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Inheriting Clutter

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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.

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