For a long time now my husband and I have kept track of our savings and spending using budgeting programs on our computer. We record pretty much every cent we spend so we know where the money is going.

Recently we bought a new Apple Mac Mini so our old software is no longer compatible. We downloaded and tried out a couple of free software programs but have not been to happy with the performance of these. I have been persevering with one anyway just so we can keep track of things as usual but after today we have decided that we really don’t need to do this any more.

There are two reasons for this. One is that we have now paid off our home loan so we don’t need to keep track. Nor do we need to keep track our spending so much either since not having a home loan means we have a lot more disposable income. But the best reason is that today when I was inputting and balancing our spending against the online banking statement I noticed that there was very little to keep track of any more.

The input went a bit like this…

groceries, groceries, groceries, groceries,auto (gas/petrol), groceries, groceries, groceries, groceries,auto (gas/petrol), groceries, groceries, groceries, groceries,auto (gas/petrol).

As you can see, we really don’t do a lot of shopping these days except to buy groceries or fill up the car and motorbike. The bit of cash that goes in my wallet usually goes on having coffee with friends, more groceries and hand outs to our son for school supplies and other incidentals.

Most other things we buy replace an old favourite, so there isn’t any clutter coming into our house to take the place of the stuff heading out the door. This is the key to staying decluttered and it also means we have more savings to spend on the things that are more important to us like:

• A nice meal out together occasionally
• Travel
• Being able to get the car serviced without having to worry where the money is coming from
• If any unexpected medical expenses crop up we have nothing to worry about except our health

I am sure there are many more things but these are the few that jump into my head immediately.

With that accomplished the next target is to get my husband semi-retired by the time he turns fifty.

ITEM 184 OF 365 LESS THINGS

More personal clutter ready for the recycling bin

The word for today is…

DOWNSIZE

Sometimes decluttering doesn’t mean getting rid of things altogether sometimes you just need to DOWNSIZE. For example here are a list of the items we have DOWNSIZED since the start of our decluttering process…

• We replaced a twenty something year old bulky stereo system with a new iPod docking station.
• We replaced an old laptop with an iPod touch so we don’t have to carry such a heavy item around with us when we are on vacation.
• We replaced our old computer tower with a new Apple Mac Mini which takes up so much less space.
• We replaced a big bulky computer desk with a lovely hardwood 1500 x 900 table. (The room looks so much less cluttered now).
• We have given away and sold a big chunk of our baseball souvenir collection to get it down to  a more manageable size.
• We have digitised several old LP records and sold the physical copies on ebay reducing the collection.
• We have digitised a bunch of sentimental papers too so that pile is also significantly smaller.

I look at this list and I think we have made great inroads into the decluttering but I also know that we still have a long way to go. We will no doubt DOWNSIZE in some of these areas a lot more before we are finished.

You may be thinking that for someone who preaches about buying less stuff you sure have made some expensive purchases on that list. You would be correct and I sometimes feel guilty about that but it is all in the line of decluttering. Most of the items that were replaced had been used extensively and were sold on or passed on the someone else who needed them and may not have been able to afford them otherwise.  I am OK with that.

ITEM 174 OF 365 LESS THINGS

My plan is to eliminate enough items out of the kitchen so I can move items from my display cabinet into the empty spaces so I can eliminate the need for the display cabinet or at least downsize it.

When I first started this adventure of decluttering at the beginning of the year that was all it was to me, decluttering. As I go along on this journey and discover the freedom that unburdening our lives of things that only bring stress on us I am starting to embrace the idea of taking it to the next level.

It really is a natural progression because the fundamentals of minimalism  have been a constant topic of conversation in our home for some years mostly without me even realising it. My husband has been reading up and considering the options available to us  for some time now and I have only just put a label to the concept.

In a round about way I stumbled onto a blog recently – Sanity In Simplicity – that follows one person’s journey into to minimalist lifestyle. I haven’t read that much of her posts yet but what I have read I have enjoyed.

Here is a small sample from the very first post from Megan’s blog….

Minimalism means many things to many people.  To me, it is a way to declutter my space so that I can declutter my mind so that I can declutter my life and sort out my priorities.  It a way to have more time and less stress, and be more environmentally friendly.  It means working less and playing more.  Minimalism, to me, is freedom…

Megan has some links to other great blogs about minimalism as well that are worth a look at.

Maybe next year I will have a whole new blog topic to consider “How I stumbled into minimalism” but lets not get ahead of ourselves after all one step at a time is the motto of 365lessthings.

ITEM 128 OF 365 LESS THINGS

This is another of my ski gear eBay auctions, a pair of child size 10 Columbia Snowboard Pants that fetched $32.95.

Just thought I would share a little story about some cheap luggage we once owned and how we off-loaded it.

My mum bought us a set of luggage and the first time it did the cycle through the airport wheels fell off and things broke. We only used them one more time and that was as excess baggage when we moved to America. They then got stuck in a cupboard until the first unsuspecting visitors came over to stay with us.

Since America is a great place to shop the visitors had a lot more stuff to take home than their suitcases could carry  so we gave them one of our dodgy ones to take their excess stuff home in. After a couple more lots of visitors came and went we were rid of the entire set of luggage and went out and bought some better ones to replace them.

I have  a couple of tips I will share with you about buying luggage and this comes from experience.

1. Do your homework before buying new luggage and buy a brand that has a good reputation of producing quality product.
   
2. Don’t buy suitcases that when full of clothes will weigh more than the standard baggage allowance per case unless you like paying the excess weight fee.

ITEM 118 OF 365 LESS THINGS

With air travel in mind this remote control chopper is today’s offering to the 365  things I hope the little boy I gave it to has lots of fun with it.

I know I am getting slightly outrageous today but I just wanted to plant this thought.

Now that you have created space in your home do you really need it? That much space I mean. How many of us live in homes that are far to big for our needs.

Is your home just a status symbol with more rooms than you need that just cause you a whole lot of wasted time doing housework.

When I was a child with four siblings and a mum and dad, we all managed to live quite comfortably in a four bedroom house with one bathroom, a kitchen, a lounge room with a rumpus room under the house.  One of the bedrooms was actually used as a spare room and Mum’s sewing room as she did dress making from home for extra cash.

When I was 21 we moved into a house with four bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a billiard room, a study, a kitchen and a formal dining room. At this stage three of my siblings had already left home. Now my parents have “downsized” to a house with four bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a billiard room, a study, a lounge room, a kitchen and a dining area and they live together alone in this house.

I know my mum likes to think we can all fit into this house should we all come to visit at once but now that the grandchildren are growing up and starting to get married and have children of their own is she going to  buy a hotel to fit everyone in.

It was just a thought, please don’t thing I have gone completely off the rails with the whole decluttering thing.

ITEM NUMBER 110 OF 365LESS THINGS

Clearly this has nothing to do with the topic of  the day but it is however my contribution for day 110

When out picking up a few groceries the other day, I noticed a woman getting her handbag checked as she exited the shop. Nothing unusual about that except the lady had to rest this bag on a nearby store display in order to open all three compartments that were so crammed with God knows what that she could barely get the zippers open.

There was no chance she was about to steal anything because quite frankly she couldn’t possibly have fit another thing in. Although she quite possibly had already stolen 3 paperbacks, half a dozen DVDs, a flat pack bookcase and 2 bags of potting mix  the way that thing was heaving at the sides. Honestly her bag was like a filing cabinet with handles.

Seriously ladies, how much do we really need to carry with us for a couple of hours out at the shops. Depending on what she was carrying in that thing I am sure this Lady could have parachuted into Siberia with that handbag and survived for a month on the contents. MacGyver eat your heart out.

Ok, so I am getting a little carried away with myself but really, aside from your purse, cell phone, maybe a note pad and a pen, your keys, a few feminine heigine products and a little lipstick what else do you feel you need for one short trip that you simply can’t do without. Men manage to leave the house with a wallet in their back pocket for heaven’s sake.

After seeing this woman I went home and cleaned out my handbag and aside from several old grocery lists and some old shopping dockets my bag was looking OK.

So if you haven’t started de-cluttering yet maybe this is a good place to start.

Today’s give-away

Colleen’s Helpful Hint for the Day

To clean your washing machine just run it through a cycle with 2 cups of white vinegar. Why not throw your shower curtain in the machine at the same time and it should come out clean and mildew free.

Although my toiletries are one of those things I have well and truly under control, sometimes certain items do seem to multiply and then reach their expiry date while I’m not looking.

Sunscreen is one of those items that tends to do this due to a number of reasons like…

• An unplanned trip to the beach where a “pink pelt” like me has to lather on the sunscreen or that pink soon turns to blistered red so you duck to the nearest convenience store to buy a bottle.
• A planned trip to the beach where you forget the sunscreen and rather than go all the home you are forced to buy another bottle.
• A family picnic to the park where you forget the sunscreen and you borrow someone Else’s bottle, forget to give it back and can’t remember which family member owed it.

Needless to say now you have four bottles of sunscreen, two of which have passed their used by dates, taking up space in the bathroom cabinet.

This is only one small item but the same story applies to lots of different things. For example…

• The extra suitcase you bought while on holidays in America to bring home all the stuff you bought because things are so cheap over there
• The extra esky (Cooler) you bought last Christmas because you had a big family BBQ at your house and didn’t have enough room in the fridge
• The snow chains you had to buy because of unseasonal weather when visiting the mountains last April.

Need I go on.

The next thing you know you think you have outgrown the house you live in and start looking for another “dump site” with a bigger garage. It used to amuse me when I lived in the USA how many cars in our neighbourhood were parked on the street or in the driveway because the garage was full of other “stuff”.

Check around your house today and find one of these things and relegate it to the “get rid of” pile. Just remember you always have the option of borrowing things when in need, then you just give them back when you are done.

Two bottles of sunscreen past their used by date

Colleen’s Helpful Hint for the Day

A slightly damp microfibre cloth is great for removing deoderant stains, dust and other accidental marks from your clothes. I keep one handy in my bathroom cabinet just for this purpose.

While cruising the Internet looking for inspiration on the topic of decluttering I found a few interesting articles that take downsizing and minimalism to greater extremes. I am not prepared to go to that extent, not at this point anyway, but they were inspiring and made me feel that what I am attempting seems like a walk in the park.

When I say “a walk in the park” I don’t mean it demeans my efforts in any way, it just helps me see the bigger picture and I now feel very comfortable that the small sacrifices I am making are not such a big deal.

Some of the topics to google when looking for such articles and websites are:

• Simpler Lifestyle
• Downshifting
• Minimalist Lifestyle
• Voluntary Simplicity

Have a look at some of the links I have attached to these topics and you will see what I mean. Giving away a DVD is chicken feed compared to giving away the DVD player or the electricity for that matter. It puts things into a whole new perspective.

Today’s giveaway is a water flask that I haven’t used since I stopped playing softball in 1999.

Colleen’s Helpful Hint for the Day
Use an over-the-door multi hook hanger to organise long necklaces. It will keep them from tangling and you will easily be able to see and choose which to wear.

I have discovered that uncluttering is the cure for resorting to retail therapy.

How often do we use retail therapy to make up for times when we feel down, disappointed, bored and other conditions of the mind. What does this kind of therapy do to improve the situation? Usually it just adds more problems like credit card debt, guilt and regret.

It has amazed me how quickly I formed a dislike to shopping once I committed myself to my 365 day resolution to de-clutter my home.

Now when I get spare time I don’t get bored, I use that time to find the next thing I am going to get rid of or try to come up with a subject for my next Post. This leads to a satisfaction that I am using my time constructively and am less likely to feel down. I generally feel better about myself and my bank account is looking healthier too. Not to mention the satisfaction that I am helping others by donating items to charity.

Another item that has not been used for so long I can’t even remember why we bought it in the first place

I am Australian and my give-away for today is a barbecue. If you are from another country you may wonder what is unusual about being Australian and giving away a BBQ, so I will explain.

Just about  every household in Australia has a BBQ, because of our climate we are a very outdoorsy kind of people. When friends come around for a meal the normal procedure is to “chuck a steak on the barby”. Personally though I would rather cook a nice roast dinner, a spicy curry or maybe make gourmet pizza and as a result our BBQ has not been used for the last three years since we took it our of storage after an extended period of living overseas.

The moral of this story is, just because everyone else seems to have one doesn’t mean you have to. There are people out there who don’t have cell phones, computers, bicycles, cars or even televisions and they survive very well.

So no matter what it is, if you aren’t using it now, you probably never will so pass it on to someone who might get some use out of it.

So today I am going to wheel my BBQ out to the street (I live a a fairly busy road) and I am sure it will probably be gone within an hour. I will update this post to let you know how long it took to disappear.

I put the BBQ out at 9:00am and it rained for about an hour. I went out at about 10:00am to see if it was still there, a car was parted nearby and a man was looking at the BBQ. I went out again at 11:30 and it was gone.