Skip to main content

Inheriting Clutter

Image
By

This book stood out on the library shelf. Massive clutter can create anxiety at any time, let alone when it has to be dealt with during one of the toughest points of life.

Author Julie Hall deals with estates for a living. Her book covers the nitty-gritty of dealing with all that stuff. It also covers caring for parents while they are here and what to do to make life easier for them, your siblings and you.


Parent Logic

We may wonder why parents keep so much stuff. Julie explains that our parents (having grown up in a different time) have their reasons. Often they had to 'go without' as kids and so don't want to 'go without' again. Sometimes they think items will become valuable with age. 

Also there's the thought "the more I leave the kids the more they will have". This is obviously mathematically true - but whether that's a good thing is questionable.

Ironically, this admirable quality of aversion to waste often ends up causing waste. Items get stored for years and then discarded because they have decayed beyond use. Or because they are part of a massive estate that has to be dealt with quickly.

It's not just them

While it's easy to point the finger, we all have too much clutter, says Julie. Our parents' passing starts a chain reaction because our homes are already bursting at the seams with our own plethora of stuff.

While 1 in 10 Americans have off-site storage, it's not our parents renting those storage units.

"I will never do this to my kids"

In theory the process of having to deal with a parent's estate should give us the resolve to live with less stuff. But if not, Julie gives five more reasons to get rid of your own stuff.

  • Less anxiety and worry about the stuff we seldom use
  • Spend less time searching for things (the average American spends 2.5 days per year)
  • Helping people in need (by donating or selling items)
  • More time to do what you love doing (rather than maintaining stuff)
  • Finding things you forgot you owned

So why do we have so much stuff?

It seems so obvious that living with less is better, so why do we have all this junk? Julie says that advertising screams at us "you need to buy this to be happy". And there's peer-pressure (even though we're not teenagers anymore). And we can afford it (or we put it on credit card if we can't).

"The benefits of getting rid of excess property begin immediately, allowing you to enjoy life more and worry less. So what's stopping you?"

Interesting Stats

From her experience with estates, only about 25% of stuff gets thrown away. The rest can be sold, donated or recycled.

We only use about 20% of what we own. To put it another way, 80 percent of what we keep, we never use.

Each year the average American buys 68 items of clothing. Again 80% are seldom worn.

The US has more than 50,000 storage facilities.

In short

Grab a copy from your library. It may help inspire you to declutter, and it may also help one of the toughest times in your life a lot less stressful.

Related Reading

If you like the sounds of this, then you might also want to check out Let It Go.

See my other reviews or subscribe to my monthly email for future ones.

Read more about:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Less Clutter More Cash - now available

By
Do you feel like you have too much stuff? Is your home full of things you never use? Would you like to swap them for cash? We did My wife and I have sold more than 550 items online as we downsize and we've learnt a bit along the way. I've put some of our best tips into this handy ebook. I hope you can use these tips so you too can have less clutter and more cash. Enter your email address below to receive the book for free. Less Clutter More Cash Get my new ebook for free. PS. This will subscribe to the But Wait There's Less email list, so you'll know when the new updated version of the book is available. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Post a Comment
Read more

Big motivator for small living

By
It's been a while between posts here - mainly because we've been moving house. It's been a real motivator for downsizing. Packing each and every item we owned, really makes me wish there were fewer of them. Moving everything from the old apartment to the new one made me envious of those people who live in a "tiny house on wheels". For them moving house simply means towing it to a new location. No packing required. The whole process has reaffirmed our commitment to owning less stuff. So we're going to be intentional about downsizing. It will be an ongoing activity. My environmental heart couldn't stomach a spontaneous dumping of things into the garbage, but it's also more fun this way. Selling things online brings in some handy pocket money. Giving items away is also a great community activity, whether it is to friends and family, to charity or to people in the neighbourhood. I'm looking forward to it as a lifestyle rather than a task to do....
Post a Comment
Read more

The 'keys' to happiness

By
At the moment my wife is practising a song. She'll be performing it on piano at the upcoming wedding of a friend. She wants to do lots of practice so it can be just great for the day. But we don't own a piano. At this point the material world says "Well, go out and buy one". But these days there are many more options. After a couple of practices on a friend's piano we put out the call on Streetbank - a community site for people to share things with their neighbours. Within a day we had a couple of offers of a keyboard to borrow. It's a great solution as it was free for us, and made use of keyboards that were just sitting around unused. One was so unused that the owner said he would test if it still worked before he lent it to us. I'm told that Aristotle once said that joy was in use not in ownership. I think this is a good example of that philosophy in action. Although sometimes I question if it's "joy" to hear the same song pract...
Post a Comment
Read more