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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Clean House on the Style Network is a show that depicts people hanging onto junk. Although I’ve never seen an episode where the people had a storage unit, I did see one episode where the husband built an add on storage area the size of a garage. Yet the lady still could keep her stuff organized with the extra room!
I find that taking a picture really does help me let go of stuff. I don’t know why but it works.
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Clutter-phobes may want to read the book “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder.” While not all clutter is good (pathological clutter may be a sign of mental illness), some chaos probably won’t hurt you and may even be beneficial. Clutter itself doesn’t get me down so much as the expectation of having my house Dwell-ready at all times. (I have ADHD. If I can walk from one end of my apartment to the other without tripping or otherwise injuring myself, it’s a good thing.) I live here, and I don’t care if it looks like I do. That said, I know it’s time for a major whirlwind clean when I repeatedly can’t find what I’m looking for, more clothes don’t fit than fit, and I trip over stuff. (I am what the book calls a cycler.)
Fortunately for me, I move every year and a half, so I’m forced to reevaluate my things on a regular basis.
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Since 1992 my parents, retired in Florida, have been renting a storage unit; my dad currently pays $107 per month. (Yes–$1284/year. Ouch!)
They originally rented out the unit primarily to store bulky items (workbench, tables, ceramic supplies) that they thought they might use once settled into Florida. However, they quickly cluttered up their new house with more ceramic studio stuff, home improvement stuff, etc., so maintained things in storage. In other words, they got settled without dealing with the stored stuff, so they basically shelled out money every month since then in order not to upset the reigning peace. All of my suggestions to downsize were met with protests such as: “We hope to get back into using kilns to fire ceramics” and “We plan on building a side addition to the house, so will need the tools” and “some of this stuff is worth a lot of money, so we can’t just get rid of it.”
Sigh.
Now that my mom has passed away, my dad knows that he needs to close out the unit, but it’s tough for him. He collects stuff in general–he still has every computer that he’s ever owned, and he thinks they’re all worth something and potentially useful–even the Compaq computer from 1987! All of these things represent a more youthful past for him, a time when his life was on the upswing; to get rid of these things is, in a way, for him, to accept the defeat of old age. I can sort of see his point: to get rid of the big workbench would be an admission that that stage of life has passed. But he knows he has to do it…. The trick is getting him to do it, or giving me permission to do it for him. It’s really tough. Pictures don’t suffice for holding memories; in this case, it’s Stuff–way too much of it.
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My parents have all the stuff they have accumulated in their 50+ years of marriage. The 2 car garage barely fits one car. They have four Grandfather clocks purchased in Germany (about a hundred years old). My great grandfather was a wood carver and made beautiful detailed shranke/wardrobe and bookcases that my father has. It won’t fit into my house and I urged him to sell them to get income. He won’t get rid of anything, his hording is excessive. He still has all the lead weights that he collects off the road that came off car tires because the lead can be made into fishing weights. I see it as hazmat. My mom stores stacks of butter containers because they may come in handy. I get ill just visiting their house with floor to ceiling clutter. Vhs tapes, thousands of them which most likely are degraded from age. AAARGH!
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One my friend uses the following technique to answer the question if he needs some stuff when it comes to uncluttering. He calculates how big area it will take to store something. Then he calculates how much money he should spend to leave this thing, how it is really useful and how often he will use it. And after that he compares if the cost and use of something are bigger than the cost of storing. If no, that thing goes out.
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Too. Much. Stuff. The only time I’ve ever had a storage unit was when I was moving around a ton for a few months and needed somewhere to store my “home” while I was living a floating lifestyle. I’ve always been one to strive for simplicity and few possessions; whenever I get to a certain point of ownership, I start to feel the things all creeping up on me! It’s then that I go a little nuts and do a major purge.
The last purge I did was two months ago, entitled The Simplicity Challenge. I blogged all about it, as I was going through the process of letting go. It takes a lot of effort, even if you’re as un-materialistic as I am.
Speaking of stuff, after seeing the video you linked to called Possessed, I was in the throes of my Simplicity Challenge and got a little obsessed with reading about stuff. I wrote a three-part series on stuff: why we want it, keep it, and have such a hard time parting with it. I believe I quote you somewhere within the series. The three posts start out with part one, Why Do We Have So Much Stuff? http://www.antishay.com/?p=70
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My husband was horrible at throwing things out- I would routinely pick up an item and ask him “what is this?” “I don’t know” he would reply. “Do you need it?” “Maybe- what is it?” -roll eyes and throw out.- Now he is much better since he has realized that he doesn’t miss any of the things we have tossed. We do have an area where we keep things that we think we don’t need but aren’t positive. If we haven’t used it in the last year it is gone. Part of spring cleaning.
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Had the same experience as many others with my parents’ hoarding after they passed away. Actually my brother did since he was executor, and the only one who could stay at their home long enough to go through the stuff. What he did was a 3 step process:
- Asked each “kid” to identify stuff they’d like to keep
- Had different folks (used book/video marketer, auctioneer, professional “yard saler”, used clothing person, etc) come through and identify what they would want to purchase and gave him estimates as to value of those things the “kids” wanted to keep.
- After all the various persons had carted off and paid for/auctioned what they could, there was a huge house sale run by the pro and almost everything was sold. What was left was donated to Goodwill.
- The proceeds were distributed amongst the heirs MINUS the value of what we had “claimed”.
It was a huge undertaking, and I think he was there at least a month getting things squared away. Glad it wasn’t me, but he did a great job with help from wonderful family friends.
I remember one of the more amusing discoveries was an old chest freezer full of
[stockpiled] toilet paper rolls.
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Self storage is not just recession proof, in fact, it BENEFITS during recessions, depressions and inflations. Why? Because people are more likely to downsize they living space when they are in bad economic shape!
Those who are able and willing to, liquidate their stuff, as it costs more to store certain things than it does to own it.
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