My Brother and my Father are collectors of “stuff”.
Not valuable stuff, just stuff.
There comes a point in Life where you no longer control your stuff, your stuff controls you. Watching my Brother and my Father my entire Life, I understand completely.
And it can be worse than that. Your stuff can control your adult children and others.
My wife's mom started suffering from dementia and could no longer care for herself, so we took her in sometime early 2012. We began cleaning out her house and doing repairs. Four years later, we're still working out getting rid of her stuff while remodeling her house preparing it for sale. I'll mention just a few things.
Tens of thousands of plastic bags. How many can one use in a lifetime? I bundled many into large garbage bags, vacuum sucked them into large balls and brought them to plastic recyclers. Thousands of rags, neatly folded into bundles tied with string, everywhere in the house. Hundreds of bars of soap, many stuffed in drawers in bedroom chests. Many hundreds of articles of clothing, more than a dozen people could use in a lifetime. Then there's bolts of cloth, spools of thread, sewing machines, knitting accessories,etc. Many hundreds of books, magazines, vinyl records, VHS tapes, figurines, and so on. Lots of expired foodstuff, oils, spices, etc. None of her stuff is valuable.
Well, except for the crates of liquor and cigars. They were her husbands' stuff, he died several decades ago. We gave away hundreds of cigar boxes, the recipients said the cigars were still good despite the age. Same with the liquor, we made a bunch of people happy giving away brandy, rum and other aged liquor.
All this cleaning up made my wife and I take a hard look at ourselves, and we've begun clearing out much of our useless stuff. It does tend to tie you down and control you.
Stuff Collectors have not learned the art of loss and it’s sadness. It’s that simple.
Not valuable stuff, just stuff.
There comes a point in Life where you no longer control your stuff, your stuff controls you.
While this is true, some of us see tough times are near and that stuff comes in handy. Growing up on the farm we never threw anything away that had a future use. The scrap metal pile was visited frequently as we cut and welded that "stuff" into new "stuff" that was useful... or repaired the old "stuff."
Its Amazing how frugal One can become By Practicing old Fashioned Habits..... Better to be frugal by choice when times are good and have the resources to not suffer when times are tough. I could live off the grid for many years, probably indefinitely... however I would miss my computer and outside communication. It would do me good though to have more prayer and God focused time.
I’m thinning a lot. I want my basement for other things besides storage.
Some of it I know I take a loss for on Ebay and CL.