Knowing when to downsize helps you avoid feeling overwhelmed in your own home. When that time comes, Everything But The House is available to help you manage the downsizing process.

1. Retirement

Retirement is a common reason to downsize. Decreasing yearly expenses, such as heating and electricity, property taxes, and mortgage payments, helps make your retirement savings go further. In addition to reducing expenses, leaving the suburbs in favor of a downtown condo positions you closer to shops and restaurants. In a smaller home, there's less housework and fewer household maintenance tasks to handle.

2. Divorce

During a divorce, it's common practice to sell the house so that both parties are in a position to purchase a smaller property. Initially you may feel like you want to keep the family home, but in many cases, it makes the best financial sense to let it go in favor of a more manageable property with a lower mortgage payment.

3. Too Much Space

Once the kids have all grown up and moved out you could be left in a house of mostly empty rooms. If you have one or more unused rooms, you're paying extra property taxes and utilities without good reason. Downsizing saves money and prevents you from getting overwhelmed by maintaining a house that's too big for your current needs. Additionally, it can get lonely wandering around a large, empty house. Moving to a smaller property in a thriving community has the potential to reduce the feelings of isolation that may occur when family members move away.

4. Relocation

It may be necessary to relocate where property values are higher, leaving you with no option but to downsize. Common reasons for relocation include being closer to your grandchildren or an elderly relative you need to care for, work commitments, the proximity of amenities, or finding a good school for the kids. Downsizing is particularly helpful for older adults who may be moving from two-story into one-story homes to enjoy more mobility in their living spaces. With fewer floors in a home, there's less space to store things, and downsizing is primarily a practical solution. Relocation can also represent a fresh start, and eliminating some lesser-used items can further deepen this feeling of renewal.

5. Making Money

If you want to generate some additional cash, downsizing may be the answer. From reducing your costs of living to selling off your unwanted items, downsizing provides many ways to earn extra money. A library of books, a collection of antique coins, or a piece of rare furniture all have the potential to garner good prices at auction, especially if you use an online service with a large bidding audience such as EBTH.

Handling Your Estate Sale

Making the decision to downsize isn't always easy, and a common concern is what to do with all of the possessions you won't have room for. EBTH makes it easy to arrange the sale of everything from small personal collections to complete estate sales. Experts catalogue and professionally photograph your items, showcasing them in an online auction that runs for five to seven days. The high-quality photographs and large marketplace helps maximize potential profits EBTH handles everything from sorting and organizing to shipping sold items on your behalf, giving you time to focus on downsizing and enjoying the benefits of your efforts.

In fact, the idea of ditching excess and scaling down is increasingly popular. While downsizing certainly doesn't make sense for everyone, if you find yourself in one of the following situations, it might be worth considering.

1. Your Kids Have Moved out

An empty nest is a big transition, but it can also be a good opportunity for you to evaluate your living situation and make necessary changes. Families with children typically need a lot of space for the kids, their stuff, and their friends. Once they're gone, you might find yourself with a house that has empty rooms and items you no longer need. Downsizing also allows you the freedom and flexibility to move wherever you like, even if that's closer to adult children who may now live elsewhere in the country.

Downsizing doesn't just apply to your living arrangements. If the kids are gone but your house is still full of old comic books, sports equipment, unused furniture, and other miscellaneous items, now is the time to get rid of what you don't use. Downsizing and selling the unnecessary items in your home gives you a chance to utilize your space for something else. Whether you want to transform an old bedroom into a dedicated craft space or set up a home office, you first need to clear out the clutter.

2. You’re Considering Retirement

Retirement is the start of a new chapter in your life—one that's hopefully filled with leisure or travel. When you're tied down to a home with a large mortgage or expensive upkeep, you may not be able to spend your retirement the way you wish. Some retirees like the feeling of a smaller space because it better represents their needs.

If you're entering retirement and want to downsize, you're not alone. A 2014 study by Merrill Lynch in conjunction with Age Wave revealed that more than half of retiree respondents who moved after retirement opted for smaller homes. Many retirees also notice that shedding excess items and finding a comfortable, convenient living situation allows them the freedom and flexibility to travel more, and selling your unwanted belongings with EBTH can help fund your next chapter.

3. Your Current Expenses Are Too High

If your mortgage, insurance, and taxes take up too much of your income, it may be time to look for a smaller, more affordable living situation. If you've lived in your current home for many years and have built up a fair amount of equity, selling your home could result in a profit. Using that money to purchase a smaller, less-expensive home reduces your monthly mortgage payments, and it can also help you allocate more funds toward other debt you might carry.

If you need extra cash but are unwilling or unable to sell your home, focus on your possessions instead. Reducing clutter and selling off excess items can also give you extra cash to put toward your bills.

4. You Crave Organization

Getting rid of excess clutter around the house by downsizing is also a great way to stay organized. The more stuff you have, the harder it is to keep on top of it all. Chances are good that there are things in your home you don't want or need.

If you find that you have too many items, you feel anxiety every time you enter a cluttered room, or you don't have enough storage space for everything you own, it might be time to downsize. Getting rid of your excess things can help you feel calmer and could even help you get more sleep.

5. You’re Simply Overwhelmed by the Size of Your Current Home

There's no question that caring for a large home overflowing with possessions is a substantial amount of work. It's easy to get overwhelmed tending to everything, especially if you're also balancing a job or you don't have help with the burden of upkeep. From the weekly cleaning to the larger maintenance projects, lots of space filled with lots of stuff often results in lots of stress.

Caring for your home isn't the only way you might feel overwhelmed. In addition to upkeep, having a large home often means you have a high mortgage payment. If you live in an area with high taxes or elevated overall cost of living, this can add to the stress burden. If you have the means and opportunity, downsizing to a smaller living situation with a relatively low cost of living may help you get rid of the constant anxiety.

Sometimes flights of downsizing fancy pass quickly, but at other times, it’s sensible to make some lasting changes. If you’re thinking now might be the right time to cull your belongings and downsize, consider these motivational factors and see how you feel about formulating a plan.

Liquidate Your Assets

One big motivator for downsizing is the potential to profit from sales. They say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and in this context, “trash” simply means something you don’t need anymore. After all, the items you’re considering parting with are probably of high quality and in good condition. They’re just not right for your lifestyle now, and that’s a perfectly valid reason to downsize.

Whether you have valuable collector’s items or you simply have some furniture pieces that you don’t often use, there are plenty of prospective buyers out there who might love to take your things into their homes. You can use the money you earn to revamp your home or replace several smaller items with one primary statement piece.

Change Your Decor

Once you’ve sold the items and everything is shipped off to their new homes, you’ll have plenty of room to add new furniture and decor or simply rearrange your remaining pieces to look more polished. With less clutter around the house, you’re better able to redistribute your belongings so each and every piece has a chance to shine on its own. This alone can make a tremendous difference in the way your house looks and feels.

If you want to make a big change, such as bringing in an entirely new dining table or repurposing a bookshelf to hold your collection of first-edition mystery novels, downsizing is a simple matter of taking out the old and bringing in the new. Feeling a little disillusioned with some of your home decor is normal, and it’s easy to fix. You simply need to clear out some of the things you don’t love as much anymore to make room for your fresh pieces, whether through estate sales or yard sales.

Pay It Forward

That antique camera in your attic may not be of much use to you, but there might be a collector out there who’s dying to get his or her hands on something exactly like it. Downsizing, especially when it comes to ridding yourself of rare and unusual items in good condition, can be a way of “paying it forward” and letting someone else enjoy your belongings much more than you might be right now.

You might be surprised by how coveted some of the items in your home are. Seemingly innocent stuffed animals, decorative objects, action figures, paintings, clothes, and old furniture can be holy grail collector’s items for serious hobbyists out there. Even if these items don’t net a dramatic financial windfall, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that, not only did you downsize and clear out some clutter to make your own life a bit better, but you’ve also given someone else the opportunity to enjoy something special.

Focus on What You Love

If you have any collections, beloved artwork, or special furniture pieces you’d like to show off, it can be distracting, design-wise, to have groupings of other items gathered around your display area. Downsizing your life allows you to shut off some of the aesthetic interference around these special focal items. This way, the attention always stays on what’s most important to you: those favorite few items that touch your heart directly.

Whether you’re cleaning artwork off your walls so a single favorite painting has its chance to shine or you’re culling unworn and unwanted clothing items from your closet, downsizing introduces some tranquility into your home. If the crisp, clean appeal of minimalism is calling to you, downsizing may be the right answer.

Simplify Your Life

Speaking of crisp, clean minimalism, downsizing ultimately amounts to simplifying in ways that impact your daily life. For example, if you have fewer trinkets on your shelves, you’ll have less to dust. Having fewer pieces of furniture means you’ve given yourself more space to spread out and enjoy a room. Living with fewer distractions in general allows you to stay focused on one thing at a time, introducing a more tranquil approach to small tasks like grabbing a book from a shelf or picking out what dress to wear to a wedding.

As an added bonus, uncluttered home decor is very on-trend at the moment. Even if maximalism is your standard approach, downsizing gives you more power over your presentation. Getting rid of just a small handful of things — even if it’s just a few purses you don’t use anymore or some jewelry from a time in the past you’d rather forget — can give you a sense of empowerment and help you shed some emotional weight from your life.

Let me be the first to say that getting rid of things can be extremely satisfying. By and large there is a “gotta collect ‘em all” mentality when it comes to ownership. Americans especially are a part of a uniquely aggressive consumer culture that constantly encourages us to buy, buy, buy! You see it in news segments covering Black Friday sales shenanigans and coverage of the holiday shopping season where market analysts are never entirely satisfied with the numbers compared to previous years. Sometimes being marketed to as an American feels like part of our civic duty. Right up there with jury duty and avoiding parking tickets is the onerous task of wading through a daily sea of sale offers. While sorting your recycling don’t forget to include the sales fliers tucked under your windshield wipers, printed at the end of your receipts and left in your mailbox.

If your closet doors don’t shut on the first try, or the idea of an empty horizontal surface in your home is a foreign concept, it may be time to consider downsizing. “Oh no,” you tell yourself “not me. I’m not an empty-nester. I can still see my floor. I’m not in a place where I need to downsize.” Do not be fooled. Downsizing is not always about need, oftentimes it’s about the desire to do more by owning less.

Maybe you’ve decided to move in with your significant other, and you don’t have the space to keep both comfy napping couches. Maybe you’ve landed a new job that requires a cross-country move. Maybe you’d just like to live a simpler life with fewer possessions because you’re ready for a fresh start. Whatever the reason, downsizing is appropriate at any age. The following are a handful of helpful tips to help ease you into the glory of downsizing:

1. Don’t Say “Maybe”

One of the hardest things about downsizing can be decision fatigue. As it turns out, our brains have a set number of choices they’d like to make in a day and once we start to deplete our reserve of decisions, we begin to feel aggravated and overwhelmed. There’s no worse culprit for driving up decision fatigue than saying “maybe”. Saying maybe to keeping an item seems like a good idea, because it gives you time to sort out your feelings while you move onto the next yes or no decision in front of you. But really all you’re doing is giving yourself more choices to make half an hour later when you’re spent and just want to take a break. Don’t give in to the temptation of maybe, it’s yes or no.

2. Be Honest

We all have items that have been thrust upon us as gifts (it’s the thought that counts!). It’s natural to feel a twinge of guilt when you decide to part with an unwanted gift, but don’t let an impulse towards being overly polite stop you from getting rid of unwanted possessions. If it ugly, ill-suited or useless you’re not doing yourself any favors by keeping it.

3. If It Doesn’t Fit It Doesn’t Stay

This piece of advice applies across the board, from clothing and furniture to your current lifestyle. When you’re getting ready in the morning and grab blindly from your closet to put on something that will fit without issue, your life is less stressful. When you’re running out the door and don’t trip over the stray ottoman that gets shuffled around because there’s no room for it anywhere, your life is less stressful. When you sell the skis that have spent five years on your wall as a perpetual reminder of your failure to actually try skiing, your life is less stressful. Sometimes saying no to owning things can feel even better than saying yes to buying them in the first place.

4. Spread the Love

Sentimentality for our belongings isn’t uncommon or unjustified. We pack memories away with our belongings, and pulling things back out is often accompanied by a rush of nostalgia. If you balk at the idea of your cherished items being taken home by strangers, a great solution is to start donating to friends and family first. There’s a comfort in knowing your things will be utilized and appreciated by someone you love. A word of caution: do not expect your loved ones to love your belongings the same way you did. If it pains you to see your concert t-shirts repurposed into crop tops or your oak table painted white to match someone else’s decor,  learn to look look away, donate to organizations like Salvation Army or Goodwill or make a little extra money by selling your belongings with Everything But The House.

5. Patience is a Virtue

Downsizing isn’t so much a project as a process. If you spend twenty minutes getting rid of all the lidless plastic containers in your kitchen, that’s downsizing. If you spend an afternoon cleaning out your closet, that’s downsizing. If you sell two-thirds of everything you own and move into a tiny-house, that’s also downsizing. However you go about it, take your time. Working slowly reduces the chances of  getting rid of something you might want later on and can make the process more enjoyable.

Downsizing can be a fulfilling and enlightening process when we come to it on our own terms. Whether it’s to stop yourself from becoming a packrat in the early stages or just because getting rid of things feels good, downsizing is appropriate for any age. Your ex-boyfriend’s moldy sweater, your kid’s dusty video game system, your globe that’s missing Madagascar - say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

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Where do you want to move? If you (and your spouse) are still in good health, you might look at a smaller house – or even better, a condo so that you can leave the mowing, raking and shoveling jobs to someone else. Talk to a realtor about the options in your area.  

What’s most important? Think about what you most want or need in a house or condo. Is it an open kitchen, a 3rd bedroom or a maybe a deck? You are downsizing, though, so don’t fall into the trap of going with something the same size as what you’ve got. You can do this!

How do you get started? Well, you can start to thin things out even while you’re deciding where to move. Then once you know where you’re going, you can get down to the real nitty-gritty.  

Take a look around your current house. What pieces of furniture can’t you live without? Check the dimensions and layout of the new place. What will fit? Make a list and tag those items when you get close to the move date so the movers will know what goes.  

Do a little at a time. Downsizing can be overwhelming, so don’t try to do it all at once. Set aside a couple hours a day to sort, toss, donate and pack. If you’re on a roll and feeling energetic, go ahead and continue but don’t expect too much of yourself all at once. Cut yourself some slack — if you get tired or feel overwhelmed it’s okay to quit for the day.

Give back to your kids. If you have adult children who may have left a box or ten in your basement or their old bedroom, invite them over to take a look around. Chances are, some of those valuable items that they couldn’t part with 15 years ago, won’t seem as important today — especially if they have to find a place to store them themselves! Let the kids sort and toss or take entire boxes with them. It will help you to pare down and may provide some good laughs as you enjoy looking through boxes together. 

And then give them some more. Besides getting rid of their stuff, this is also a good time to let them pick out a few of your things to take home. Are there things they’ve always loved or wanted? Letting them take some items now will eliminate any fighting over the goodies when you’re gone — and lets them choose something that’s meaningful to them. Parents sometimes make the mistake of assuming based on value. If your daughter has fond memories of burgers piled high on a melamine platter, she might rather have that platter than granny’s Waterford candy dish. Let them choose some things you no longer use or have room for. 

Sorting it out. Most experts suggest having three piles — one each for things to toss, things to save, and “maybes.” Beware the maybe pile, however. It’s tempting to keep everything once you go back for that second look. Be ruthless!

What do you do with what’s left? Go through the “toss” pile and determine which ones might be good enough to sell or take to a consignment shop, what you might want to give to charity and what just plain garbage is. Craigslist, eBay, an estate sale or a garage sale might even net you some cash for those unwanted treasures.

Enjoy a job well done. We’re not going to lie — downsizing, and all the work that goes with it, isn’t a lot fun. But once you’ve sorted, organized, packed, labeled and tossed, give yourself a much-deserved pat on the back. Then get ready to start a new chapter of your life in your brand new home — feeling a whole lot lighter.