offers a rueful laugh.

"Frankly, while it was happening, it was one of the most traumatic things I've ever gone through; paring down and repurposing many of our things, while getting rid of tons in order to fit into this smaller home. What I discovered, though, is how we live now is a lot less work to keep up, and I just love everything about St. Helena - the beauty of our surroundings, the wonderful restaurants, the culture of wine making. For us the move was well worth it."

On the other hand, the Mathers-Rotella clan four hundred miles to the south in Thousand Oaks, outside Los Angeles, had to scale up in order to rightsize their lives. Laurie Rotella Mathers, in her mid-fifties, wasn't necessarily ready to make a move, but when her mother, Gloria Rotella, eighty-four, fell several times in her own home, Laurie and her brother, Tom, decided to take action.

"I was in a panic when Mom called to tell me she'd slipped in her bedroom and lay there on the floor from two until seven at night," remembers Laurie. "That's when Tom said, 'We've got to take this out of Mom's hands.'"

None of the Mathers-Rotellas wanted their mother to be confined to a nursing home or even an assisted-living facility. After all, they joke, "We're Italian!" Instead the family pooled its financial resources and built an 800-square-foot addition to Laurie and Larry Mathers's house. "Upsizing" was their rightsizing solution.

"We didn't dare call it a 'Granny Unit,' though. It's called 'Mother's Suite.' She's picked out the furniture and the things from her other home she wants to bring with her, and she can shut the door to her own section of the house whenever she likes."

The money from the sale of Gloria Rotella's house went into building the addition at the Matherses', as well as a pool of funds that pays Laurie - who retired as a bookkeeper when her mother moved into her home - to be her mother's companion. Brother Tom agreed this was the wisest use of his mother's money. When Laurie and her husband eventually sell the house years down the road, Tom will then receive his share of the family inheritance.

The point is that rightsizing isn't necessarily about shrinking your living space, although for the generations now in their seventies and eighties that may come to pass. It's more about stepping back at around age fifty and beyond, taking serious account of your future finances, analyzing the particulars of your family situation, your likes, dislikes, and best choices among several nice-to-haves. It's a process by which you learn to evaluate people, places, and possessions according to how they make you feel, choosing to live with the material things that truly have meaning because of their sentiment or utility - and preferably both.

Rightsizing is also a method for drilling below the surface to examine what your life is like now - not a year ago or ten years ago. It also suggests you "play it forward" and think about likely scenarios in the future. The exercise involves both the emotional and the practical aspects of making a change in your living quarters and your way of life.

Take Susan Peck in Cincinnati, Ohio, who was divorced in her forties. She continued to rattle around in her 5,200-square-foot family home while her son and his wife and a growing family were squeezed into their cute but tiny "starter home" nearby. Their rightsizing solution? Trade houses. Mom moved into the starter home, and her son took over the larger house.

As you can probably surmise by now, the process of rightsizing your life will be stimulating, sometimes aggravating, sometimes upsetting and exhausting (especially if you're helping someone else go through the exercise), but with the proper approach, solutions exist to every problem. The best news is that coming to grips with the issues and solving them can be downright exhilarating.

As Diane Barr in Vineyard Valley and hundreds of fellow rightsizers have told me, "Despite the exertion involved, it's ultimately well worth the effort."

So here's my motto for people like us: don't just move to somewhere new ... rightsize your life! This book will show you how.

Copyright © 2007 by Ciji Ware

About the Author

Ciji Ware has been a print and broadcast journalist for twenty-five years, best known as a health and lifestyle commentator for ABC in Los Angeles. She is the author of Sharing Parenthood After Divorce and more recently, five historical novels.