hey everyone in this video we're going to talk about minimalism we're going to talk about what it is how we used it as a tool to change our lives and how we've seen other people use it to help them explore alternative lifestyles like moving into a tiny house traveling long term and even getting out of debt we've seen tons of examples of how minimalism can have a transformative positive impact on people's lives so we want to talk a little bit more about that with you so what is minimalism basically it's the idea of simplifying your
life down to the essentials there's a whole wide range of different ways you can interpret minimalism some people might take it a bit more to the extreme for example their living room might be just completely empty with no furniture and just white bare walls in just a wooden chair and then some people might not necessarily appear to be minimalists but they've still applied the concepts and ideas to their lifestyle it's a very personal process and it can take months or years to become a minimalist and simplify your life the way that you want it to
be and it's also an ongoing process so you're constantly going to be adjusting what feels right to you maybe the first time you downsize you get rid of too many things and you feel like you're missing something and so you might need to get a few things back it's a constantly evolving way of life and you just need to listen to yourself and do what feels right so if we dig a little bit deeper into what minimalism is there's basically three parts of your life that it can apply to so the first one and the
most common is your physical space so how cluttered is your living space and the idea is to really think and look at the objects and the things that you own and figure out what is essential what's bringing value to your life what you need and what you don't need and then downsizing and getting rid of that extra stuff that's basically just cluttering your life and a really important part of downsizing is not just getting rid of stuff but also making sure that you don't keep bringing in new things into your life so whenever you you're
thinking of bringing in something buying something you ask yourself is this absolutely necessary am I going to use this is it going to add value to my life and asking yourself those questions can really help you maintain your minimalist space the second part of your life that minimalism can really have an impact on is just your everyday life and your time it's really common these days for people ourselves included to fill our days with work and social media and activities and hangouts and it can get really overwhelming really quickly if we don't manage that and
so whenever we start to feel overwhelmed one of the things we do is we try to minimize our schedule and make sure that we're prioritizing the most important parts of our lives and sometimes that means saying no to things that are not at the top of our priority list the third part is financial the financial impact of minimalism so when you become more aware of the money you're spending and try to cut back on those expenses that that aren't necessary you might be able to see a little bit more money in the bank at the
end of every month which might allow you to get out of debt maybe travel a bit more maybe start saving money think about retiring a bit earlier the financial impact of minimalism on your life is obviously going to depend on your financial situation how much disposable income you have if any and whether you're in debt or not so some people might not find that they're saving that much money at the end of every month but maybe it's a little bit less tight than it was before for example [Music] we've been minimalist for five years now
before that we were not minimalist at all we had a four bedroom house that was stuffed with stuff and so just to give you a quick overview of what we did we decided to simplify our life in every way that we could and we basically wanted to have a fresh start and start exploring different lifestyles to see what would make us happier so what we did is we sold our house we got rid of our cell phones we gave away most of our stuff and we started traveling so we've seen huge positive impacts from minimalism
on our lives sometimes we own more stuff sometimes we own less it's a constant process and it really depends on what we're up to and also what's interesting is that like you mentioned we met a lot of people living all sorts of alternative lifestyles and pretty much the common denominator is that all of them started by becoming minimalists by downsizing and simplifying their lives we've made a lot of other videos about minimalism you can check out our playlists if you're interested we're also putting together a video that's gonna be a minimalist guide for beginners so
subscribe and stay tuned that'll be coming up in the next few weeks
