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Home > What's wrong with this picture? - Part II

What's wrong with this picture? - Part II

June 30th, 2005 at 04:24 pm

Giving things away and throwing them out IS fast and easy. It can be a good quick fix for a crisis situation. But quick fixes aren't necessarily what work in the long term, and they often cause other problems. And they don't teach you good skills for the future.

If you have a bad day at work, drinking a beer when you get home might calm you down for the moment. Stick with that as your main tool for dealing with stress, you've got a drinking problem.

If you keep buying more and then just throwing or giving things away as your main tool for controlling clutter, it's a money problem waiting to happen--especially if you're carrying credit card debt. It's possible someone could be giving away things that haven't even been paid for yet. Wouldn't it be better to try and sell them and recoup at least a little money?

I came across a story about Suze Orman, who supposedly suggested this: Get a dollar bill and hold it in your hand. Are you able to tear it up and throw it away? For most people, the answer is no. So, when you're tempted to buy something that you might end up throwing/giving away, imagine it is a dollar bill and remember how you wouldn't want to throw IT away.

I'm not a big Suze Orman fan, but that's great advice for preventing clutter in the first place.

Some of the organizing folks suggest clutter prevention tactics like "one new item purchased, one old item out." A workable idea, but they are still saying to give or throw away the "one old item out." To me, that just reinforces the habit of wasting money. Easy come, easy go. I don't want to be that way anymore. If I'm ever going to feel like a "grown-up," I've got to stop taking the easy way out.

On the other hand, I know someone who's taken 18 years (so far) to try and deal with a houseful of stuff she inherited. Because she's so fixated on getting every penny out of it, it's taking WAY too long. I don't want to live that way, either.

There's got to be a happy medium--and that's what I'm trying to find.

I can see where yard sales aren't ideal. We don't have the storage space to hold enough for a really good sale. We also don't live on a street that gets much traffic.

I'm not crazy about Ebay, either. I've tried it a few times, and had one $125 success story. But mostly it seems like more work than it's worth.

Amazon's been great because it's quick to list things and then you can forget about them until a sale comes through. I did get aggravated about it this past week, but it was because I was, as usual, trying to do too much at once. I ended up having to make two trips to the PO in one day, there was so much to take. But, I can control the flow of sales by not listing everything at once. I can wait to list more until I have more mailing supplies on hand. And if life gets really busy I can put all my listings "on vacation."

Two more ideas sound good to me right now. Consignment stores, and craigslist.org.

The consignment store near me has you make appointments to bring things in, and you can go as often as once a month. It should be just as easy to do that as make a trip to Goodwill, and there's the possibility of getting a little money out of it.

http://www.craigslist.org is kind of a huge, free, online classified ad section. (You wouldn't believe what some of the ads are for!) There are different craigslist web pages for different areas. I like the idea a lot better than freecycle.org. If I decide to take the risk of having a stranger come get something at our house, at least we'd be getting some money out of it.

And since both of these deal with people in the local area, they overcome a major Ebay problem--how to sell things that are too expensive to ship.

I want to look into some local, real auction houses. And there are always the used book and CD stores where we can turn things in for credit.

There so many other options besides giving and throwing things away, that just take a little more time and effort and can also help the budget a little. I only wish someone had suggested them to me when I was in that major decluttering phase.

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