Calculating the Cost of your Clutter

Calculating the Cost of your Clutter

by | Nov 7, 2019 | Declutter

The truth about a difficult situation can be a useful reminder that you need to make some changes. I once had ninety six boxes of clutter in my home. They occupied an entire room in our three bedroom house. I had allowed a third of our house to be utilised by packed and boxed clutter.  On a building that cost us £1,200 per month the maths are easy to do. This figure is the cost of living in the building, and also includes insurance, utilities as well as decoration. That’s £400 per month of our outgoings spent each month on the storage value of my boxes, most of these containing books.

£4,800 a year over five years minimum or £24,000 that I have shelled out as a part of overall accommodation costs just to store several thousand books that I have not looked at or made any use of in that time.  Boy, did this realisation make me feel stupid! It also caused me to feel sadness that I had not handled the situation well.

In your own place what have you got that takes up the equivalent of at least a full room in your house?  Think about the value of the items that you have in that combined space where, if you were to box all the ‘stuff’ and stack those boxes, you would end up with a room filled from floor to ceiling.  Take that room as a proportion of your property and identify the monthly cost of that building or space.  It doesn’t really matter whether you rent or pay a mortgage.  The cost you have is the cost.  If the clutter is taking up 10% of your monthly accommodation budget then take that figure as you Cost of Clutter.  If it is 20% then it is 20% of your expenditure.  This fact should be enough to make you sit up and take notice all of a sudden.

I know you might say, “But Nick, don’t be hard on me! This is only filling the basement or a garage unit attached to the house.” Am I sympathetic to you? NO! Not at all.  Am I empathetic to your situation?  Yes, for sure I am. Having been through the process myself I am gong to explain this in a very straight forward way. I care enough to help you make the difference in your life that we finally had the courage to tackle in our own situation.

Whatever the cost, take a moment to see that same amount of money in your savings account and being available to you for fun activities, holidays, investment, travel and holidays. Those funds could be used to pay down or settle in full loans that you have and which you would like to be free and clear of. Consider the emotional relief that will come from taking such money and clearing those debts. You could buy possessions that you genuinely love and adore, and which might have an investment value as well as being functional and or beautiful in your living space.  Items that you would benefit from seeing and using every day.

This will not be easy, but the journey you can make is a simple one.  Explore the items in your house that bring you no benefit or which have fulfilled the function for which you originally bought them.  This usage or non usage relates only to some of the clutter in your life.  A lot more of it will be having an emotional cost to you.  In the same way that I had in the back of my mind the subconscious sense of the emotional weight of those boxes of books, files and papers, so too will you also be carrying a burden associated with the stuff you are carrying about in your home space.

Reduce your clutter and enhance your life in the process!

Shocked into a Declutter Decision

Shocked into a Declutter Decision

by | Nov 7, 2019 | Declutter

My favourite bookshop occupies one long floor of a beautifully converted weaving mill, next to a canal, a river and a country park. I was browsing the shelves one weekend and my attention was caught by a beautiful clean copy of a title about decluttering.  I sat on a reading bench with the book and began to go through it. The chapter titles drew me in to how I might better deal with my clothes by folding them in a special way, methods to calculate what represented the right number of shoes to keep, and questions around the levels of joy that an item brought to me. The book cover was white and very subtly projected the attractive image of a potentially clean and clutter free living environment.  This promise was so good

Crossing the exposed wood floor of the gorgeous bookshop and on my way to the counter, I found myself having an epiphany. “What the hell was I doing buying a book about dealing with clutter, if only to take the book home and add yet more weight to an existing bookshelf?”

My major clutter devil is addiction to books. For years I have bought books almost as soon as I have touched them.  At the time I was about to buy that book at the till I already had around 2,500 books. If there were such a civil category I would be classified as an official hoarder with serious kleptomaniac tendencies!

To let go of anything requires a decision. To let go of our generic ‘stuff’ can be a difficult process for many of us given that the size of the task can be daunting. Somewhere in our head we know that we have too much. Too many food processing gizmos, too many magazines on home style, too many items of underwear, or winter coats, or gardening tools, or drinking glasses, or walking sticks, or reading glasses, or knives and forks. You get the idea because you know your own living space so very well. We watch TV shows about people living in tiny homes, or practicing a minimalist lifestyle which seems to require a yurt or a container home and we are put off.

Too be honest, the more I see the really good container homes online the more inspired I am by what can be done to shed the non-essentials and live better with less. So we know we can do better than this, but why do we continue to hold onto so much.  We understand that there is a link between the mass of ‘stuff’ and the emotional sense of feeling weighed down by it all. Yet still we buy and accumulate.  If it was a logical process to make space for a new thing by clearing out the old before we go shopping, then our lives would be easy, our homes spaces clutter free. It is not this way and so we must adapt and change our behaviour to meet the problem we have created for ourselves.

We attach feeling and meaning, nostalgia and memory to each item that stays on our shelves, in our cupboards and which hangs on our walls or has a special place on our window ledges. Many of the feelings and thoughts which we pin to the objects are deep rooted and we are unaware of the pull we have to the item. With another item we might have a clear memory of the occasion when it was given to us and by whom. That memory can be good, bad, or downright unpleasant. Why are you hanging on to something which has anything other than a good sensation or memory attached to it?

You need to look at the benefits of decluttering and letting go, versus the negatives of hanging on to so much that you know is already draining you, making you feel heavy or even guilty around some things and simply unhappy about others. Keeping things that bring you no practical or emotional benefit can be a waste of your time, energy and a drain on your well-being. Whether we are considering a broken electrical item in your basement, or chipped and cracked crockery in your kitchen, the items are no good for you.

These things each carry a stagnant energy which is not part of who you are now. The act of holding onto such things can pull you down and hold you back. Rather than hold onto so much that gives you no actual benefit, it’s time to let it go out of your life. Through the act of letting go you are creating a positive space into which something new, or beneficial, can come. Start with something easy.

What can you remove from your home today?