About a year ago, at the advice of GRS readers, I started an experiment. I took all of the shirts and sweaters from my clothes closet and moved them into our spare room. Whenever I needed something to wear, I checked the clothes closet first. If what I needed wasn’t there (as was often the case at first), I went to the spare room to find it. After I’d worn a shirt or sweater once, it was allowed to return to its home in the main clothes closet.<\/p>\n
The results of this experiment probably won’t be very surprising. After a couple of weeks during which I was reclaiming my favorite shirts, most of the rest remained unused. For an entire year.<\/i><\/p>\n
On Tuesday, I gritted my teeth, grabbed the 37 shirts and sweaters still left in the spare room, and took them to a local thrift store. Some of the things I donated had never been worn (or had been worn just a couple of times). It hurt to part with those clothes. I probably spent more than $750 to purchase them (remember, I buy a lot of clothes at thrift stores), so in a way it felt like I was throwing away $750.<\/p>\n
But it occurred to me that’s the wrong way to look at it. I’m not throwing that money away now<\/i>. I threw away that $750 years ago when I bought the clothes I wasn’t ever going to wear. (Plus, I’ve managed to get rid of a bunch of Stuff, which was the whole point of this project in the first place.)<\/p>\n
Over the past few weeks, I’ve bought a handful of new shirts to fill some gaps in my wardrobe. But I’ve made a vow to myself: I never want to buy clothes compulsively again. It used to be I’d go into Costco or Goodwill or wherever, and if I saw a shirt or sweater I liked, I’d buy it \u2014 even if I didn’t have a need for it. Now, though, I want to apply my new-found financial discipline to my wardrobe. Instead of buying lots of cheap stuff, I’m going to allow myself to purchase nice stuff (I like the clothes at REI<\/a>), but only when I have a need for something.<\/p>\n Now that this project is over, it’s made me think:<\/p>\n My guess is that of the things I own, probably 20% of the Stuff gets 80% of the use. While a part of me wants to be brave and simply pare down what I own to just the bare essentials, I haven’t reached that mental space yet. I’m too attached. But maybe I’ll get there in a few years. For now, I’m just happy to have trimmed my wardrobe down to a manageable size.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" About a year ago, at the advice of GRS readers, I started an experiment. I took all of the shirts and sweaters from my clothes closet and moved them into our spare room. Whenever I needed something to wear, I checked the clothes closet first. If what I needed wasn’t there (as was often the case at first), I went to the spare room to find it. After I’d worn a shirt or sweater once, it was allowed to return to its home in the main clothes closet.<\/p>\n The results of this experiment probably won’t be very surprising. After a couple of weeks during which I was reclaiming my favorite shirts, most of the rest remained unused. For an entire year.<\/i><\/p>\n On Tuesday, I gritted my teeth, grabbed the 37 shirts and sweaters still left in the spare room, and took them to a local thrift store. Some of the things I donated had never been worn (or had been worn just a couple of times). It hurt to part with those clothes. I probably spent more than $750 to purchase them (remember, I buy a lot of clothes at thrift stores), so in a way it felt like I was throwing away $750.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[488],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25061"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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