Never having heard of Westexas in 2004, and learning about PO, I sold up in Southern CA, moved to Colorado and did the "ELP" thing with mixed results. Positives: Much healthier, relaxed, and more social lifestyle. Negatives: Family lost interest when the sky did not fall (yet) and missed "the good life".

Personally, I now think the scope of what we are facing is beyond ELP's help. Someone said it well: "Until we change the way money works, nothing else matters". We will remain in servitude as long as our labor and wealth is siphoned away through inflation and taxation.

My advice: ELP is a good thing, but make absolutely sure your family is onboard with how far you are taking it.

I probably should ask a more general question: Has anyone who has voluntarily downsized had reason to regret it?

I'm still working on ELP, but so far so good. Some more money in the bank, already live close to the job, was tilling dirt in the veggie garden last weekend. Unfortunately the angling is very low now.

Finally got my woodstove installed yesterday!

Westexas,

I was writing a long response to your ELP question, but it just became too verbose.

The short answer is that I have been working toward the ELP scenario for about 5 years now. However, your posts, and the those of the TOD Contributors, have made me decide to "kick it up a notch". The solar water heater will go in this year, as will the bigger garden and edible lanscape.

Mathew Simmons recent admission that we are at peak now was the nail in the coffin, for me.

We will not know who is right about the "peak" date, until after it happens. And thats the point. Once everyone knows, then it will too late to prepare as effectively.

This issue is just too important to chance.

The biggest and best change I made to my life was to be debt free. The most important was to not have kids. (Too many kids without Dad's out there)

Just about everything I do hinges on the possibility of gas at 5-7 dollars a gallon, electric being .25 cent a kwh, and bread being 5 bucks a loaf.

Preperation removes most of the anxiety. I sleep great and enjoy life!

Don't make a wish list, make a work list.

Hello Westexas.

ELP?

Not yet. But school is finally out this summer and ELP is very much under discussion and within a two year time frame.

Your main point:

''As Jay Hanson, et al, have pointed out, getting more and bigger stuff is more fun than downsizing. It's no fun to put up a for sale sign and tell your neighbors that you are downsizing to a small two bedroom apartment along a mass transit line, or within walking distance of your job.''

Why is this?

For the first two hundred years of the Industrial revolution, Society was governed and controlled by.

Knowing your place
Religion
Obtaining needs , rather than wants. (Family food bills routinely took up 50% of a working man's wages)

Ways up and ways out for about 80 % of the population were entirely dependent upon self education in such places as Mechanics Institutes, common in northern industrial cities. This took enormous self discipline, try finishing a 12 hour shift in a cotton mill and then turning up for two hours tuition in mechanics.

The last fifty years has been an out-of-school party for the West.
Automotive freedom has enabled the discipline of proximity to wages, family to disappear and dormer towns, distance from other schoolkids, distance from real daily life to flourish. JHK says it all better than anyone.

In the West, peer group pressure for more goods and a 'lifestyle' at all age groups in society has displaced thinking and learning at all levels, but it has hit hardest in the hapless western working class. Adverts,MSM, Corporatisation have all played a part. A part more akin to a drug dealer than any pillar of society.

Where do you go after a life of 'bigger, better, faster' and ' I want it and I want it now' ?

People cannot fall back into them selves. They have no internal resources such as the ability to think, reason, self entertain, discuss, debate. They were never allowed to!

I am always struck by the powers of reasoning, articulation, vocabulary and knowledge displayed in informal letters by relatively 'uneducated' people from about a hundred years past. Pick any such book up say,concerning letters home from the Somme, Paschendale, The ACW or any political pamphlet and you will quickly see the difference.

In a world where the posession of objects takes precedence over posession of knowledge then ELP is heretical thought to almost any western adult. Independent thought is not at a premium in a world which requires conformation. That is why western schools have been failing youth for the last 30 odd years. Who needs thinkers in a world requiring drones and cubicle dwellers?

It will not be possible for most people to respond to ELP in any rational way. It is outside their highly conditioned world view. People know of no other way. It is not their fault: They have been trained by the system since birth. Welcome to the Machine. Thirty years of advanced psychological conditioning sucks independent thought out most humans. The system has done a good job.

All you can do is quietly inform those you think capable of listening and then hope they work it out for themselves.

From Smirking Chimp:

On Friday, the government reported that net capital inflows reversed from the requisite $70 billion to AN OUTFLOW OF $11 BILLION!

There are lots of numbers there, but no citations of primary sources, so I'm a bit skeptical. Still.... it is what I've expected for some time. The tip will be fast as the financial community jumps on the wagon. If indeed this is happening.

cfm in Gray, ME

Could the negative savings rate be due to changing demographics? More retirees means less going into savings and more coming out. It may be decades before savings rate improves.