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The hidden (and not so hidden) financial costs of clutter…

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Do you know that your clutter could be costing you a FORTUNE in both time, and money?  It may or may not be obvious, but for many, this could add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars every year. There are some obvious ways… like late charges for bills you misplaced (or even worse…credit damage!) and duplicate buying of things you have but cannot find. Clutter, even if it’s organized, complicates your life and makes it easier to make these sorts of mistakes. It goes even deeper though!

Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/hans-2/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=227972">Hans Braxmeier</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=227972">Pixabay</a>
Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay

Financial Costs of Clutter

  • Your kitchen counters/cabinets, sink and fridge are a mess and you can’t get inspired to cook or find what you need, let alone physically have room to do it. Instead, you often use less-healthy, more expensive pre-packaged convenience foods, fast food and dining out. Dining out for a special occasion or treat here and there doesn’t have to be a budgetary nightmare, but grabbing something because you can’t wrap your brain around cooking a healthy meal at home, can be. And a lifetime of this behavior can also lead to health problems, which can be costly. Many of us don’t have the energy to plan and cook if we have to work around clutter and mess.
  • You’re out of space at home, so you rent a storage unit and fill it with the clutter that you don’t want to part with. This can cost $80-100/mo or more in many places, for a standard 5×10′ or 10×10′ unit. If you don’t spring for climate-controlled, you’re ruining your stuff as well if you live anywhere with hot/cold/damp weather any part of the year. I’m not 100% opposed to storage units for a specific purpose (moving, getting ready to move, temporarily storing items you KNOW you will use regularly soon but truly have no room for and can’t declutter) but in most cases, storage units are filled with mostly random crap we really do not need and could not name if pressed to do so. And we pay ~$1200/yr for the privilege of keeping that crap.
  • Maybe you’ve upgraded the size of your living space in order to better house your stuff, and not the people, in your life? Did you have to buy a 5 bedroom house when your family only sleeps in 2 of them, because you have so many office supplies, craft supplies, etc. that you need an entire room to store them? Did you pay more for a 3-4 car garage, cause of your unused stuff? Or perhaps you needed the house with the huge attic or basement, and you only use them for stuff? Unless you make a living (of any kind) from these creative/craft/office exploits, or they’re a part of your daily life, maybe it’s not necessary to have entire rooms dedicated?
  • You’re more depressed/anxious because clutter has been show to result in higher stress-hormone levels in women and now you spend $100s per month on medication, therapy and supplements. And when you’re depressed, you might shop more to feel better, and you’ll probably cook at home less, and be less healthy.
  • You can’t park cars inside your garage due to using it for storage, and that adds up to more wear/tear on your vehicles’ interior and exterior, as well as potentially other even more important parts.
  • You buy gifts and other needed items on sale, lose them, re-buy them, use them and then find the original once it’s too late to return.
  • You purchase more and more toys and other items for children because they seem to be bored of what they have, when in actuality they are probably overwhelmed and would enjoy less, which would save you money!
  • You spend spend spend on items to help you declutter or organize what you have. Storage furniture, containers, dividers, labels, books, courses on dealing with clutter…these ALL add up. Yes, sometimes we need to buy a few things to contain things we need, but if we’re containing things we don’t need, that is wasteful.

Non-Financial Costs of Clutter

  • Clutter and mess make it difficult to clean and find things, and impossible to stay organized. This can cause stress between spouses or even between parents and children.
  • Relationships outside your household suffer because your house is too cluttered/messy/dirty to have friends over, host gatherings, etc.
  • So much time is wasted searching for keys, wallets, purses, sunglasses, paperwork, etc.  What do you make per hour? What is your time worth?
  • You won’t be as productive in a sea of clutter, whether you’re working, doing hobbies, spending time with family. It gets in the way. And if weighs heavily on us. Many of us can’t fully enjoy ourselves or ever relax with a massive clutter issue hanging over our heads.
  • You can’t clean, maintain, update your house because it’s too cluttered. Your house suffers, and you suffer emotionally, in addition to financially.
  • Your spending is focused on stuff rather than experiences, and there isn’t any left for those experiences. This is the human cost of clutter. Not only does keeping your clutter in check take time away that could be spent with family and friends, the money you spend takes away from experiences you could share with them…vacations, day trips, zoos, museums, activities, etc.

Increased Costs for Moving Due to Clutter

  • Your home will take longer to sell if it’s cluttered, and maybe because it will be less clean, or look that way, due to clutter. Buyers can’t picture themselves living there if there is clutter (including too much decor)…even if it’s neat.
  • You may make significantly less money.
  • Larger/more moving vehicles, packing materials, packing, loading/unloading and unpacking will cost more in TIME and MONEY whether you do it all, hire out part of it or hire out all of it.

Some challenges to consider if you’re falling into a costly clutter trap…

There are different ways to tackle clutter. One way is to work on just one room at a time, and complete the room. One potential drawback is that if you remove items from that room that need to go elsewhere, you could be creatings piles you can’t process, or adding clutter to other rooms. I often find myself with piles of things I feel I need to keep, but nowhere to keep them. This can sometimes create more mess than before!

Another option is to focus on different types of clutter first, but sweep the whole house at each stage, and not indivual rooms. Go room to room and gather EVERYTHING you could throw away/recycle. In bedrooms and bathrooms this would include expired and/or unused cosmetics, toiletries, supplements, medications, etc. as well as clothing. You might want to save clothing for its own day, since it can be overwhleming the first time you tackle it. In living areas it may just include things you don’t need or read that are too worn out to donate or sell.

Once that step is complete, you go back through and grab everything you can donate, give away to someone you know or sell. Gather it up, drop it off, list it, etc. Choose a place in your home to keep it while you work on it, like a box in the garage or near a door you use often. I find that putting donations straight into the back of my vehicle is convenient since I’m eliminating the step of having to load a lot of stuff later, and I have to drop it off before I can pick up groceries, etc. It can’t get forgotten there.

Once THAT step is complete, it’s a good time to go back to closets and tackle clothing, shoes and linens. And then sentimental items. And then books. These things tend to be harder to deal with, but also are easier to contain and won’t necessarily bog down your WHOLE home.

Emergency meal planning…

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I’ve mentioned before that my family recently suffered a 35% pay cut.  We had no notice and a tiny bit of severance, and this all started during the holidays and just a couple months after we closed on our home.  We had some legal issues related to the home we were leasing and we’d just plunked down the bulk of the remainder of our emergency fund to retain legal help.  We had to drop the case after the lay-off.  The timing of everything just really was all wrong.

I recently started a new business doing custom vinyl graphics and lettering.  I started it mostly for fun and now I’m doing it out of necessity, hoping to grow it into a supplemental income that will actually help our family.  I’m OK with this, because I LOVE IT and I’ve expanded into a Sign Shop rather than “just” a sticker shop!  I’m doing OK, but still really stuck at that stage where everything I make gets reinvested, plus a little more at times.  I’m still buying necessary supplies and already find myself in need of a larger cutting machine and a wide format color printer, which is another chunk of money.

We’re OK…the mortgage is paid…but I find myself in the uncomfortable position of doing some juggling to keep the other bills paid.  We’re expecting a bonus that should allow us to get caught up but in the meantime, I’ve been examining our spending to figure out what else we can cut.

I discovered that our largest expenditure monthly is still food.  We definitely are still spending way too much money eating out and way too much at the grocery store.  It’s amazing how $5 here and $15 there can REALLY add up in a month’s time.  I estimated we were spending $200 per month on fast food and in reality it was more like $400-500 per month if I count the times my hubby eats lunch out for work.  Add in actual sit-down restaurants and OUCH!

As far as groceries go, I’ve been experimenting shopping different places to see how much less I can spend and I’ve determined that Sam’s and Costco really are my best bet for the things I can buy at those stores, as long as we don’t waste any of what we buy.  (That’s a big IF…it’s really hard to use up the fresh produce even though I’m trying!)  I’ve given up most organics 🙁 but I have gone back to organic milk, although when I am at Sam’s I *will* buy their regular milk since it’s hormone/antibiotic-free.  The regular milk at my local grocery choices (Super Target and Super Walmart usually) just is not fresh enough for me and often tastes as though it’s already “turned” when we open it.  But enough about my snobby milk tastes and back to “How can I spend very little on food over the next couple months?”

There are great “emergency” meal plans online, but they either assume you have ingredients on hand that I don’t already have, or they are set up for you to shop for everything you need, which for me isn’t quite what I need, because I have a LOT in my pantry.  I just am not sure of how to put it together!  If my pantry and fridge were completely bare, I’d follow Hillbilly Housewife’s plan but thankfully for us, we’ve got stuff sitting around that we can use if we can figure out how to use it!

While I’m not a stockpiler, I am very guilty of buying certain foods and letting them languish in my pantry till they’re too old to use or I give up and give them away in a purge because I can’t think of a way to use them.  I have a big sack of lentils purchased online that are doing that VERY thing!

Since I’m visual and tactile, my plan of attack involved taking those things that I want to use OUT of my pantry and setting them out on the kitchen table.  From there I was able to create a meal plan based on what I saw and then put the items back, but only after I wrote down what I had, so I could remember to actually USE those things.

The really nice part is that everything I use from the pantry or freezer is basically FREE to me at this point!  (Yes, I know I once bought the stuff but most of it has been there at least 6 months and will feed us without taking any $$ out of our current budget.)

My other money-saving food idea is to give in and buy some of the convenience foods I’d long ago given up.  I’ve got two teenagers (and a husband) to feed and they are perfectly happy to chow down on canned raviolis, frozen pizzas, boxed cereal or Kraft mac and cheese when they are hungry and in a hurry.  As great as meal-planning and slow cookers are, I just can’t ALWAYS have something perfectly wholesome and healthful ready to grab at just the right moment.  All the time.  If I were anywhere near perfect, I probably could figure it out, but I’m not.  I am still struggling.

Hungry kids on the run lead to fast food visits that aren’t planned; packaged and convenience foods are cheaper, plain and simple.  I try to limit these, of course, and I keep some healthy and quick (good quality protein bars, nuts, trail mix, fruit, cut up veggies) on hand also.  I just would rather the kids eat a few $1 cans of raviolis than get find myself talked into am unplanned $28 Chik-Fil-A visit on the nights were in the car running from dance to music to whatever.

I did really well for about a week but I’ve caved quite a few times in the last several days.  We did Chik-Fil-A (times 2), Rubios (times 3) and Taco Bell (times 3).  Well, it’s only the 6th of the month, so if I’m “good” from now on, I can forgive myself.

How I reduced my kids’ wardrobes AND my stress…

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My kids have too many clothes.  Waaaaaay too many.  Especially my nine year old daughter.  When my older kids (now 15 and 18) were younger, we were pretty broke and I couldn’t buy a lot of nice clothes for them.  My mom loved to buy them clothes and that was nice, but it was never what I liked or would have chosen.  So with my younger two kiddos, I enjoyed that we were much better off and that I was able to buy them clothes and shoes without a lot of concern about budgets or limits.

With our recent income drop (35% less) I’ve been more aware of our newly rekindled committment to be frugal in all areas of our spending.  I realized that my biggest spending issue with the kids’ clothing was the quantity, not the quality.  This thought (the thought that they have way too much) actually came to me not when I was concerned about money but when I was sitting in my room literally surrounded by clean clothes up to my shoulders.  I have been dreading organizing and putting away the kids’ clean clothes since there are about six baskets’ full and really, nowhere to put it all.  I decided that I would go through all their clothes and pare it all down to a pre-determined, manageable amount.  I also realized that it’s easier to think I need to buy them more clothing when what they have is a disorganized mess and not properly put away (aka, living in laundry baskets all over my room).

How many clothes do young kids really need?  Another interesting question, as I realized my kids really only regularly use about 25% of their clothes.  They seem to re-wear the same items over and over and most of it just sits unless they run out of that favorite 25%.  My daughter dances and she has way more dance outfits than she could ever wear.  She is at the studio twice a week for two hours each time and on one of those days, she has to wear a black leo with black dance shorts…so all those adorable dance outfits I’ve bought since she got serious about dance can only be worn in a rotatation, once a week.  She probably doesn’t need more than 2-3 of them.  I won’t admit how many she has.

I’m a numbers person, so I wanted to create guidelines based on numbers.  I knew it’d be easier to stick with getting rid of all the excess if I had firm guidelines that were logical to me.  So I set it up like this:

three dressy outfits (appropriate for choir rehearsals or going out to dinner)

three lounge outfits (the things they like to lounge around or sleep in)

for the boy, four jeans and four denim shorts

for the girl, four skorts and four leggings

for each about 10 t-shirts/tops (these get changed more often)

two bathing suits each (when they have one, it gets worn out and faded too early in summer)

two sweatshirts each

one jacket

The actual numbers will vary from family to family, based on individual needs but my overall goal was to reduce quantity to an amount that easily fits in the space we have and also can be washed and put away in a couple loads.

Mission accomplished.

 

 

Money Management for Dummies

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*I’m the dummy.  I’m terrible at following a budget.  Even when I think I’m doing awesome, I usually end up with some sort of shortfall.  That was taking a toll on our savings account, so T and I put our heads together and came up with a brilliant (mostly his idea!) plan.

I sort of feel like a 50’s housewife with an “allowance” but we’ve implemented this new method for April and so far, I can see that it will make keeping track of our spending trends and our savings, much easier than before.  It also helps me keep our grocery and eating-out budgets reigned in…we’ve had months where we’ve gone over those 2-3x!

So, here’s the plan.  It requires 3 accounts.  We have a money market for savings and two checking accounts.  So, all T’s paychecks go into the savings.  Every last cent.

This number is the number we have to work with every month when the first comes around.  Then from there, that amount of money is routed to the checking accounts, after being divided appropriately.  We picked a number that we can spend, in total, each month, AFTER contributing 1/3 of our income to savings.  This remaining 2/3 *should* cover all our expenses, possibly (hopefully!) with some left over.

Checking #1 is for our recurring/fixed expenses.  This includes rent, insurance (auto, pet, life), Tom’s commute costs, utilities, subscription services, the kids’ classes/lessons, etc.  Everything that is paid monthly or yearly.  The yearly items were divided by 12 and added to the monthly amount.

Checking #2 is for our “discretionary” spending.  This includes groceries, my gas, clothes, shoes, household, home school supplies, outings, treats, eating out, entertainment, etc.  I chose to give myself a disbursement on the 1st and again on the 15th, since I knew it’d be easier to budget it all out if I only had to think ahead two weeks at a time.
I really don’t want to overspend and run out of money when we need groceries, for example.  So the “discretionary” amount is divided by two, and transferred twice a month.I like this plan because I can now pay the entire month’s fixed bills at the beginning of the month, without having to juggle them around paydays (which aren’t fixed.
I *love* not worrying about due dates!!  I also don’t have to worry that if we overspend on discretionary items that we’ll end up strapped when a big bill comes due.  It’s been tough to pay rent, student loans and our electric bill all around the first.  Our largest outlay occurs before the 10th of the month and then from the 15th on, there’s really nothing major due.  This led to overspending (month after month) during the second half of the month, even though it would have been smart to try and carry something over to the new month (I *did* say I’m the dummy!).

The only caveat is that this required “seeding” our first month from our savings account.  It makes me a little nervous to see that savings # fall downward a notable amount, but I know that the majority of the next 4 paychecks will be going into savings, so by the end of this month, it should be back to where we started…and by the end of next month it should show more growth.

I use YNAB to manage everything and this concept is technically known as the “buffer” in that system.  The idea of YNAB is that the money that you make this month will pay next month’s bills, but this assumes you’re using last month’s money to pay this month’s.  That’s your “buffer.”   It can take months to set aside a full month’s income to create your buffer, unless you tap into your savings account.   If you check the forums there, you’ll see that there’s a constant discussion about whether or not it’s safe to fund your “buffer” with savings.  Most people agree it’s safe, but only if you commit to putting future income back into savings once you’re living from your buffer. Of course this isn’t an option for people who haven’t yet established savings.  No shame in that, but it should be a goal.  I wouldn’t tap into an “emergency fund” to seed a buffer, but since we’ve managed to save beyond that since we began saving 1/3 of our income, I felt safe tapping that account to seed our new plan.