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Declutter while you can

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Yesterday evening Cassie and I walked past a down-at-the-heels house in the neighborhood, its paint peeling, its roof tired, and its lawn going to weeds. At one time, the owners had a lovely, bountiful vegetable garden-someone who lived there loved to putter in the yard. Traces of their handiwork persist: the now feral vegetable patch overgrowing with weeds and bermudagrass, a trellis with a grapevine still producing lush bunches of deep purple grapes, big grapefruit trees strong and green from years of fertilizing and canny tending.

Rare among Southwesterners, these people never fenced their backyard, so you can see everything. The gardener’s old wheelbarrow lies on its side next to the house, its bottom rusted through. Mildewing frost cloths and decrepit shade curtains clutter the back porch.

At first I thought the house had been abandoned, its owners carted off to the nursing home or at least departed to cooler climes for the summer. But last night someone was home, the lights on so you could see inside the family room.

A Case Study in Clutter

What a mess in there! The place is stacked with junk: something that looked like an old exercise machine or an upended table and piles of clutter and trash that should have been thrown out years ago. Until the elderly occupant, unaware of our presence, closed the blinds on the kitchen door, you could see that room was chuckablock full of junk, too.

When we rounded the corner where the house stands, we found a car in the driveway and the garage door open. There was, after all, room for a single vehicle to fit in among the junk in the two-car garage, and so, since the driver hadn’t put the car inside, it’s possible the woman in the kitchen was a caretaker and not the homeowner. What a tangle in the garage! The place was stacked several feet out from the walls with tools, containers of household chemicals, and general junk. Someone had conceived the brilliant idea of using the pull rope for the retractable attic ladder as a device to hang bags full of old plastic grocery bags-and they must have stored a 30-year supply there! Great balloons of plastic bags stuffed with more plastic bags hung from the attic ladder rope, blocking the way to the kitchen door.

Amazing.

Don’t do this to your relatives.When you croak over — which could be any day now, no matter what your age — someone else will have to come into your house and clean out the mess. Have a little mercy. There’s no need to keep your megacollection of toy cars, hub caps, old clocks, plastic flowers, and multifarious sets of dishes with you at all times. Or every plastic bag you ever dragged home from the supermarket.

It is not frugal, not thrifty, to keep and stash every piece of junk you’ve ever managed to acquire, no matter how great a bargain it was when you got your hands on it. To the contrary: the constant acquisition of stuff drains your wealth. While you’re still healthy enough to take care of it, it burdens you with a clutter of junk to have to clean and store. When you’re too old to keep on dusting and scrubbing, it leaves you living in squalor amid stacks of mouldering debris.

The garage you paid for is meant to store your car, not trash. The space inside your house, for which you also paid dearly, is for you to live in, not to collect dust on trinkets and trash

If my neighbor had called an estate sale company and unloaded every piece of clutter that she wasn’t using, she could have had a nice chunk of cash to brighten her old age. At the very least, it would have paid for a weekend in Laughlin, Nevada

A true frugalist lives simply. And that simple lifestyle does the frugalist and her heirs a great favor: less junk to take care of means more time to enjoy healthier pursuits.

Principles of Decluttering

Here are the rules I try to live by:

  1. If I haven’t used it in a year, it goes to charity or gets sold.
  2. Nothing sits on a tabletop or counter unless it has a use.
  3. One use may be decorative, but this should be kept to a minimum: just enough to soften a stark look.
  4. I try to put things away when I’m done using them.
  5. Everything should have a place, and the “place” should be inside a drawer or a cabinet.
  6. The walls are festooned with as little stuff as possible, and what’s on the walls is the best quality artwork or crafts I can afford. Except in my office, I don’t clutter the walls with family photos.
  7. I discard empty containers, with few exceptions.
  8. It took some doing, but I finally trained myself to quit collecting old jars, boxes, cans, and fancy clothing-store bags simply because maybe someday they might come in handy. Nine and a half times out of ten, they don’t.
  9. If I find I’m not using a handy-dandy old bottle, out it goes.
  10. I do keep plastic bags, because I have two uses for them: wrapping garbage and picking up after the dog.
  11. But if I didn’t have these uses, I’d use canvas shopping bags or ask for paper bags at the store, to keep that filmy, infinitely lasting plastic out of the landfills.
  12. Instead of stuffing bags to be reused inside a plastic grocery bag hung on a nail, I use a couple of Kleenex-box-like bag holders, scored at Costco. Much neater.
  13. I have one set of dishware, not sets for everyday use and sets for entertaining and my grandmother’s Lenox from Tiffany’s. It’s a decent set of stoneware in a timeless style, which I eat from every day and which I feel comfortable using to serve guests. Ditto the glasses. Ditto the silverware.
  14. I own one set of sheets, one set of towels per bathroom, one set of kitchen towels. When they’re dirty, I wash them and put them back on the bed or into the bathroom.

Simplicity Makes Your Life Better — Long-term

It’s so much easier to clean house when you don’t have to pick up a lot of tchochkies, dust each of them, and dust around them! The less junk you acquire, the less work it is to care for your living environment.

From the vantage point of some maturity, it’s easy to see that developing habits of simplicity — decluttering your life early on and keeping it decluttered — will serve you well as you age. Not only will you save a great deal of cash over the years by not collecting junk that you rarely or never use, the easier it is to take care of your home, the longer you’re likely to be able to stay in your home. If cleaning around your stacks of junk is a major project, at some point along the line you will decide the heck with it. And it won’t be long afterwards that your kids will decide you can’t take care of yourself and move you to the old-folkerie…or worse, in with them!

1 Comment left on iWeb site

Anonymou

Hi, Vicky

At age 50, my spouse and I moved into a new home.I gave away 35 boxes of stuff to Goodwill.It felt so good that I’ve continued to go through the spaces of my new home with a critical eye.I frequently ask myself, have I used this in the last year?No.It’s gone.From experience, I know my daughter and son-in-law will appreciate this.

When my mother-in-law died three years ago, my husband and I cleared out her home in three days.We were able to do this because she had already disposed of all the unessential stuff from her life.

In fact, a couple years prior, my husband spent a few days with her (in another state) and helped her go through her house with the goal of eliminating stuff.They trashed stuff, they kept what Mom still needed, they gave stuff away, they boxed a few things for my husband to bring home, and they had a yard sale.

I believe they made a meaningful experience out of the process.Stuff helped them remember and relive the past.It also helped them consider the present and the future and what Mom was going to need in her last years.Certainly not the collection of mouse Christmas tree ornaments or the collection of 50’s era Hummel, which she worried would disappear with the inevitable strangers she would employ in her home.She wanted to be sure that we would keep the Hummel (with their historiical, sentimental, and real value) in the family.

And yes, Mom pocketed some cash.Further, she felt good about giving away things to people who would enjoy them.But most of all, she maintained control.She made the decisions about her own stuff and about how she would live out her future.

Mom left Hungary during WWII with one small suitcase.Perhaps it is with this perspective that at 80 she was able to make decisions about discarding stuff.I believe, though, that she relieved herself of the burdens associated with keeping stuff.

You offer helpful suggestions for people considering the usefulness of their stuff.Today we have various avenues for unloading stuff.We can give it to fmaily, friends, and/or charities.My friend puts it on the curb with a FREE sign on it.We can use Ebay to send stuff all over the world.My husband has amazingly good luck selling online.We have craigslist.

I personally don’t want to be burdened with all this stuff.I’m all for spreading mine around

Saturday, July 26, 2008 – 09:50 AM

Dollars and nickels and dimes, oh my!

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Seven-thirty in the morning and I’m beat. The pool has been backwashed, the unhappy pool cleaner set in motion (again!), the rug backing Cassie pee’d on in last night’s panic at the vacuum cleaner run through the washer and hung on the line, the regular laundry started, the ironing I haven’t done for the past three weeks set aside (to be ignored a while longer), the dog fed, me fed, the kitchen cleaned up, and the dog walked. Now to sit down to Quicken, figure out what to do with the $600 tax rebate that finally came dragging in, and decide how to handle the red ink in this month’s budget.

I’m beginning to think $1,500 just isn’t enough to cover my monthly costs above and beyond the utility, loan, and insurance payments. It seems like a generous amount: for heaven’s sake, it’s almost a whole paycheck! How can I not live on fifteen hundred bucks???This month, with two more days to go in the budget cycle, I’m $351.28 in the hole. Although I have that much in savings, it’s $1.28 more than I had budgeted to buy some much-needed clothes in this summer’s sales. So…guess I won’t be buying clothes. Again. My wardrobe is rags just now, with exactly no summer dresses or skirts. All I have to wear is Costco jeans, which make me look like a beer barrel on two legs, and I’m out of decent shirts to go with them.

I’ve thought the budget issue had to do with the heavy hits from Anna’s final illness, which added up to over $1,000. But that’s now in the past. This month’s cycle started anew, and I’ve had four unexpected dings:

Leslie’s, clean out pool filter: $87.54

  • Veterinarian: examine Cassie for limp: $95.30
  • Dry cleaner: clean dhurrie rug to remove ointments Anna rubbed into it: $15
  • Vet: X-ray Cassie’s leg after I stepped on her sore foot: $17
  • Apple: new operating system to deal with server migration: $69.82

That comes to $402.66 in extra hits. Though it sounds like a lot, it shouldn’t be enough to put me $350 in the hole. As a practical matter, the $1,500 budget normally has so much play I can buy as much as $300 in clothing or other indulgences without having to dip into savings. What that seems to suggest is instead of being “generous” by about $300 a month, my $1,500 living expenses budget now has only about $102 of play ($402 – $300). A year ago, if I’d had $402 in unplanned expenses, I’d be about a hundred bucks in the hole…not $350.

Evidently inflation in routine costs has increased my day-to-day expenses by somewhere around $300. Costco’s gas was down to $3.99/gallon last week. I paid almost $60 for a fill-up that used to cost about $35, and I’m already almost half-empty. Though I’ve been staying away from the university as much as possible, now that my dean is back in town, I really should show up to work more often. If I drove to campus every day, I would have to fill up at least once a week–possibly more than that. That’s $240 a month, up from $140. Grocery inflation? Doesn’t apply. In fact, my grocery bills have been falling because I’ve quit driving to stores whenever I need one or two things. In this budget cycle I spent $361 on groceries, a relatively modest amount for me, since that is the one area where I do indulge myself. During the same period in 2007, I spent $571 at grocery stores (though some of it went to making food for two large dogs). The hair stylist has jacked up his prices, so that this week’s haircut plus a ten-dollar tip came to $75…and he cut my hair so short I look like one of those eccentric old ladies who gets her hair shaved off so she doesn’t have to comb it.

Wait: there’s a $55 car maintenance bill; that would account for some of the overrun. So that brings extraordinary costs to $450.

Problem is, the extraordinary costs keep rolling in. Yesterday a bill for car registration showed up: $116.34. That comes off the top of next month’s billing cycle. Then Cassie pee’d on the other dhurrie rug last night, adding another spot to the place where she shat, which I never cleaned out adequately. So now that rug has to go to the cleaner. It’s old and was never a fancy, expensive number like the one I had to take to the specialty cleaner after Anna smeared antibiotic ointments all over it. So I’m unloading it on a cheaper dry-cleaning outfit, whose rep says they’ll do the job for $70. That’s $186 out of next month’s budget…before the budget cycle even begins.

This month’s $350 shortfall…where will it come from? I could use the tax rebate to cover it, but really, I wanted to put that into the Renovation Loan payoff fund. If it comes out of savings, then it seriously does mean no clothing purchases until the winter sales. Argh! I desperately need summer clothes. Since I look like a wacky old lady who gets her hair shaved off so she doesn’t have to comb it, I might as well go around in faded, worn-out rags anyway. Won’t make much difference

Uh oh. Waitminit here. Sometime back I entered a note in Quicken to the effect that there’s a surplus in the credit-card budget’s cookie jar. That’s the result of living under budget for several months and not transferring the surplus to pay down loan principal…it created a de facto emergency fund

Am I saved? Could this be true? Let us away to the credit union’s website…
* * *

HOLY mackerel!

There’s a surplus, all right. It’s nine hundred and seventy-six bucks! Lordie. I noted that at the beginning of the month and then forgot it, in the flurry over the website, the injured dog, hurting myself (when I fell on the pavement tripping over the dog), running late on a client’s job, and generally being too darn hot and too darn old.

Amazing grace! It’s a miracle. Maybe Lady Karma has decided to quit kicking me in the shins. Or at least, maybe this time She missed.
🙂

A step to improve the finances

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Mrs. Micah issued a challenge to readers and bloggers to describe one step, no matter how small, that they are taking to improve their financial situations. As a matter of fact, I’ve come up with something but haven’t had time to blog about it, what with the past week’s technoadventures.

Thanks to a reader’s comment, I figured out how I could pool my biweekly paychecks so as to “pay myself” on a bimonthly basis. This ensures that there always will be enough money in the account that dispenses payments, by EFT, to the utility companies, the Renovation Loan lender, the life insurance provider, and the long-term care insurer, and it allows me to fund the “piggy bank” account for credit-card charges once a month: on the first, rather than on whatever cockamamie date a paycheck arrives.

First, I funded a dormant checking account at the credit union with my state income tax refund of $1340, almost as much as one of my paychecks. I added another couple hundred bucks to bring this bankroll up to the amount of a single paycheck.

July’s first payday happened quite close to the first. I put that check in the newly grubstaked “pool” account. This brought the balance to the amount of one full month’s pay.

From that I funded the “piggy bank” account for the credit-card budget and the account that dispenses automatic payments-not with half of what is needed but in full, for the entire month.

Friday, July 18, was this month’s second payday. The credit union, apprised of my new scheme, automatically transferred the paycheck into the “pool” account. That brought the balance back up to the equivalent of one full month’s pay. On the 31st, I’ll make my regular transfers for savings from the “pool”: to the Renovation Loan repayment fund, to the property tax/homeowner’s insurance/car insurance fund, and to indulgence savings.

In Quicken, I renamed all my credit union accounts so my titles jibe with what the CU calls them at its online site, simplifying the books and cutting the likelihood of making an error.

Next time I’m at the credit union, I’ll arrange to have automatic transfers from the “pool” made on the 1st and the 31st. Ta DAAAA!!! No more fiddling with online transfers.

Everything except paying the credit card bills will be done automatically.

No more fiddling with Quicken and manual transfers. No more worrying about whether enough cash will hit the credit-card “piggy bank” to make the monthly budget. No more hating GDU’s ever-changing bimonthly pay schedule.

Now that’s what I call stress relief!

w00t! 18 grand materializes from the air!

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Lordie! Here I’ve been thinking I’d lost about $23,000 in the stock market…. Comes a statement from GDU’s Fidelity retirement plan-the first I’ve seen in a year. It turns out the balance the Fidelity rep gave me over the phone a few weeks ago was wrong. He only gave me the amount in the 401(a) plan. The fund also includes a 403(b) plan, which contains $18,465 more than the amount he said I had.

That means I’ve “only” lost about $4,535 to the bear.

Wow! I’ve never been so pleased with a loss in my life.

3 Comments left on iWeb site:

Mrs. Accountability

That’s wonderful!! Funny how the situation could cause such a paradigm shift

Friday, July 18, 2008 – 09:35 AM

Zhu

Wow, that is so cool!

I’m too chicken for stock market… I saved up a bit but I don’t like the idea of potentially losing money. I mean, I wouldn’t mind your kind of loss though

Friday, July 18, 2008 – 07:00 PM

Funny about Money

In fact, you lose money in the market and you gain it. Over time, you should make more than you lose, if you’ve diversified and invested carefully.

With mutual funds where you’re simply rolling all gains back into the fund by automatically purchasing new shares with gains or buying new shares each month with savings from your paycheck, when the market goes down you stand to earn MORE money, because you buy shares at deflated prices. As the market comes back up, your existing shares plus the shares you bought in the bargain basement make money.

This is most obvious in your 401(k) or 403(b), where you and your employer are plowing money into the funds every payday. It’s hair-raising to get a statement that shows the plan has lost more than you and your employer combined put into it over the quarter…until you realize the contributions are buying lots of shares at reduced prices. When the market comes back to normal, you feel mighty flush.

Moments of Fame

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Nicole at The Budgeting Babe e-mailed, while Funny was down, to say the 161st Carnival of Personal Finance is up. She has kindly included Funny’s rumination on the possible financial benefits of moving to a rural setting, especially if you’re less than staggeringly affluent. As usual, the CofPF is huge and full of interesting posts. Check out, for example, this heartfelt reflection from Amanda at Value for Your Life on the decision to make a fundamental change in career plans. Money Blue Book has an amazing discussion of the arcane way in which the number on your credit card is generated. And I enjoyed the speculation, at Can I Get Rich on a Salary, about the strange case of the woman who refused to pay off her credit card debt.

Country Magpie has posted the 72nd Make It from Scratch Carnival. This event includes some amazing recipes, including (believe it or not!) one for latter-day granola and one for making cherry liqueur. The carnival links to some interesting crafts projects, too, possibly the most amazing of which is a scheme to crochet the ubiquitous plastic grocery bags into handbags and clothespin bags. The crazy things look pretty good! They’ll presumably last for the ages, too.

More on Mac

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Pete visited yesterday and left a comment on “MacHeadache,” apparently in the wee hours of Tuesday morning (hard to tell, since iWeb has come unstuck in time…it no longer knows what time it really is). I started to respond to his, which only just appeared, in a comment of my own and then realized I was going on at enough length to create a new post.

Here’s what Pete observed:

It does seem supremely lame that Apple migrated you to MobileMe without being sure you had a system that was compatible. I don’t know if .Mac is (was) technically aware on an ongoing basis what version of Mac OS you use, but it stands to reason, and they could have been smart enough not to migrate anyone who would break without warning. I’m not sure what the alternative would be, but they could at least have given you a chance to migrate elsewhere if you needed to.

But the rest of this stuff? Having a computer is just about the opposite of simplicity and frugality. In fact, to achieve anything resembling computing peace of mind, simplicity and frugality need to go right out the window. Here are a couple of examples:

Broadband would make those system updates download in a reasonable amount of time. Windows wouldn’t be any better in this respect. For that matter, neither would Linux. All the major operating systems are pushing big updates out to the installed base on a regular basis.

Panther is two major versions of the operating system behind. I realize you’re not the sort who gets jollies from a computer for its own sake, and that’s fine, but in general you would experience fewer crises of this magnitude if you were to keep up with the Joneses. Running Panther today is like running Windows 2000.

As far as iWeb goes, well, given that you’re aware of its limitations, I’m not sure why you torture yourself with it when there are so many free blog publishing solutions out there on the web

My response:

Functionality! Pete, yours is the first comment that has posted in over a week. Yesterday, if you had hit the “Add Comments” link, you would have seen an ad for MobileMe

I downloaded all the most current software, for which I had to pay at a time that was WILDLY inconvenient for me. Even though the Apple store’s manager gave me a 50% discount (turns out that’s fairly common-others have had the same experience), it still put my budget, which had barely recovered from the staggering expense of caring for a dying pet, back in the red. Eventually I would have bought the most recent OS, but when I could afford it, not when Apple ordered me to.

Yes, I know DSL is slower than broadband. I can’t afford broadband. In these parts it’s expensive, and I work for a university…by definition that means you don’t earn much unless you’re a football coach, a full bull in business or engineering, or an upper-level administrator. The cheapest cell phone I could get from Qwest — which I subscribed to only because pay phones are a thing of the past and I have to commute on a freeway that takes me a long, long way from home and from the car mechanic — is a stretch for me. I miss having a phone bill that is not a stinging hit each month.

All the rest of my software is up-to-date. The package that includes iWeb, called iLife, is the 2008 edition. I have followed all of the instructions sent by Apple’s support team. My son, who is a great deal more techie than I am, has also tried to make the system work. So far, nothing has succeeded

That you were able to post a comment suggests some functionality may be returning. However, it remains true that iWeb, while it has some attractive features, doesn’t have the interesting features supported by WordPress. I should be able to enter a StumbleUpon button, I should be able to subscribe to Feedburner, I should be able to register with Technorati, I should be able to register with Google, I should be able to ping other blogs. None of these things appear to be possible with iWeb.

I started Funny about Money in iWeb because I had never done a blog before and I doubted much would come of this one. Apple touted its user-friendly simplicity, and it looked like a way to play at blogging without having to put out much effort. I was already paying for Mac.com, which provided an extra e-mail account and which alleged (wrongly, I’m now told) to provide off-site storage space for Quicken backups. Since I didn’t expect Funny would go anywhere, I figured it wasn’t worth the learning curve involved in developing a website on more serious blogging software.

Now I figure Funny does have the potential to draw readers, and it’s kind of taken on a proverbial life of its own. Had I known it could be even mildly successful, I would have started the blog in WordPress, following Jim’s very cogent advice at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

It’s way past time to move Funny to WordPress. It’s going to lose most of its archive, but frankly, little of that is worth storing for the electronic ages. I’ll migrate the key posts first and then the ones I think are the best I’ve done so far. With any luck, once I get the blog on the new platform it will be even better and will have more opportunities to find new readers.

LOL! Yes, computers are the opposite of simplicity and frugality! But they are a part of our daily life. Just as you can’t get by without a cell phone, you can’t live a fully engaged life in America (or the world) today without a computer system and an online connection. It’s just the way things are.