financial mistakes and our last cottage

lately i've been getting a lot of emails asking me about downsizing.  apparently quite a few of you are considering it these days. while i don't consider myself and expert on the subject i can share my own personal story and hopefully you can avoid making the same mistakes i did.

before we moved out of our large tract home and moved here to redlands we renovated another small cottage in a nearby city first.

that's it up above.  isn't it cute?

i fell in love with this little cottage at a particularly vulnerable time in my life.  the perfect storm for making big financial mistakes was brewing deep inside me.  i was peri-menopausal, i was experiencing really difficult problems with my youngest son and i felt i would jump out of my skin if i didn't make a big change.

i had been reading about simplifying/downsizing my life for many years and the time just seemed right to me.

so we began looking for a small house and we came upon this one and that was that.

 there were many reasons why this particular cottage was not right for us.  i overlooked all of them, even while knowing deep down inside me that i was making a mistake.  there were obvious drawbacks that i didn't fully think through before we went ahead with the purchase.  i made tremendous mistakes in judgement, mostly b/c i just wanted a change.  downsizing was a dream for both of us but i rushed through the decision making process and made a complete mess of things.

things i didn't fully consider...

there was only one bathroom.  after cleaning 3 bathrooms for so many years, one sounded like heaven!    but the truth is, we really needed two.  i know that's not a big deal for a lot of people but for us it didn't work.

  also there was the issue of how close this house was to the neighbors.

we could hear their tv and radio on all the time.  we could hear their normal conversations and it really bothered me.  again, maybe this wouldn't bother someone else but it really did bother me.

looking back the house was never the problem, i was...

i was an emotional mess and we suffered a lot financially b/c along with me being a mess, the biggest housing crises since the great depression was looming overhead.

in the end, we survived.

the little cottage eventually sold but we lost a lot of money.

and i really do believe that everything happens for a reason in our lives.

we wound up here and this is a better fit for us.

like i said, i learned a lot about myself and i think the whole thing made me a great deal more frugal.  now our only debt we promise ourselves we will ever have will be this one mortgage and we're doing our best to pay this one off as quickly as possible.

so that is that and i'm happy to share these pictures and my story with you.
if you have any questions i'd be happy to answer them in the comments.

xo