Zero savings. I keep reading about it everywhere and it’s infecting my mind. Where does the money go? How can people possibly have not one single dollar tucked away somewhere? I have a jar with over $80 in it, because I’m a scrounge, just from coins I’ve picked up in the street in the last twelve years. (Mostly pennies!) Then I remind myself that most people do not make a mental or emotional connection between “savings” and their spending habits. We don’t even think of our “spending habits” as spending habits, just as “trying to live my life.” When I work with photos or do home visits with my clutter clients, I look around and think, even at a dollar per item, there’s a lot of money sunk into this room.
When I don’t have any savings, then my personal belongings represent my net worth. Um, unless I have debt. Then I have clutter and a negative net worth. Before we go on, I’ll state the obvious: Financial net worth is not the same as spiritual net worth or social net worth. All we’re talking about today is money. Although, as long as we’re on the topic, when we don’t save any money then we are counting on other people to fill in for us, bail us out of trouble, and perhaps support us in frail old age. What will we do if we find out that they had the same plan as us, to count on us for material support the exact same way we were counting on them? We tend to fill our homes and lives with clutter when we cut ourselves off socially and isolate ourselves emotionally. That’s part of why any discussion of the emotional, spiritual, and social inevitably includes the financial. Back to the clutter. Where did it come from? The extremely frugal of us will be chuckling and remembering all the stuff we’ve brought home for free. The chronically disorganized will be looking around and noticing how much of the clutter consists of junk mail, newspapers, recycling, and other stuff that... well, it didn’t cost anything but we don’t think it’s all that valuable, either. In both cases, we might do well to ask ourselves if we could lower our rent by using less space. We can also ask whether we could earn more by diverting our scrounging, bargain-hunting energy toward more lucrative side hustles or training for a higher-paid career. The rest of us can ask, did this cost more than a dollar? A used book, a shirt, a throw pillow, a pen, a can of soup? I still shop at thrift stores, and the price range in my area is now $3-8 for most items. Anyone with a good memory for the lineage of their bargains may be able to bump up that estimate and say, Yes, everything in this room cost at least three bucks, or whatever that number might be. It could be an interesting exercise to go around with a notepad and write down estimates for the larger items. Roughly how much was the couch, the TV, the bed? It could also be interesting to do an estimate for one small area, such as “everything in the fridge” or “everything on the floor of my car.” There’s something about the number 55 that comes up often in my work. Fifty-five coffee mugs, fifty-five t-shirts on the floor, fifty-five mechanical pencils. At a dollar each, we can say, “Okay, that’s $55.” Did I actually need each and every one of them? If all my shirts are in layers on the bedroom floor, and I’ve been washing the same basket of other clothes for the last several weeks, then is it possible I could have saved that $55? If I had, would I then have an envelope of money and a clear surface in my home? Or does any cash on hand “burn a hole in my pocket”? Does a bare surface make me feel a little stir-crazy? Do I spend money quickly or surround myself with stuff because it’s emotionally more comfortable and familiar? The trouble with clutter is that it fades into the background. We’re so used to it that we forget it’s there. More, we have trouble imagining anything else. How would life be different if I never had to clean this up again? How would life be different if I actually had an emergency savings account? How would life be different if that savings built up over years, and I started trusting its presence? The other problem with clutter is that it generally doesn’t have any resale value. Many of my people are so emotionally attached to the sunk value of their stuff that they’ll hang onto boxes and piles of it for years, hoping to “get something for it” at the yard sale they’ll never have. Then they finally do put a yard sale together, spend twelve hours a day sitting out in the hot sun, and fail to sell 80% of it. This is a mistake that derives naturally from scarcity mindset. Abundance mindset says, donate it all to charity, spend the weekend napping and going to the park, and think of a different way to come up with $300. My husband and I once wasted a beautiful summer weekend trying to make $100 at a yard sale, and this year we just offset our expenses $600 a month by moving. The new place is thirty square feet smaller, which is less than the size of a ping pong table. In an emergency, could we get everything out? I think not. I have two pets, and if a natural disaster happened, I’d really have my hands full just collecting them and getting them safely out the door. In my area, the main risks are tsunami, earthquake, wildfire, flash flood, and mudslide. Years ago, I decided that I would never allow myself to get my heart broken by feeling like my stuff was “ruined” or that I’d “lost everything.” If I’m alive, my loved ones are alive, and my pets are alive, then I have lost nothing. I feel much better having an emergency plan, a go bag, physical fitness, insurance, and emergency savings than I think I would if my apartment were full of a bunch of material objects, no matter how awesome they might be. We keep clutter because we’re overly concerned with the value of things. We’re caught up in the aspirational feelings that we will Definitely Use This Someday. We believe that objects represent our memories and our heritage, and that without the objects we’d forget our past. Many of us believe that our stuff is our personality, so much that we even use the term ‘conversation piece.’ When we feel poor and that life is difficult, we hang onto our stuff because we believe it’s the best we’ll ever have. Imagine how different it would be to instead feel financial comfort, to feel that the future will be more interesting than the past ever was, that we are changing and growing and contributing all the time, that tomorrow will be easier. Imagine how it would be to feel less “this thing is worth something” and more “I am worthy.” Comments are closed.
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AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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