Practical Tips on Radical 
Downsizing and Thinking Small

Donna Philippe-Johnson

   We receive many letters each week from people asking for specific information and advice on how they can begin to downsize and move towards a simple, debt free lifestyle. Since we’ve answered these similar questions over and over during the past few years, we thought it would be helpful to include them in one list and post them on our website. As you will see, our approach is very radical – Think small, reduce everything, want little, minimize spending, get out of debt and work less!

These tips are only examples and suggestions of the many things one can do to downsize and achieve independent freedom and a peaceful lifestyle.  We encourage everyone to use these as inspirational stepping-stones to launch your own personal strategy for something higher and better.  We realize that our path to freedom is unique for us and will not be workable for everyone.  Begin with small steps that feel right for you and the wisdom of simplicity will be your guide. 

• Get rid of all excess clutter and unnecessary possessions.  Figure up all the square footage in your home being used for storage of your stuff and then realize that you are paying a monthly premium in utilities, rent and mortgage payments just to keep a roof over it all.  It’s also draining the life-force out of you.  Black Elk said, “Each thing owned takes a measure of spirit from the owner and when you give it away, a full measure of spirit and power is returned to the giver’s body.” 

Once you’ve cleared out all the excess clutter in your outer life, you will make some space in your mind where you can see things clearly and make better decisions.  This will also prepare you for living in a smaller house, with only the essential items necessary to be functional and comfortable.     

• Buy a small piece of land if at all possible or an older, modest house.  Unless you are independently wealthy, this is ultimately the only way to eventually become rent and debt-free and attain a paid-for home. When you can achieve this, you will have time to work on a garden, improve your health and cut back the hours you work earning money to survive.  As an added bonus, you will have quality time for relationships, creativity, art, hobbies, fun and volunteer work in your local community.
  

• Think Creatively.  For example, if you can’t yet afford to buy your own land, try to find someone who would be willing to let you “camp” on their land in exchange for some caretaking and work-exchange on their property.  There are non-resident property owners who have trouble with hunters, trespassers, people dumping trash, etc. on their land.  They might be willing to allow you to set up a small, temporary homestead in exchange for caretaking their property.  The idea is to think creatively and believe that you have options.  If you are willing to make sacrifices, you can think outside of the box.
  
  
• Downsize to the smallest house you can possibly imagine living in. Value only the basic essentials you need to be comfortable. Minimize the number of rooms and make the area open and spacious enough to provide good airflow. (Whenever you strike it rich, you can add on to your house later on.) If you have kids, instead of having separate bedrooms for each of them, simply build a cabin with a large loft for sleeping. Remember, they grow up fast and end up leaving anyway, so why take care of a large house that you won’t need later?
  

• Change your eating habits to a biogenic, vegetarian diet. From our experience and research, we feel that a 90% vegetarian biogenic diet is healthier than many of the other choices. We buy mostly organic food and our food bill is less than $200.00 a month for two people.

Biogenic nutrition has a rippling effect which leads to superior health, reduced food and medical expenses, the ability to live in a smaller shelter, reduced fuel and water consumption, reduced living expenses, less hours spent earning income, increased leisure time and a greater sense of freedom and contentment. (For complete information about biogenic nutrition, see Chapter 14 in our free on-line book, The Subtle Way & Its’ Power.) 

• Buy all of your staple foods in bulk.  Learn to cook simple meals and go back to whole grains and legumes that can be purchased in bulk. For example, we buy 50 lb. bags of wheat for our homemade sourdough bread and 25 lb. bags of whole corn, which we grind fresh as needed.  Other staples can be purchased in bulk as well, such as honey, beans, rice, oats, spices, salt, etc.
  

• Take responsibility for your own health with natural healing, exercise, diet, cosmotherapy, and herbs.  It is wise to be cautious about going to medical doctors when you are sick because they know nothing about natural healing.  Medical doctors are only good at one thing, which is patch-up trauma repair and first aid. They are great when it comes to sewing you up from a bullet wound or car crash or reattaching your limbs. All they know is what they’ve been taught at medical school, which is patch-up, slash, burn, drug and remove and replace body parts! They are taught and trained to treat symptoms of disease by handing out prescriptions or cutting and burning parts of your body. Furthermore, if you ask a doctor about using natural methods, diet, herbs, etc, they will probably suggest you don’t mess around with such “nonsense.” You have to educate yourself. (See Chapter 15 on Natural Healing in our free on-line book, The Subtle Way and Its Power.
  

• Drop all insurance, except what you are forced to pay such as mortgage and car insurance. We live in a 500 sq. ft. cabin, which only cost $10,000 to build, so we don’t need to insure it. If it burns or blows down we’ll build another one, maybe even smaller next time. Also, since we eat a biogenic diet and get plenty of exercise due to our daily activities, we seldom get sick anymore, so we feel that having health insurance is unnecessary. It comes down to this: either we spend our money on supporting a healthy lifestyle and buying organic food or we’ll spend it on health care and medical treatment.
  

• Start a savings account for medical first-aid treatment. Start saving and add to this account each month. Pay yourself rather than an insurance company. If your bill for the emergency first aid treatment is more than what you have saved, you can always make arrangements for a monthly payment plan according to your income. If you eventually end up with a large sum of money in this account, purchase a Certificate of Deposit and let it earn some interest until you need it.

• Shop at thrift stores for many of the items that you need.  Buy most of your clothing and household items at garage sales and thrift stores.

• Put a timer on your electric hot water heater.  Set it to turn on only two hours a day.  It’s inefficient and wasteful to keep water hot all day, especially when you’re away from home. If you really need extra hot water, you can manually turn it on and in 30 minutes another tank of hot water is ready to be used. Just doing this one thing can save many dollars over the course of a year.

• Use wood heat for the whole house.  Because our house is only 500 sq. ft., one small wood heater provides all the warmth we need.  We get our wood free from downed trees around our area.  Sometimes during very cold weather we use a propane heater in the bathroom. An outdoor five-gallon tank fuels the heater. We just fire it up for about 15 minutes when taking a shower. We use less than 10 gallons of propane over the course of the entire winter.

• Reduce your use of fuel for cooking. Because of our 75% raw, living foods diet, we don’t use much fuel for cooking.  We use an electric hot plate in the house for heating water for tea and have a propane gas stove in our bakery cabin for stir-frying vegetables and baking. Gas is efficient, clean-burning and you can turn the main supply off when not in use instead of wasting fuel just to keep the pilot light burning.

• Earn money doing odd jobs.  After your place is built and paid for you have the option of quitting your career and becoming independent. Then you can pursue creative activities that are meaningful to you. There are so many opportunities if you pay attention. Many people tell us it is hard for them to locate someone to hire for small jobs because everyone is busy working full time. Because of flexibility, the independent homesteader has many opportunities to earn extra cash. For example, we work a couple of hours each week doing the bookkeeping for a small business and occasionally we cook breakfast at a local Bed and Breakfast. We do many other kinds of odd jobs, such as selling sourdough bread, potted plants and rustic furniture.  Kevin sings and plays acoustic guitar for tips. We can live on a very small income because of our radical downsizing.

• Learn to live on a very small income. First of all this means getting clear about your relationship with money and recognizing all the poor spending habits that are eroding away your wealth. You must learn to live with less and stop wasting money. Don’t use credit cards, don’t eat out every day, (pack a lunch instead), and stop buying things just to relieve boredom. Track your income and expenses in a notebook and work on getting out of debt. We discuss our own particular method in our book, The Subtle Way & Its’ Power. (See Chapter 12).

Equally important is staying away from get-rich schemes, especially multi-level marketing or any other business venture that requires a large investment to get it going.  Don’t get into debt borrowing money for a business with the hopes that you’ll make it rich. It seldom works. It is far more cost effective to sell your labor, provide some type of service, work odd jobs or do some form of creative artwork.  Avoid anything that requires overhead capital and high maintenance.

Realize that starting a business is risky and takes a lot of money.  A huge percentage of new businesses either fail in the first year or enslave the owners with long hours of endless work, headaches and bills. There are always too many regulations, licenses, product fees, taxes, insurances - the list of requirements and restrictions issued by local governments is not conducive to success.  It is as if they are designed to cause the small business owner to fail. The old saying is true; “it takes money to make money”. So if you want to be free, don’t try to own a business.

The same is true of trying to raise animals to earn a living. The costs involved are outrageous. There are so many expenses that have to be considered such as feed and veterinary bills, vaccinations, food supplements, shelter costs, fences, worming medication and transportation costs. There is nothing simple or cheap about raising animals for profit.  So we don’t raise them and we don’t eat them.

The point is, if you set up a tiny simple lifestyle, you won’t need very much money to maintain it.  Don’t expand!  The more you expand, the more money you will need. THINK SMALL!!

• Use only a small under-the-counter refrigerator or small freezer. This will definitely help you save on electricity.  If you change to a biogenic diet, you will be eating only fresh, raw fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, dried fruit, biogenic greens and a small amount of cooked food, such as rice, beans, potatoes, soups, etc.  Therefore, you won’t need a large refrigerator if you are preparing all of your food from “scratch”. You’ll save time and money because you won’t need to purchase canned, boxed, processed, or frozen foods. Refrigerated foods can be kept to a minimum.

• Minimize your use of electricity. If you are on a low income, instead of thinking about how you could ever afford thousands of dollars in solar panels and batteries so you can get “off the grid”, just minimize your use of electricity right now. Do all the practical things wherever you are: live in a small house, put a timer on your electric hot water heater, change all the incandescent bulbs to low watt fluorescents, turn lights off when you leave the room, reduce the amount of phantom load appliances in your home (all those convenient electronic devices that rely on remote controls to operate. These devices constantly consume energy 24 hours a day!).

Get rid of your electric clothes dryer and use the sun, use a crock-pot to slow cook your beans, soup, potatoes, corn meal mush, etc., build an outdoor clay oven for baking bread and other foods, install ceiling fans, open the windows and minimize the use of air conditioning (air condition only one room in your house).  Instead of getting rid of the electric bill, just figure out how to minimize it. Our electric bill is always less than $45.00 per month. $540 per year is far better than trying to come up with the initial cost of setting up solar energy.

• Set up a rainwater catchment system to supplement your water supply. Rainwater is also great for the garden and when the power goes out. Install an underground water cistern with a manual hand pump. (See Chapter 13 in our book, The Subtle Way & Its’ Power for a picture of our cistern.)

• Compost your humanure, kitchen scraps, weeds, etc. and you won’t have to buy any fertilizers if you have a garden.  Also, you won’t have any sewage or toxic black water on your property. (Details for setting up a humanure composting system is available in Chapter 16 of our on-line book, The Subtle Way & Its’ Power).

• Get rid of cell phone, Internet and cable T.V. bills if at all possible.  Most Americans are spending more time and money meeting the needs of technology, instead of their own basic needs.  This leads to a lack of exercise, poor health and boredom. Reducing the use of these technological devices will be a great monthly savings.  We budget our long distance calls with pre-paid phone cards and use the Internet at the library. For an occasional treat, rent movies.

• Start preparing and planning now for your future downsizing, even if you have children at home and can’t break free for several years.  You can start implementing some of these ideas right where you are.  Starting with a changeover to a healthy diet is always a first priority. And try very hard to start saving money.  You need a nest egg as a cushion to fall back on for emergencies and things you might need.  Also, you will need to earn the necessary money for your future exodus from a life of entrapment and bondage. You must stay in the system for a while to prepare for the transition, but then you can “Take the money and run!”

• Have courage and patience in the process of reaching your goals.  It took us 14 years from changing our diet, buying property, getting out of debt, living in a tent, then in our tool shed, building the small cabin, etc. to where we are today - debt-free, a thriving garden, renewed health, creative part-time work, and time to enjoy each other and the rest of our lives.  We had to practice delayed gratification, learn new self-reliant skills and be willing to sacrifice and work hard for many years in order to finally reach the level of freedom we have now.

So hang in there, catch the vision of a simple life in touch with the forces of nature and take the steps necessary each day to achieve your goal of independent freedom. All of the above tips are covered in more detail in Part Two of our free on-line book, The Subtle Way & Its’ Power.

Peace be with you!

My House is Small

My house is small

because my desires are too

My meals are simple

because my tastes are few.

My life is quiet

because I have everything I need.

My heart is still

because I am where I want to be

This land is beautiful

I need be nowhere else

I have books and movies and music

and they all go well with a hot cup of tea,

a slice of toast

and a warm fire.

I can see the morning sun through my window

and at evening time the stars dance

across the sky.

My lady sits next to me

reading her book

and taking notes.

She looks to me like a piece of Heaven-

So beautiful and happy

And I am grateful that my house is small

It makes us sit closer together.

      Solenzar

Recommended Resource Material

FOOD

Dining in the Raw (vegan, raw food ideas) by Rita Romano

The Bread Builders, Hearth Loaves & Masonry Ovens by Daniel Wing & Alan Scott Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cooking with Mother Nature

Search for the Ageless, Volume 3, The Chemistry of Youth, by Edmond Szekely

The Subtle Way and Its Power by Donna and Kevin Philippe-Johnson (Chapter 14:  Food-Nourishing Ourselves Naturally)

BUILDING & SHELTER

Build Your Own Earth Oven, by Kiko Denzer

The Complete Book of Woodworking, Published by Landauer Corporation

Low-Cost Green Lumber Construction, by Leigh Seddon

GARDENING

The Humanure Handbook, by Joe Jenkins

How to Grow More Vegetables, by John Jeavons

How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, by Ruth Stout

Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew

Lasagna Gardening, by Patricia Lanza

SIMPLE LIVING, SPIRITUALITY & ANCIENT WISDOM

The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery

Extreme Simplicity: Homesteading in the City, by Christopher & Delores Lynn Nyerges

Balance Point – Searching For a Spiritual Missing Link, by Joe Jenkins

Choosing Simplicity, Real People Finding Peace & Fulfillment in a Complex World,

by Linda Breen Pierce

Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Living with the Earth, by Tom Brown

Deep & Simple – A Spiritual Path for Modern Times, by Bo Lozoff

Living Without Electricity, by Stephen Scott & Kenneth Pellman

NATURAL HEALTH

The Biogenic Revolution, by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

10 Essential Herbs, by Lalitha Thomas (an absolute must for applying natural healing)

The Essene Gospel of Peace, translated by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

The First Essene, by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

DNA: Pirates of the Sacred Spiral, by Leonard Horowitz

Healing Celebrations, by Leonard Horowitz

The Subtle Way and Its Power, by Donna and Kevin Philippe-Johnson  (Chapter 15,     Natural Healing:  Taking Responsibility for Your Health and Healing)