Did you know that simply having excessive clutter in your house can actually cost you money? It can!
Photo by Rick Audet
If you’re like me, one of the “reasons” you have clutter is actually to try to save money. I put reasons in quotation marks because it’s not really a proper reason so much as an excuse, but that’s a post for another day.
You keep some things around because you feel you may need them in the future. You don’t want to pay for a new item, so you keep the old one around so you’ll have it at the ready the next time you need it. Makes sense, right? You have good intentions, but if it ended up as part of your clutter, this means it is either being stored in the wrong location, or that it doesn’t even have a proper place in your home at all. And clutter can cost you money just by sitting there.
Every so often I re-learn this lesson, but I hope that by writing it down in this blog it will actually sink in once and for all. It’s quite simple: having clutter makes it more difficult to locate specific items, especially when you’re in a hurry. You may be like me and say “I know roughly where everything is”, and I do. However, I can’t locate items in a split-second because they are often not where they should be. Last night I was looking for my seam ripper. It’s a small item, so it can get hidden quite easily. I know that it’s probably “somewhere” in my craft room, but I couldn’t find it at all. It may be hidden somewhere in that room, or I may have allowed myself to walk off with it and leave it in an improper place. The long and short of it is that if I can’t find it today I will have to run out and buy a new one, because I have a project on the go that can’t be held up and I need my seam ripper.
What’s that? I’ll have to go out and spend money on a duplicate of an item I already own just because I can’t find my current one? Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Not to mention being completely contrary to one of my reasons for having clutter in the first place, which was to try to save money. A seam ripper only costs a couple dollars, so it’s not a big deal. Or is it? Every small item you need to re-purchase due to clutter can add up in the long run, and no one needs to waste money that way when there’s much more important things to put it toward.
In addition to lost items, you can also easily lose bills and invoices in your clutter pile, or important notices. No one likes to pay past-due fees because they found their bill two days too late. You may also easily lose larger-ticket items to your clutter piles; a while ago I had a 1gig thumb drive lost in my clutter for a couple months. This was back when a nice 1gig one cost about $99, so I did not go spend the money on a replacement, but for a long time I didn’t get to use the item that I had paid good money for.
Getting rid of your clutter and then keeping everything in a proper place (or at least near to its proper place 
) will save you money in not only the long run, but in the short term as well!
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I own three identical pairs of nail clippers because of this phenomenon, and I can only find two of them at the moment.