How Much is Enough?
By Aaron Nolan, CFP®
Moving is one of the most miserable tasks known to man.
You don’t know where anything is. All your free time goes to packing/unpacking boxes. Your whole body aches from moving things around.
Even when the end destination is a positive one, the actual act of moving is not fun. At All.
My wife and I went through this over the summer, and while I have a fresh perspective on how miserable the whole thing is, I also have a positive takeaway that will stick with me forever.
We don’t need 90% of the things that we own.
Prior to putting our house on the market, we had to make it as presentable as possible for prospective buyers. This process involved taking most things off the walls, clearing out closets/storage space, and scrubbing the whole thing from top to bottom. The goal was to give a potential buyer the feel of a blank canvas that they could transform into whatever they wanted.
Maybe we took it a bit too far, but by the time the house was photographed we had close to 75% of our things boxed in the garage. They stayed there for 6 ½ weeks before we moved out.
When we first put so many of our things in the garage, I was pretty irritated by the idea of going out to the garage and sorting through boxes every time we needed something.
Do you know how many times I had to actually do that during those six weeks? Exactly zero.
As we inched closer to moving, 90-95% of our things made it out to the garage. Every time a box became fully packed, we continued to stack them in the garage.
The final week before moving was strange. The only things that weren’t boxed up were a few clothing items and our necessities.
Yet, my life was 99% the same as before.
I still had my sneakers to go on a walk after work. I still had a pan to make food with. I still had a TV to watch movies on. I had a couch to sit on. I had a bed to sleep in.
Realizing that my life that final week was no different than it was every other week of the year was a bizarre mix of refreshing and depressing. Refreshing because of how nice it felt to only need a few material things in my life. Depressing because of how fixated we get on material things, yet we use so few of them on a daily basis.
Does this mean you should get rid of everything and live an ultra-minimalist lifestyle? Probably not.
However, it does mean you should at least think about how many items you actually need in your life compared to items that serve no purpose in your day-to-day life.
How much is enough? Most likely it is way less than you already have.
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