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

What to do with 128 pens?

By
I never need buy a pen again. Ever. The pen round-up. I searched the house for pens and gathered them up. We had 128. Woah - that's more than I expected. Then it was test-time. (You can get a lot done watching summer sport ;). Good ones went on the table. Broken ones in the box. Pen operations I saved a few 'broken' pens, by taking working insides and matching them with functional outsides. Particularly much-loved pens, for sentimental reasons, were given a life-extending 'ink transplant'. Final Tally We ended up with 67 broken pens and 61 good ones. And about 10 pencils. What to do with 67 broken pens? In my city Biome recycles pens . It's as easy as taking them into the store and dropping them into the giant collection box. Decluttering and recycling together - I love it. A lifetime of pens An average pen writes 45,000 words. So that dedicated shopping list pen on the fridge could write a 20-word shopping list for 43 years. Our 61 pens repre...
2 comments
Read more

Why millionaires don't "feel" rich

By
We're wealthier than ever - so why don't we feel like it? Australia has gone almost three decades without recession. The stock market recently hit a record high. Our wages are record highs. Home loan rates are at record lows. We live in one of the richest countries in the world at the richest point in history. So what's wrong? Comparison Wealth is relative. So what do we compare to? Where we expect to be? "When your wages growth is only 2 or 3 per cent, you don't feel as well-off as when it's going up 10 per cent. That's that nominal distortion that people often suffer from" , says economist Shane Oliver, and that "expectations have grown a lot faster than reality." We're earning more than last year, but we want even more. So compared to our imaginary situation, we see ourselves as worse off. What we see around us? Shane Oliver again. "If you think about it - Australians today are a lot wealthier. They're living far ric...
4 comments
Read more

How to waste a year's wages

By
A friend recently asked me why it is that so many people (on good incomes) are struggling to save. Often the big three money areas are housing, transport and food. In one sense these are necessary items. But what we spend on them is often way more than necessary. I crunched some numbers on how much extra my wife and I could spend on these things - if for some reason we wanted to burn our money. 1. Housing Our apartment is fairly nice, but also cost-effective. I've mentioned how choosing it saves us $1,800 per year , compared to a similar one we saw. The high end of 2-bedroom apartments in our suburb is $305 per week more than our apartment. Not $305 per week. $305 per week more than ours is. I cannot get over that. Sure it's new and modern-looking, but that's a lot of money. It's an extra $15,860 per year above what we pay. 2. Transport The Australian Automobile Association lists the costs of owning and running a car. It includes many often-overlooked c...
4 comments
Read more