This is the Perfect Time of Year to Declutter. It Can Help Your Finances, Your Psyche, and the Planet
Hi Friendos,
This week I’m continuing what’s turning out to be a fall newsletter theme of intersections between emotions and personal finance. I read an account of the self-storage industry and as you might guess, there were many stories of people renting storage units filled with items they did not use and would never use. Many of these people spent tens of thousands of dollars over the years on storage units they rarely visited, paying amounts that far exceeded the value of the items in the storage units. People usually rent storage units at times of life transition, like when downsizing their home, after a divorce, or after a death.
The storage unit companies benefit when people face challenges in grappling with their new life circumstances. They also benefit from automatic credit card billing, which makes payment collection easy and also makes people less likely to notice rent increases. It is so much easier to just pay another month’s rent on the storage unit, rather than taking time to deal with all the items in the unit. It is the unfortunate flip side to automating one’s finances: it’s wonderful when it helps with retirement saving and ensuring you don’t pay late fees, but so troublesome when it keeps you apart from your bigger goals.
Dealing with physical items can be hard for so many reasons: they belonged to someone who died that you loved, they represent the kind of person you want to be, they represent a time in your life that you miss, they embody your personal development and life journey. To get rid of those items, you might need to process grief or admit that your current life is different now from what it was in the past or from what it might become in the future. Or perhaps the items themselves are less meaningful but still hard to deal with: the untouched supplies for the project you did not complete, the book you never read, the equipment you barely used, the item that you immediately realized was a mistake but you missed the return window. To get those items out of your life, you have to admit to some kind of “failure.”
I have personally struggled to deal with items in each of those categories I described above. This week I did have a victory in selling an office chair that I wasn’t using because it ended up not fitting my body very well. Now there is this nice light feeling in the area where the chair used to sit. The post-declutter airiness is wonderful, and the perfect reminder as the Christmas ads are starting to really crank up. There’s a lot of emotional work that happens on the path to that nicely decluttered space, and I am not in the mood to revert back any time soon. Decluttering can impact your future buying decisions.
Over the next couple weeks, perhaps a decluttering project would help your mood as well, and be a nice counterweight to all the cultural influences pushing in the mega-consumerist direction. It might help you avoid spending more than you’d like these next two months, and help you walk a little lighter on the planet as well.
-Stephanie
