海角大神

A bigger house isn't an excuse for more junk

There are plenty of good reasons to move. But if one of them is having more space for your stuff, maybe you should reconsider.

When we were first married, Sarah and I lived in an extremely small apartment. It was (very) cozy for just the two of us, but it worked.

When we had our first child, we converted a small area into a spot for the bed and the crib for our baby. We literally did not have room for even a small desk in our apartment at this point.

When our second child was on the way, we finally realized that we had to move. Our older child was simply not old enough for being on top of a bunk bed and we couldn鈥檛 come up with another way to give everyone adequate space to sleep.

So we moved into a larger home, one that works great for us now. We have plenty of space for our family of five and more than enough space for every possession we have.

Now, let鈥檚 say we kept accumulating stuff. It fills every excess space in our home. Everywhere you look, you see clutter.

Eventually, our home would start to feel a bit cramped. We might eventually find ourselves considering a new, larger home simply for the stuff we had accumulated, at a tremendous cost.

The problem with that scenario is if we have so much stuff that it fills up our home, we can鈥檛 possibly have time to use or enjoy all that stuff. That鈥檚 why we employ the 鈥渙ne in, one out鈥� rule most of the time. Too much stuff means not enough time to enjoy it.

Let鈥檚 say, for example, that you collect movie props. For a while, you鈥檒l have plenty of space for them, but at some point, they鈥檒l begin to crowd your living quarters. At that point, you will have a lot of movie props, but if you have a lot of movie props, you have less and less time available to enjoy and care for each one of them. If one movie prop takes five minutes a month to dust and clean, a hundred movie props take eight hours a month to dust and clean. If you can spend fifteen minutes a month enjoying and showing off one movie prop, you鈥檙e suddenly dumping 25 hours per month into enjoying and showing off the props you have.

Now, if movie props are your primary hobby, that might still be okay, but you wouldn鈥檛 want your collection to grow too much larger than that or else you will have little time or space for anything else.

In other words, if you don鈥檛 have time to enjoy an item, why do you have it at all?

If you find yourself in a situation where you have so much stuff that you can鈥檛 even recall the last time you looked at most of it, it鈥檚 not time to move or get a bigger house. It鈥檚 time to go through a lot of clutter and have a giant selloff.

There are situations where moving makes sense, like when you are having difficulty finding adequate sleeping space for your family. When you鈥檙e moving just to house your stuff, you might want to rethink your choice.

This post is part of a yearlong series called 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),鈥� in which I鈥檓 revisiting the entries from my book 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap,鈥� which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my 鈥減hotography intern鈥� for this project.