I have too much Stuff. Odds are, you do too. In fact, Americans own so much Stuff that they don’t have room to store it all. Our basements and attics are full. Our garages and workshops are overflowing. Our passion for Stuff has spawned a growing industry devoted to providing space for all of the crap we own. This afternoon on NPR, Marketplace featured a story about the recession-proof self-storage industry.
Reporter Andrew Phelps originally rented a unit for what he thought would be a few months. Three years later he returned to find “Star Wars figures, little umbrella thingies that go in cocktails, and more trophies and old baseballs and yearbooks. Oh my God — my Nintendo 64!” For three years, he’d been paying a monthly fee to keep Stuff that he never used.
“I wound up throwing away, like, 98 percent of this Stuff,” he says. “I don’t know why I kept it in the first place.” He’s not alone.
According to Steve Northam, the manager of a self-storage facility in southern California, most customers are just like Phelps. “I try to tell people that kind of stuff. You know what you’re gonna do, you’re gonna be writing checks on this Stuff. You’re gonna say I’m gonna be in there for six months or something like that and I’m going to see you five years later and you’re still handing me money. And you’ve paid more than three times what that Stuff’s worth and, in some cases, four or five times.”
I’ve never had a storage unit. Out of curiosity, I checked pricing at a facility near my home. Their smallest unit — 25 square feet — costs $56 a month! That’s almost unbelievable. $56 a month! $672 per year! Prices for larger spaces range up to $278 a month. Wow.
Don’t think I hold any sort of moral high ground, though. I, too, have lots of Stuff. I’ve just found ways to store it without a monthly fee. (Or maybe I’m paying even more — maybe I have a bigger mortgage to own a bigger house to store all my Stuff!)
Last summer when we returned from England and Ireland, I came to the realization that Stuff was ruling my life. For a couple months, I tried to purge the excess Stuff around me. I sold it on eBay. I gave it away on Craigslist. I hauled it to Goodwill. But I still have too much. I have one entire room currently devoted to Stuff I Want to Purge. The good news is that aside from personal finance books, I’m bringing less Stuff into the house. (That’s one benefit of frugality, I guess.) I feel like the tide of battle has turned.
Not everyone is winning the war on Stuff, however. It seems the self-storage industry is largely immune to recession. People are squirreling away things just as much as ever. Marketplace spoke to the regional manager for a storage company, who said:
A big part of our business in some places recently has been people that are storing temporarily while they stage their home to buy, while they’re between houses because they’ve just moved up. Now we’re kind of getting the other side of that where maybe they’re staging their stuff while they move down, or while they move out.
How many self-storage facilities can one find in Canada? The U.K.? Australia? Why do Americans feel compelled to horde so much Stuff? How can we overcome our need to always acquire more? And where do I go to buy into a share of the self-storage industry?
[Marketplace: Americans keep putting more in storage]
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NYSE symbol PSA. It’s better known as Public Storage, and they’re ubiquitous. The stock, since January 2008, has risen 50 percent (50 percent in 4 months?)…
I don’t see any downturn in this, either. It’s such a throwaway society that garbage companies and public storage facilities will only increase in value.
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my boyfriend and i are planning on moving out-of-country for a few years and i’m thinking about whether or not to get a small storage unit for the stuff that we don’t want to get rid of (family memorabilia, music collection, art collection) or whether to beg family and friends to keep/use it all in their house while we’re gone (asking someone to keep a 4′ tall remote-controlled sailboat for you is kind of a big deal, though). putting it in storage would be expensive (the art would require a climate controlled-unit), but then we’re not burdening other people with the stuff and we don’t have to worry as much about it being lost/stolen/broken/destroyed by accident.
we COULD just get rid of ALL of it. i’m a pack rat/collector/hoarder by nature, so this is shaking me up. it’s so hard to get rid of things that you cling to because the original owner has passed away, and it’s hard to get rid of things you are passionate about (my boyfriend’s music collection, my graphic novel collection). In most cases, the cost of storing the items would be a lot greater than replacing them when we come back. But for the CD and art collection, it would cost much more to replace them than it would to store them.
O, what to do…
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Not only is it wasted money, but many of these self storage places are climate controlled! We are wasting precious energy to heat and cool a bunch of Stuff!
I totally see a downturn in this industry. I think going forward the trend is that people will be forced into buying and hoarding LESS Stuff. The Stuff is going to become increasingly more expensive as gas/transportation and manufacturing prices rise- not to mention the weak dollar. The era of cheap Stuff is over.
I’m interested to find out why you think that it’s not?
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Another cost of stuff is the time it takes us to maintain it. How much do we lose finding a place for it, dusting it, repairing it, cleaning it, moving it from place to place, losing it, hunting for it, finding it!
I think the term “stuff” is exactly what it is–non-defineable (can’t quite put a word to describe it) and a filler, like stuffing. We create it in order to fill a gap–like happiness. But happiness is something that can never be filled with stuff because it is intrinsic and stuff isn’t.
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We have far too much stuff in the basement – the only “storage facility” we’ll ever use. I’ve been purging for the better part of two years via craigslist and freecycle, but there’s still too much.
I’m getting less emotionally attached as I’ve gotten rid of things. I kept stuff because “I might want / need it again.” What a crock. Out it goes. Either via craigslist/freecycle, or to the trash. It’ll be a lot easier to finish the basement when its mostly empty anyway.
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J.D. – I can totally relate! A big chunk of one of the rooms in my basement is toys and baby equipment as I wait for the big twin sale at the end of May. (If anyone is having twins, lives in Portland and needs some stuff, contact me!). I am loathe to have a garage sale so I am waiting to sell everything. The problem is that I won’t actually be at the sale (my mom will be selling for me b/c I will be at Ladies Rock Camp but that is another story) and I promised to price everything to make it easier on her. That is what I will be working on for the next 4 weekends! What is your plan for your stuff?
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I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment, and I have to say if someone were to move in with me, it would be a big challenge. I am a pretty un-cluttered person, but my bedroom closet is completely full of bulky things that require storage space but not a lot of daily use (camping gear, sleeping bags, suitcases, backpack, cooler). My bicycle just leans on the wall in my bedroom!
Fortunately for me I have a second very large main closet with a built in dresser, so all my clothes live in there. Learning to share the space would be a huge logistical challenge!
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Hi All,
Thanks for this great article. I would like to point you to Zilok.com, which may bring a solution to the overflown attics and storages. We have too much stuff, yet we need even and always more. So what about renting what you have and don’t use all the time, to people in your community? Peer-to-peer renting for a new, sustainable and community-driven way of consuming. The extra bikes, snowboards, strollers, costumes… people around you will need them at some point! What do you guys think?
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oh man.. this is one of my biggest headaches right now.. i’m in the process of decluttering my home.. just trying to do a little bit at a time.. i’ve donated clothes.. cleaned out closets.. gotten rid of some old furniture.. but i still have a (2 car) garage full of stuff (mostly my mom’s clutter) that i need to sort out.. old tv’s.. a broken fridge.. and all sorts of freakin’ junk.. it’s irritating! i’m going to get this done eventually
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I had a storage unit years ago (one of the small closet ones) and that was about $40.00 per month. I kept it for about a year and a half and wound up getting sick and tired of paying that much to store stuff, so I brought the stuff back home and just did a better job of arranging things so that my basement didn’t look so cluttered.
But it is truly ridiculous that we have gotten to the point where we have so much and still want so much more and still aren’t satified. Post #24 sums it nicely when he talks about the unseen cost of accumulating and hoarding stuff has on our lives. It’s like a domino effect and all really because we cannot delay gratification and buy stuff we don’t really need just because we see it and convince ourselves that we have a need for it. And if it is something we did need and need no longer, we convince ourselves we will find a need for it again (as soon as I get rid of it, I’ll need it!!) and hang on to it for decades.
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My boyfriend/roommate had the interesting idea of renting some storage space for a while so he could pull everything out of the garage (into a place that’s protected from the elements) so he could see what he had. Then he’d only put back what he really wanted, get rid of the rest, and stop using the storage unit.
I think I’ve talked him into buying a used portable storage unit to keep in the yard and then selling it when he’s done. That should be cheaper, so long as he actually gets rid of the thing!
I still have plenty of issues with my junk, too. For example, I always have roommates and I went years and years without ever needing a couch: my roommates would always have a couch. My previous roommate left her couch with me. Of course my next roommate had his own couch, so I put my inherited couch in the garage in case my next roommate didn’t have one. I should have donated it before rodents got into the garage and destroyed the couch. Also, it’s been eight years and I still have the same roommate.
I’ve decided that since I am so good at being frugal, it would be better for me to get rid of things like these that I am not using now but might use if circumstances change. It seems wasteful, but I’m starting to think that if circumstances change, I can easily get anything I’d need. Especially since I don’t even need much. (If I had no couch, for example, I could sit on the floor or at the table. If I had no bed, I could sleep on my sleeping bag in my carpeted bedroom. If I had no dishes, I could eat out of my tupperware for a while!)
Hey, there’s a strategy. For each thing I’m using, think what I would do without it. If it’s not that bad, just get rid of it.
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I have a storage room full of items from my parents’ house. They both passed away three years ago, as did my grandparents (right around the same time). It’s full of memorable items from my childhood, box and boxes of family photos painstakingly annotated by my grandfather (which is why I’m afraid to send them to ScanCafe), stuff they brought with them from China that survived the Cultural Revolution…
Even though a lot of it is knick-knacks that don’t necessarily fit in with my decorating style, I’m not going to throw it out since if my parents and grandparents thought they were important enough to save and bring with them from China, I don’t want to throw them away.
I don’t like paying the storage fees, but I get anxiety attacks every time I think about trying to clear out all that stuff, and I figure storage fees are cheaper than therapy.
I do clear out my apartment on a regular basis – I’m hoping to empty out enough closets to move most of the stuff into my apartment instead of paying storage fees. But the stuff I have in storage I’m too emotionally attached to to get rid of now.
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If you think $278/month is bad, you should see what my mom pays per month to store her stuff. For comparison purposes, my 730 sq foot 1 bedroom apartment which amply holds all my stuff (even when I’m in need of purging) costs $1235/month (southern california). My mom pays over $1600/month in storage fees. She has 3 HUGE rooms, and the rent goes up every single year. She’s had the rooms roughly 12 years now. It started off as a 3×3 space to hold…I can’t even recall (I was 10). Then it just became a place to put stuff when the apartment we lived in filled up (the apt was always jam-packed in addition to the 3 rooms). At one point, she cleared out 1 huge room by saving only the really necessary things (papers from her days in school, mementos, etc) and tossing or donating the rest. But since then she has opened another, so back up to 3. There was only about 1-2 years that she had just the 2 rooms, so it didn’t last long.
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We rented a storage unit when we moved overseas for a year or so to store our furniture and appliances, and unfortunately, a lot of crap as well. When we returned and opened the boxes, we kept thinking, “Why did we save this?” We had moved across the world carrying two suitcases apiece (and our cats as carry-ons) and we were fine for over a year. That was sobering.
Honestly, even though we would have had to replace the furniture, it would have been mentally easier to let it go when we moved and replaced it later. We did save a little money but given the fact that we had to move into and out of the storage unit, I’m not sure the hassle was worth it.
These days we are smarter, and even though we currently have a toddler, we live pretty lean. When our neighbors moved out of their apartment (identical floorplan) they mentioned the weight of their moving shipment, and it was five times heavier than ours had been when we moved a year earlier. We want another child but have ditched the baby stuff as we’ve gone; it’s easy to replace now that we hang out with people who have young children. Our apartment and two shelves in the laundry area are more than sufficient (the shelves were generously donated by our landlord, who is amused at how little we keep on them and always stops by when he’s in town to marvel aloud about how clean we are–I wish he were right about that but in fact the place is kind of dirty although it is never messy). Frankly those shelves encourage us to keep more than we should. Now that we’re parents there’s so much in rotation that it’s easy to let things pile up.
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We’ve used storage units a few times when we’ve moved. This last time came back to bite us–our unit was broken into and some expensive items were stolen. We were able to recoup not quite 50 percent of our loss through our homeowner’s policy. We haven’t replaced a thing, yet. The only items we really miss are my husband’s suits and tuxes and our ottomans. The rest, all bits and pieces of furniture, clothing, a television, we don’t plan on replacing. In some ways this unfortunate event “helped” us downsize and clear out the clutter, which is good since we moved from a much larger 4 bedroom+ house to a 2 bedroom+ house.
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I thought about this when we had to store some appliances and misc crap while we were living in an apt. We rented a storage unit for a year before finding a house. I remember seeing some article that said storage units were price/square foot even more lucrative than high-rise condos in major cities….and they can be anywhere.
The flip-side of this I think is rather than looking down on people’s tendency to collect Stuff, teach them to embrace it. Why not get all entrepreneurial and *start* a self storage unit? It seems easy enough…buy some cheap land, put up a big pole barn, and section it off with plywood. Put doors on it, and a fence around the whole thing. Then watch the money rake in.
The place we used provided no insurance for the goods it stored; that had to be covered by our renters insurance. If the roof leaked or something happened, they weren’t liable. We had to provide our own lock, but they would happily sell us one (at a markup!).
I would LOVE to get into this business….talk about seemingly easy money. I’m sure there are caveats, but your post proves just how lucrative it can be!
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Snow Crash is a GREAT book…
This is one of my favorite issues (so much so that I’ve thought of becoming a professional organizer/declutterer a la Peter Walsh). I’m continually going through my personal possessions and redefining what I need to keep vs. what should go.
MY CLUTTER RANT, PT 1:
I think a large part of what has gotten us into this situation is the continual push over the past few decades that pushes all of us into the role of consumers.
In order for the corporate entities to thrive, they really need for us all to be eager shoppers — we are shopping ourselves to death and it really only benefits big business.
We’re getting so craven that we even have the government telling us in recent years that it’s our patriotic duty to shop. If that doesn’t wake you up to examining why you buy what you buy, I don’t know what will.
The other big piece of this equation is the push for McMansions. I don’t have the hard facts at hand, but at the same time that household sizes are decreasing, the size of houses is increasing.
I’m not a hard-line purist that thinks we should all be living in tiny 250-ft closets, but seriously — how many families really need 2000, 3000, 4000 sq ft of living space? How many single people. I myself live in a generously sized 850 sq ft, which is quite ample for the most part (ok, I’d really like more kitchen cabinets and counterspace). I can even accomodate my parents’ frequent overnight visits without anybody feeling pinched for space.
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MY CLUTTER RANT, PT 2:
On to the personal:
I’m gearing up to move overseas. This has really made me focus on my relationship to every single thing I own or buy, since I’m planning to take everything important with me (once I move I don’t plan on coming back to the US). I’m not perfect. One part of me wants to purge EVERYTHING and move with only what I can carry in my luggage on the airplane. The other part of me wants to keep my oh-so-important stuff.
This has also led to conflicts with my mother, since a) I want to take as much of the heirloomy stuff that is really important with me the first time, and b) our goal is to move her with me at some point.
The conflict is that we have much different criteria on what’s really important. She’s a depression baby and much more prone to the “keep it, you might need it” mindset.
She also has a much different heirloom threshold than I do. For example, she wants me to keep all the Dr. Seuss books she read to me when I was a toddler, because of the memories she has. As far as I’m concerned, the memories aren’t in the objects themselves and I don’t want to drag 5 Dr. Seuss books around with me til I die. They were important to our history, but there is far more important stuff.
And then there is the stuff she’s given me, like 5 pieces of fancy crystal when I was a freshman in college. These aren’t heirlooms, these are things she scrimped to buy for someday when I had a fancy house and lifestyle.
The problem is, it’s now someday. But I don’t have a fancy house or lifestyle. I don’t even entertain that much. And I don’t even like the crystal that much. Yet I’m terrified to suggest parting with some or all of this crystal (so instead I purge things that mean more to me, as to free the overall stuff burden).
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@ Aryn
Great Post. You hit the nail on the head!
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My first ‘stuff’ wakeup call was George Carlin. See his routine here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
So very true!!
My wife and myself agreed that we will not buy anything new unless it replaces something. takes a bit of discipline but is liberating.
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We’re 5 days away from the birth of our second child and 13 from the settlement of our second house.
We’ve put our current house on the market and done the requisite “staging” which involved removing ALL of the unnecessary clutter. We’ve stored the boxes in the garages of a few friends until we move.
The problem, (though I’m not sure I call it that anymore), is that we’ve become
really fond of living in such a minimalist way. The only times I’ve mentioned wishing for some of those extraneous boxes back have been involving kitchen items or outdoor toys for my toddler. That’s it.
That means that all of those boxes of clothes, vases, movies, knick knacks, extra towels, sheets, blankets, containers, craft supplies, etc are absolutely unnecessary to our life.
While I’m glad we’ve collectively come to this conclusion, I wish it hadn’t taken so long.
We’re planning to move the boxes into the basement at the new house and giving/selling the majority of the stuff away.
Now, if I can just keep my Mother-in-law’s well-meaning but highly frustrating intentions to unpack our house for us in check, we’ll be alright.
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I agree with a lot of what is said about the tyranny of stuff, here and in the links in the comments. However, I have one slight misgiving: I own two vehicles, both extremely elderly by most peoples standards, a 1981 RX-7 and a 1976 Kawasaki motorcycle. I’m also a college student with no income, so I save *everything* I can. I once bought an extremely cheap lot of parts off a man who was sending his RX-7 to the junkyard, so I have boxes of spares: an alternator, a starter, ignition coils, carburetors, distributors, etc. Anything that comes off my vehicles in the course of repair or re-fitting gets saved, in case I need back ups later. While it does take up a fair amount of space (by my standards, renting half of an 800 sq ft apartment), it seems like having my treasure trove of spares saves me emotional stress and financial worries when something inevitably breaks. An example of when more Stuff is really a good thing?
I find it interesting that I haven’t run into any auto hobbyists or motorcycle enthusiasts among the financial bloggers or their comment galleries. Is this because automotive hobbies are inherently anti-frugal, or because auto hobbyists tend simply to not be financially savvy types?
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My husband and I lived in 500 sq ft apartment in Sweden for two years. One of the friends I made there had an apartment of 800 sq ft for a family of 4. Living overseas completely shifted my thinking about space, needs and wants.
I have really enjoyed the Not So Big House series of books and the author’s philosophy about stuff. Excerpt from site:
“The inspiration for The Not So Big House came from a growing awareness that new houses were getting bigger and bigger but with little redeeming design merit. The problem is that comfort has almost nothing to do with how big a space is. It is attained, rather, by tailoring our houses to fit the way we really live, and to the scale and proportions of our human form.”
I think that also applies to all of the possessions in our life. We are looking to the things we own or buy to bring us comfort and satisfaction. But for the most part we don’t receive that satisfaction or it is so fleeting. Then we have to buy more, spend more to fill up that hole in ourselves. It can be a never-ending cycle.
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I think too many people can’t remove the idea that a THING is not the MEMORY that you want to preserve. I’m afraid that for many people, they feel if they get ride of a THING, that they are lessening the MEMORY that this thing is _really_ about.
As for me, yah, i had a storage locker. I used it while i was moving, and had a gap betwixt appartments. Seriously, when i move next, i’ll probably rent one for another 3 months, the lessening of stress of using it as a staging area is AMAZING!
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JD: I’d love to see a post based on your cousin Laurie’s business (#38). Please do add this to the future post list.
Posts and lively comment sections like this one are like injecting nitrous oxide into my engine of decluttering. This will be a supremely productive weekend as a result. Thanks all!
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The only time I can see renting a storage unit as sensible is between moves as a very temporary solution. Stuff, stuff, stuff … ugh. Like most everyone else, I am not saying I am perfect, but I have let go of a lot of stuff the last several years and not purchased more. I am a Flylady (www.flylady.net) fan and she teaches you to do “27 fling boogies” weekly to get rid of stuff. At first, this task is daunting, but the more you do it, the happier you feel. She says S.T.U.F.F means Something That Undermines Family Fun. How does that make sense? Because we’re always cleaning it, moving it, fussing at the kids about taking care of it, etc. She believe clutter causes illness and I believe that totally. I know people with severe autoimmune diseases whose houses have no flat space not covered and worse, only have paths through their homes. I believe these folks and any of us can get rid of clutter a little bit at a time, but we have to do it ourselves, going through the process to get rid of it. If we cart it off and put it in storage or hire someone else to come in and do it, we don’t “get it” and we just start all over again. We have to go through the process where we don’t keep something we hate because Aunt Mary gave it to us. If it makes us feel bad when we look at it or think about it, it has to go. That’s how we end up getting ill from stuff. Look around your house and think about all the things that make you feel bad. Maybe it makes you feel bad because you paid money for it and now you don’t like it. You already paid the money … donate it to charity or give it to someone who loves it. There are people who can make money selling stuff on eBay, but they are not people who have issues with stuff for the most part. If you are too overwhelmed to get rid of stuff, then you will be too overwhelmed to sell stuff on eBay. There’s an email that goes around periodically about a woman who died and her funeral was overflowing with people she loved, yet her house had no clutter and was very simple. She spent her time and energy on people, not things. I try to remember that. Think of how few things in our house we actually USE, whether it’s clothes (don’t you tend to wear the same few items over and over), books, furniture, etc. A lot of times we keep stuff because of a certain image we have of ourselves … like the good or classic books (do you plan to read them again? if not, give them away). Clever kitchen tools? How many do you use? Okay, that’s enough. I am getting up to do a 27 fling boogie. Hopefully, it will be hard to find 27 things since we just donated to a charity yard sale, but I doubt it … paper especially, I am always clipping articles and the paper we get daily is amazing (the post on eliminating paper throught the mail was appreciated). It’s something that has to be kept up with.
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I pay $190/mo in rent for a shared 10′ x 10′ room and $50/mo in rent for the self-storage, for a total of $240/mo. In So Cal, that’s not bad.
I suppose I don’t really ‘need’ the stuff I’m storing, but the alternative would be to go to job interviews in jeans and sandals, go through winter with no warm clothes or blankets, have to beg colleagues to lend me books (most of which aren’t available in the library), and throw out the quilt my mother made for me when I went away to college. I could do it, if I had to – just like I eat sitting on the floor now, because I have no table. I just don’t think the suffering is worth the money I’d save.
It’s always interesting to see what people consider to be the ‘needs’ versus ‘wants’. The ‘needs’ category seems to expand proportionally to the amount of money you (think you) have.
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I don’t think this is specifically an American issue – witness programmes like “The Life Laundry” on BBC2, or “Desperate Houses” on the Irish public TV channel, RTE1.
I don’t think of myself as a hoarder, still, when I moved from a shared 3 BR house into my own 650 sq ft 2 BR apartment, I sold stuff to the value of 350 Euros (which paid for the removal company), and threw away/recycled much more.
I now find it takes ongoing self-discipline to keep my space uncluttered. Whenever I replace something, the old item MUST go – either to charity, recycling or garbage.
Decoration choices are intensely mulled over before I commit to them.
My books are regularly weeded and sold off.
I almost never by CDs (listen to the radio instead) or DVDs (rent instead).
Kitchen gizmos are ruthlessly examined for multi-purpose usefulness and space requirements.
Don’t get me wrong – I do not only buy what I need, but also what I want. Still, the permanent questions in the back of my mind: Where will I put it? How will I get rid of it? How much space will it take up? are extremely useful in reducing impulse shopping.
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I think we do store stuff for the same reason we hold onto plummeting stocks – we don’t want to admit that things we spent money on have lost their value. We’re sure the value will return eventually, if we just hold onto it long enough. We don’t consider the cost of storing it versus the possible eventual value.
That isn’t always the whole story…There are plenty of people to whom things represent a deep emotional attachment to some person or time in their life. I keep a box of things from high school that have deep personal meaning to me but they have absolutely no practical use. People keep pictures (I know someone with over 40,000 photographs) for the same reason. It’s not that hard to see that emotion transfering up the object chain. When my grandfather died, my grandmother kept everything that he had in the house. Clothes and other personal items…she kept his false teeth in the bathroom! There are things people will never be willing to let go of because they are intimately tied to something in their life.
Everyone here who’s posting about how stuff is just stuff, and experiences are what’s important, I commend you; but you should ask yourself how much of that stuff you have you keep because of those experiences. I’ll bet it’s more than you want to admit.
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well, i’m an extreme minimalist. but my husband, he’s a third (or higher) generation packrat. over the years, i have gotten him to decrease his cache of stuff he “might need someday!” but still we have a storage unit.
i have to say we probably get more use out of our storage unit than most- he goes to visit twice a week to pick something up or put something back. and we shopped around and found one for $55/mo which i don’t like but is the cheapest available.
speaking of automotive hobbyists (as mentioned above) that’s what most of our storage is. most of the space is taken up now by a set of professional mechanic’s tools which cost us a year’s income. they will go back into use in about a year, and in the meantime they earn their keep in side jobs or minor repairs to our own vehicles, but we can’t haul that 500+ lb monster up the stairs to our second floor apartment. it was all we could do to load it on the truck!
i finally convinced him to ditch parts from our old car- they weren’t selling on ebay or craigslist. this freed up a lot of space. in the remaining space, we still have box after box of books he can’t part with, our holiday decor, a dishwasher i’m trying hard to sell, and things like that. he is down to about 4 plastic storage containers of personal effects that i prefer to call junk
every time he goes to visit his grandparents, they send him home with more stuff. and stuff from the grandparents can never leave us, because he’s so emotionally attached to them. it’s that stuff-emotion tie that people keep mentioning that i cannot get him to sever.
i hope to teach our future children that stuff is not the same as memories or happiness.
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Embarrassing Clutter Confession: I have an entire walk-in filled with stuff I want to get rid of. It’s been filled for nearly a year. Like others have mentioned, a lot of the feet-dragging has to do with me wanting to get some kind of value out the items, regardless of how much it’s all actually *worth.*
There should be a standardized Statute of Limitations on Gifted Crap. Like, how long am I supposed to keep an ugly snowglobe that was a bridesmaid gift? One year? Five? Forever? It’s time to draw a collective line in the sand.
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I’m recently engaged, and on my wedding invitations I plan on writing something to the effect of “Don’t give us gifts. If you insist of giving us something, give us cash please. We have everything we need like toasters, blenders, etc.”
When I get an invite and there’s a gift registry account # to some store I get annoyed and just give them a card with $20/40/etc in it, if I give anything at all.
Is asking for money instead of gifts lame? I think I’d be saving them the hassle of what to shop for: nothing!
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A lot of people use storage units when they move since it makes the move a lot easier.
We did this when we had to move twice in two years because of a big reno. The only problem is that we didn’t purge anything BEFORE the move so when we finally got around to going through the various boxes – 90% of it was just junk – which we had stored/moved several times
Mike
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One of my favorite people, William Morris, said one of my favorite things (which I’m paraphrasing): Keep only that which is useful, or is beautiful, or (and) is meaningful. This little rubric is how I try to approach my stuff.
I don’t actually have a need for a rented separate storage space. I manage just fine with my 850 sq ft apartment and the little storage shed off my patio (where I keep those empty moving boxes and my christmas stuff).
As far as keeping the memories — actually my most prized possessions of all are three big albums/scrapbooks that I’ve been putting together. One for my mother’s family/geneology, one for my father’s family/geneology, and one that is a scrapbook for all the most important stuff of my own life. These and a handful of framed photographs contain almost all the physical remnants of the memories that I need. The rest is mostly in small pieces of artwork.
With the onset of digital picture frames, it’s all the easier to digitize and display in a tight space mementoes of loved ones.
P.S. – I don’t think it’s lame to ask for money instead of a wedding gift. It’s honest — and it would be a great way to help fund the wedding or the honeymoon. I’ve also had friends ask for no gift or a donation to a favorite organization instead of cash.
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I really, really dread the day when I have to go through my mom and dad’s “stuff” or my grandparents “stuff”…they’re ALL very much into fluffing their nests with lots of cool stuff and I know its going to be heartwrenching to see all that stuff go – but there’s only my brother and I! There’s no way we’d be able to absorb all that stuff into our lives. So, it’s the thought of my future that keeps my present clear and simple. Kinda weird huh?
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It’s not exclusive to America. We have the same problem in Canada. Self-storage units are all over the place here, especially where I live, in oil-rich Alberta. People have more money than they’ve ever had, so they buy more Stuff that they’ve ever bought before…most of which they don’t need, of course.
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You know, some of your previous posts like this (and probably some other posts from places like The Simple Dollar, Dumb Little Man, etc) are part of the reason I’ve got $100 in my pocket today and a little less stuff.
See, I usually didn’t sell my textbooks back to the school bookstore. Partially because I didn’t buy them at the bookstore because of their insane prices. I usually keep them, thinking that I “might need them someday.” But after selling one back that I was sure I’d never need (and finding out that they don’t actually care if you bought it there or not), I went home and picked out a few more to sell back.
I’ll still end up keeping some textbooks–several they won’t take back, and I will probably legitimately need to refer to my Chemistry textbooks again. But I’m glad I was able to turn a few books that would just sit on my shelf into cash.
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@Sarah, #78:
“I suppose I don’t really ‘need’ the stuff I’m storing, but the alternative would be to go to job interviews in jeans and sandals, go through winter with no warm clothes or blankets, have to beg colleagues to lend me books (most of which aren’t available in the library) ”
If that’s indeed your situation then you clearly do need the stuff you’re storing. I think there’s a difference between your situation though and the vast majority of _long term storage renters_ who’ve acquired the spaces and then just keep filling them or never get around to sorting/purging them or otherwise dealing with them.
My dad is an example of the latter – he has 3 storage lockers filled with stuff from his downsized house. To be fair, he is making progress clearing the spaces out and he’s fighting with a degenerative condition so he has “good” days and “bad” days. He’s had the lockers about 5 or 6 years and the vast majority of stuff in there has neither financial nor sentimental value. It’s just Stuff that’s accumulated over the years. I’ve helped him clear out what I could – especially packaged food he doesn’t want any more. It’s really overwhelming though. Even for someone in their prime.
Seeing how much stress and anxiety my parents’ Stuff has added to their lives has really motivated me to declutter and be careful about what I bring into my apartment. It’s been a long journey – over 5 years – but I’m nearly there.
I also found this “De-cluttering Self-Questionaire” article by Holly of Spending Wisely to be immensely helpful and inspirational:
http://www.spendingwisely.com/?p=19
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@33, if you’re paying $119 a month to store baby things, that’s $1428 per year — a lot more than it would cost you to buy those things new again, I’d wager. There are kids’ resale shops (not to mention garage sales) in most towns where you can get hardly-used or never-used kids’ items for a lot less than $119 a month. And move the buffet into your house. There’s never going to be a “good” time for a buffet not to get bumped by kids — not for a good 18+ years in your case, anyway. That $1428 per year would go far if you put it into a tax-deductible college 529 fund. I think it goes to show how we can always fool ourselves that we’re saving money by spending it.
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Clutter wears you down. I recently did a bunch of decluttering primarily because I did not want to move a bunch of stuff with me to an apartment. Also, I had items which I had not touched in years. I agree with one of the other commenters that acquiring is must easier than ridding ones self of stuff. I need to purge some of my textbooks. Sad, when you pay $100+ for a book and then can’t get anything for it! That said, I have several books still in my possession from my college days that were around $75 at the time now fetching over $200 because of limited printing.
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When my mother died last August, I was overwhelmed by how much Stuff she owned. She lived in Michigan, my sister and I lived in California, and while we all called, emailed, and exchanged cards, neither of us had seen our somewhat reclusive mother in years. The task of clearing out her apartment of wonderful but … well … useless antiques and statuary and paintings was overwhelming. And then her best friend said, “oh, and don’t forget about her storage unit.” My jaw dropped and my eyes filled with tears. An entire unit filled with more statuary, antiques, old martial arts equipment, artwork, and collectibles! Nobody could say my mother didn’t have good taste and live an interesting life, but … I couldn’t figure out why she’d kept all this Stuff she obviously wasn’t using.
My sister and I ended up donating, giving away, and throwing away about 90% of the fascinating things our mother had spent so many years and so much money gathering. Only the most sentimentally important or materially valuable items came back to California with us, and we’re now trying to sell most of the latter. The experience of struggling to deal with all her Stuff was heartbreaking on top of her sudden and unexpected loss, and it made us both realize that just because we value something ourselves doesn’t mean our heirs will. We’ve both been purging our apartments since then.
Don’t store your stuff because “the kids might want it someday.” Your heirs don’t need that guilt trip as, in the midst of mourning your death, they attempt to reconcile their own taste and values with all the excess Stuff you’ve left them. Leave them good memories. The object that made me cry the hardest when I found it was the battered old copy of Alice in Wonderland my mom had read to me when I was a child. Small, valueless, but worth more to me than all the other Stuff she’d so assiduously bought and stored over the years.
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@Dru:
I hear exactly what you’re saying. In my own family, after my grandmother died my mom was the one tasked with clearing out a HUGE family home and store (store occupied most of the ground floor, family lived abovestairs) that had been in the family since 1903 and had housed multiple generations of family packrats (plus the remaining equipment/inventory of the store).
They hauled away tons of garbage and held yard sales every weekend for a whole summer, and mailed obscene amounts of stuff to the siblings and grandkids. My parents had both just retired so they basically moved to my grandmother’s town for about 6 months while cleaning out/repairing the house to sell it.
The silver lining to this cloud is it did finally start to loosen my parents’ own grip on their own horde of stuff. (Classic line: “We don’t want our daughter to go through this with our stuff.”
They’ve finally started to get why I’m constantly pruning my possessions. It used to really upset my mom when she’d discover I’d gotten rid of some knick-knack of mine that she’d liked. Now they are slowly, painfully starting to declutter themselves.
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I’ve been reading Peter Walsh’s book lately and I realize that I have too much stuff. With me it is media items – books (even though I’m a librarian and there’s no need for me to personally buy books), DVDs and CDs. I’m moving to another city soon and I want to reduce everything I can down to a single carload. I’m going to decase my 250 DVDs (I’ve bought roughly one a week over the past 5 years) and store them in CD wallets. I’m not quite ready to digitize them all. I’ll reduce my books down to 30 well-loved tomes. I’ll donate the rest to a charity book sale. CDs go in CD wallets. Again I could digitize these, but there aren’t that many to worry about.
I think in my case the problem is packaging. Things could be stored more compactly if given some thought.
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For those ready to decase their DVDs and CDs, Allsop.com has a really nice line (No financial connection, just love their products). They have some albums holding 40 or more discs and look perfect on the shelf with your books.
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We have a slight problem with hording too, except a lot of the things we horde really are junk/trash – food packaging/cartons, cans, greeting cards, etc. because we keep thinking of ways that we can re-use them and turn them into something useful so can’t bear throwing them away.
For example, boxes can be covered with paper or fabric to become attractive storage containers, so when we buy a bulk box of cereal, we feel compelled to keep the box. It sometimes gets to the point where we have all this trash sitting around the house waiting to be converted into something useful that we get sick of it finally end up chucking most of it. :rolleyes:
As for other stuff, as JD mentioned in this post, frugal living really does help cut down on acquisition of new junk. Sometimes I hate that I always feel guilty whenever I spend money/buy something, but there is an upside to it.
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@Katherine (#25): That particular statement is underlined and then highlighted and then reiterated by my landlord when we were going thru and doing the move-in inventory of damage from the last tenant. It’s a very old house, repairing the walls is very difficult work, especially since they’re not flat walls (they’re textured), and he specifically asked me NOT to hang things on the walls unless I was going to use the pre-existing holes and leftover nails from the last tenant (not many). The tenant before had put a nail in a wall, and then had to call the landlord at 2am to figure out why the wall cracked from floor to ceiling.
If it were a drywall wall with flat paint that I could putty over and throw a layer of paint on, fine–I’ve done that at all my previous apartments. But apparently, the money I save in rent I have to pay in headache and clutter as A majority of the things I have I DO try to use, but I can’t GET to them when the boxes are stacked two deep from the wall!
My fiance and I swore up and down we weren’t moving after a year though, and now he wants to stay here until we buy a house–don’t ask him to save any money for that idea though, he has cigarettes and booze to buy *eyeroll*… I figure if I’m stuck here, I’d like to be able to have access to my floor, AND the stuff I can’t get to.
As far as garage sales and donations go… useless, pointless, and unless you have antiques or collectibles, don’t make any money. I’ve done it twice before, I refuse to get paid $2 an hour for my time, and I haven’t wasted my money on such frivolities as antiques to have anything worth selling. Besides, I get all my taxes back every year because hey, I’m not rich! So donating isn’t lucrative. Having the space to use everything I have is lucrative though.
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In the 90s, I bought a huge house with 6 bedrooms. It reminded me of a museum, with rooms we never, ever went into. The rooms gathered dust and I would go around dusting like a curator. After I lost the house in my first round of BK, I vowed to never again buy a McMansion. I moved from a huge house into a little 3 bedroomed house to save money. The realtor thought I was mad, which I most likely am. We had garage sales to end all garage sales to sell off all the museum stuff. It took months to finally empty out the garage so that we could even get into it. From that house, I moved into another big house but I am approaching things a little differently now. With 6 people living together full time, a 3 bed house just aint gonna cut it. I made a point of not filling the house like a museum. Instead, I put in wood floors and minimal furniture (think Nordic) and we all really enjoy the space and total lack of clutter. The 4 car garage houses our cars and weight/workout/camping equipment and that’s it. Everything else either gets sold or hauled away. Having been a hunter and gatherer on an epic wasteful scale, I am amazed that I have been able to overcome the packrat mentality – it sure wasn’t easy.
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yl said: “if my parents and grandparents thought they were important enough to save and bring with them from China, I don’t want to throw them away.”
Have you explored the possibility of donating those items with historical value to a museum or archive that specializes in your parents’ culture/era? That could be the perfect solution… You’d stop having to store and move the items, yet could fully respect the items provenance…
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What about some of the stuff you ‘might’ need one day? I am a true anti-stuff person. I have a really hard time with items like the 7 different sizes of curtain rods that are standing in the back of the closet. Although I have not used one of them in three years, some of the nicer ones were quite pricy. My frugal side makes me keep them, but the anti-stuff side of me cringes at the thought that they are still there in the closet. Do you give them away, and purchase new ones if you ever have need of that particular size or style again? Or do you keep them since with the idea of home decorating in mind, the investment is substantial enough to hang on to them? I also have two complete ceiling fans – from an apartment we had two years ago. These were $15.00 each and since buying a house have used two of them. There are still two left over. Would you recommend keeping these kind of items for when you need them again (which is a possibility) or just donate them and then buy more if the need should arise? It is a puzzlement for me.
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