In her career in the pharmaceutical industry, Renée Blanchette was responsible for scaling up processes and designing labs and offices to be productive, in order to validate university research in a private laboratory. Her organizational expertise has now launched her in a new career as a personal organizer, and she has discovered that retiring baby boomers are looking for the kind of help she can offer. “There’s a transition,” she told Canada Business Plans. “Part of it is helping them go through and get organized to be able to move into the condominium. That’s a process that’s very challenging. It requires some coaching along the line, because it can be quite traumatic if you’re not prepared. You can have difficulty getting started.”

Her company, Sweet City Lifestyle, operates in Montreal and Toronto and offers a service she calls “lifestyle editing”. “To edit is to change,” she writes on her website. “[And] we tend to resist it and go back to our comfort zone. Sweet City Lifestyle starts with a conversation… We’ll take something that seems overwhelming and break it into manageable and attainable step-by-step tasks.”

Renee Blanchette's service helps retirees organize their lives and belongings as they downsize.

Courses for retirees looking to right-size their belongings are cropping up, too. Last weekend, the Toronto Star described how Elizabeth Flavelle and David Windeyer are enjoying their retirement more now that they’ve downsized from their long-time house. In the article, called “Downsized and free of all that stuff that cluttered their lives”, Ellen Moorhouse writes that their “journey started with a Toronto District School Board course on downsizing, offered by real estate agent Lynn Tribbling… Downsizing Strategies for Success (course number 46336)” Learn more at www.learn4life.ca.