Why is my family downsizing?

The Pittsburgh Public Schools decided to do some downsizing.  This included shutting down my husband's Charter school, which means he's been laid off.  It's okay, who needs a job anyway?  Seriously though.  I have a great job.  So did he.  And out great jobs paid for the following:  a $1,300 a month mortgage, a $1,000 a month day care bill (for one child), over $1,200 a month in combined student loans, groceries, utilities, entertainment, and the list goes on.

This made us seriously rethink our lifestyles.  Our lifestyle if very...American.  We have lots of stuff.  He held on to jet-skis for the majority of our nearly 8 year marriage and never used them.  I held on to novelty Marilyn Monroe collectibles with no intentions of ever displaying them in any meaningful way.  The list can go on and on.  Eventually, he donated the jet skis to friends who were kind enough to let us vacation at their lake house where they actually got use.  My collectibles were sold on ebay faster than you can spell "Marilyn Monroe."  

As I started researching the internet about different philosophies on downsizing and minimalism, I realized that we are among the average American who shop for no good reason and spend our lives paying for things we rarely use, or worse, don't remember we own.  We can't afford vacations, life on a strict budget and work to maintain this lifestyle that doesn't make sense to us.

So, we decided to take my husband's layoff as an opportunity to explore what really matters in life.  The first thing is cutting our $1,300 mortgage in half by selling our house and eliminating our $1,000 daycare bill now that we have an unemployed parent.  As we continue to work toward selling our house, my plan is to go through all of our belongings and really purge.

Will we be minimalists?  Probably  not.  But hopefully we'll get out of the American wheel of debt and materialism.