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What possesses people? Just imagine having to dust all this stuff. And heaven help us, it’s all jammed into a condo! Some soul felt it was right and meet to live with enough junk to populate a boutique. A whole row of boutiques!

There probably are some nice items here. But for heaven’s sake. How many sets of dishes do you need to eat dinner? What do you do with scores of crystal pieces? How many times can you possibly use them? Once? twice? How many sets of sheets does it take to make a bed? How many hundred tchochkies do you need to take care of before you feel fulfilled?

There must be something missing in my personality. As a confirmed cheapskate, I can’t understand why anyone would want to own stuff they can’t use in daily life or that occupies their time with needless dusting and cleaning. It escapes me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not exactly dwelling in ancient Sparta here at the Funny Farm. I own nice dishes, good silverware, top of the line cookware. The walls are hung with artwork—some of it real—and the coffee table is punctuated with decorator items. What I don’t understand is the curio cabinet mentality: whole lighted cabinets full of collected junk that you never use except as objects to run a dustrag over. Mantels and hearths overflowing with collectibles. Plant shelves (what accursed developer first thought of those dust-catchers?) jammed with baskets, pots, “antiques,” and stuffed dolls. Windows barred with shelves bearing glass jars and trinkets.

Think of the amount the woman (it’s clearly a woman’s home) spent on this stuff. What else might she have spent it on? There’s at least one trip to Paris invested inside that house. Dozens of season tickets to concerts, plays, and symphonies. A set of Thomas Moser furniture. Several pieces of fine art: a real painting by a real artist, a real sculpture… An endowment for a charity or a scholarship fund. A score or more of computers for a school in a poor neighborhood. A drugstore full of meds for Africa.

It’s not that you must live like an anchorite and devote your assets to altruism—though it might help make the world go round a little more smoothly. It’s that there’s something hideously wasteful about investing resources in useless junk. And something perverse about collecting it.

This morning’s Times runs a front-page story about the coming new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, discussing the soul-searching that psychiatrists and psychologists go through in their efforts to identify mental illness and distinguish it from those little quirks we all have. Stuff-squirreling definitely should go into the Manual. No question of it.

To my mind, it’s a manifestation of the demented consumerism that permeates our culture. We’re all made to feel we should have stuff. Buy stuff. Get stuff. Keep stuff. Store stuff. Display stuff. And by all means, please: purchase more stuff than we need. Preferably with some company’s logo on as much of it as possible.

Snap out of it, America!

The thrifty farmer owns no more than is needed. And of course, we’re all farmers: our lives and our jobs are our farms. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.The garden of life ultimately grows a lot greener when it’s not burdened with junk that blocks the sunlight and water.

Stuff Therapy

Buy: the best you can afford (don’t be penny-wise and pound-foolish)
Buy: only what you need, reallyneed, in daily life
Don’t buy: anything you won’t use or wear this week or this month

? If all you do with it is dust it, get rid of it.
? If you haven’t worn it in a year, get rid of it.
? If you haven’t used it in a year, get rid of it.
? If it doesn’t have real, genuine, personal meaning to you, get rid of it. Just because it was your grandmother’s doesn’t mean you have to store it for the duration of your time on earth.

Sell it on e-Bay or Craig’s List. Yard Sale it. Donate it. Then take all your savings from not buying junk and all your proceeds from selling unused stuff and buy yourself an experience: take a trip, go to a concert, go out to eat at the best restaurant in town. You deserve it.

You don’t deserve to live in a houseful of Stuff.

1. Stay away from stores

Feeling under the weather tends to depress one’s mood. We know that people tend to spend more when they feel depressed.

2. Call a friend

There’s nothing like a friend’s voice to make you feel better. Even if it’s just a psychological lift, it’s a lift.

3. Turn off the idiot box

Violence, stupidity, and bad news—the dominant modes of the popular media—make you feel worse, not better.

4. Turn on your favorite music

So much better than violence, stupidity, and bad news…unless, of course, you favor music with those characteristics. 😉

5. Meditate, read a good book, do some quiet yoga, or go to church or temple

These activities are all of a kind. They stabilize most people’s mood.

6. Get something warm and nutritious to eat

There’s a reason chicken soup is called “Jewish penicillin.”

7. After accomplishing at least three of these things, go to bed early

Good night, little chickadees! A domani…

Funny hosts the Carnival of Money Stories on November 25! Yay! So, bloggeurs et bloggeuses: don’t forget to send in your stories. Just now, alas, I’m going to be forced to work into the night on a freelance gig. Later!
🙂

Check out these new-to-me sites that I’ve been enjoying recently:
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At the Wall Street Journal, a very active blog run by Mary Pilon, The Wallet, has been chugging along since September. She has a lot of useful and sometimes fun information, and also the occasional thoughtful piece—see, for example, this article on voting and your job.

In the “Now for Something Altogether Different” Department, I have been attracted by this charming online sketch journal, done by an artist and writer in Australia. She and her husband own a horse ranch, and their adventures, revealed in more detail at a second blog, make for stories, photography, and artwork that provide some fascinatingly exotic moments for us Yankee city girls.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned Small Notebook, discovered on a Make It from Scratch carnival. This author, who is on a quest to simplify her family’s life, offers many frugal and clever ideas, also with great charm. I may have highlightedModern Beet somewhere along the line; if so, it’s worth another mention. The thing blows me away every time I visit.

Room Farm is very nice; I like it because the proprietor shares many of my own concerns about the interrelation between money and stress. I also enjoy Simply Forties very much: the story of a youngish (from my point of view, anyway) woman living in a Texas country town.

In Utah, problogger Miranda holds forth on a just-for-her site, This Time It’s Personal, with some interesting reflections on a wide variety of topics. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned Mrs. Accountability’s Out of Debt Again: take a look at the beautiful garden produce she’s brought forth on her rural property.

Not all of these are strictly personal finance sites, although most touch on the subject now and again. Interesting…I seem to be drawn to women writers who live in the boondocks. Does this have meaning? Do I or do I not dream of retiring to Yarnell?

Outstanding! Don’t miss Silicon Valley Blogger’s rendition of the Carnival of Personal Finance at The Digerati Life. It has some of the neatest—and strangest!—illustrations from a nineteenth-century children’s book. How times have changed!

SVB kindly included Funny’s squib about a couple of real estate speculators bidding up the price of a foreclosed house beyond the asking price (more about which in a later post). This carnival includes a lot of cool stuff. One that caught my attention, now that I’m staring the Panther of Penury in the eye, is the list of seven ways to use your computer to get free entertainment at StopBuyingCrap.com. And w00t! Here’s another list of apposite advice: Eleven Things to Do Immediately after you’ve been laid off, from the recently laid-off Kyle at Amateur Asset Allocator. Lazy Man and Money takes stock, intriguingly, of his position on the route to his goal, early retirement, with some details about what he earns online that give me some hope that monetizing Funny might help with the layoff threat. In the investing department, Four Pillars has an entertaining and interesting article reflecting on the advantages of real estate over dividend investments. This carnival has more excellent and informative articles than you can count—be sure to visit ASAP.

The Carnival of Money Stories is up at the Carnival’s site, where another of Funny’s Tales from the Qwest Crypt appears. If you’ve been following the Financial Blogger’s story, you know the Bloggers have been contemplating a plan to start their own day-care center; well, they’ve decided to take the plunge, and the adventure is set to begin January 5. Five-Cent Nickel has an interesting story about having invested an emergency fund in long-term CDs—by choosing a CD with an early withdrawal penalty of only three months, he minimized the risk posed by the chance he and his wife would need the money unexpectedly.

The Festival of Frugality has gone live at Quest to Be Debt-Free, with a patriotic Veteran’s Day theme. Funny’s report on the meaning of the various “use-by” dates on food products appears here. With the nights chilling and not all of my proposed vegetable garden in, my attention was drawn by Geeky Poet’s post on cool-weather gardening at Walk a Greener Path; note several links to ways to create cold frames. Living the Frugal Life thinks about those small luxuries she’s held onto in her quest toward frugality. And if you also retain your million-dollar appetite on a ten-cent pocketbook, check out One Family’s Blog for a strategy to pursue downhill skiing on a budget.