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| Getting rid of stuff after someone is gone is hard work… |
Albert Einstein: “Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.”
After my mother-in-law passed away, our family got together to get rid of things that she had accrued over her lifetime and her husband’s lifetime. Even though they had lived in a small one bedroom apartment, we couldn’t believe how much we needed to get rid of.
Besides the large furniture, there were the usual suspects: kitchen stuff, photos, memorabilia, clothes, and left over food items. They had two refrigerators, the second of which sat in the living room, which was always an eyesore.
It needed all of our efforts to discard, or reuse still good food items like beans, rice, and various condiments. During this process, I wondered, “Why do we have such a hard time getting rid of things?”
I think anyone who grew up poor has a tendency to want things, then keep them forever. I was the same way and so were my friends. Especially for my parent’s generation, who went through the Second World War and then the Korean War, this is doubly true.
I think it changes a person to always want things, to keep them, then never let them go. I saw first hand with my own parents who kept things that were no longer used just in case they may need them later on, to my in-laws, who hoarded sentimental items of their children and their grandchildren.
This is obviously the norm, and not the exception. It’s incredibly common for someone who didn’t grow up rich, to want to hoard everything. Case in point: I never met someone of my parent’s generation say they’re minimalists.
Everyone I met lived similar lives in that they all had stuff they kept forever and their apartments showed it. Too much clutter everywhere, too many photos everywhere, and too many clothes they would never wear.
When it comes to clothes, most people will typically wear the same few items of clothing. I know I did when I worked, and I know I still do after retiring. There’s always an item(s) I wear that for whatever reason, works for me.
I like how it looks when I first wear it in front of a mirror, then I like how it looks as I check myself out the rest of the day. I might have 100 different items of clothing total, but I may end up wearing maybe about 20-30 items out of that 100.
Even after downsizing to roughly 10% of my total number of items since our retirement, I know I still have stuff that I haven’t wore since our retirement. It’s a struggle even for someone who recently downsized. I can only imagine the struggles for everyone else!
In cases where our loved one passes away, it’s a struggle to figure out what to get rid of, absent that person’s input. At least when we’re getting rid of our own stuff, we can decide right then and there what to get rid of. This is obviously not possible when your parents pass away leaving a house full of things…
We did the best we could in this endeavor. Outside of few items like handful of old photos and some kitchen items, we got rid of all the clothing/accessories, furniture (whatever we could get rid of ourselves), bedding items, and all the other junk.
It required all of us to contribute. The men (my brother-in-law, myself, and my nephew) did the heavy lifting to disassemble and recycle the furniture, while women (my wife, my sister-in-laws and nieces) did everything else.
We were all exhausted by the end. To be honest, my wife and I had only arrived to help out at around 3 p.m. as we left from Altoona (PA) that morning to New York City. Our siblings and our niece/nephew had done most of the work. Kudos to them!
The next three days were spent getting rid of the remaining stuff. Such things were dishes (why do we need like 80 different dishes?), pots/pans (do we really need like 5 of these?), blankets (two for each season?), and everything else.
At the end of this endeavor, we realized how important it was for us to live with less as of August 2020. Living a minimalist lifestyle means we don’t have 300,000 items (in a typical household) with us.
After getting rid of our own stuff then doing the same after our mother passed away, we got a first hand look at (twice in about a year) what a lifetime of buying stuff equals. It equals too many hours spent to undo a lifetime of endlessly buying things.
These are some of the things we buy just in case…
- Utensils, dishes, blankets, towels, pillows in case guests come over
I think every parent wants to make sure there are like 20 sets of each to accommodate their kids and their grandkids. In reality, except for maybe our parents’ major birthdays (60th, 70th, 80th birthdays), all of us rarely got together. Because some of us are living far away, the idea of getting together often is not easy.
Parents want to believe these gatherings should happen every month, but it’s just not feasible. We are all living busy lives and have responsibilities. To expect to get together often is an expectation likely to be unfulfilled…
I think all of us can relate to buying that extra set of something in case we have people coming over. I know we certainly did. We bought extra sets of towels, utensils/dishes/cups/mugs/wine glasses, blankets/bed sheets, and furniture to fill the bedrooms for guests in case they come over.
We hosted more than two guests maybe 10 times during our 14 years of living in a large townhouse. Did it make sense to fill our home with all these stuff just for these 10 occasions when we did have guests?
In hindsight, this was obviously not the smartest thing we did. We could have just lived our way, without worrying about those ten times we needed these things. We could have asked our family or friends to just bring extra sets of everything they needed!
To think we wasted money to fill our home in case we needed it, just makes me sad and angry…We weren’t rich. We shouldn’t have pretended to our family that we were living well, when we weren’t at times.
We should have just lived our way, without worrying about things like that. There’s always a way to deal with extra guests by simply asking them to bring things they need. They would’ve said, ‘No problem.’
- Extra everything or buying in bulk in case something runs out
Ever since warehouse superstores like Costco’s and Sam’s Club opened, I think all of us are guilty of buying in bulk. In the beginning, we shopped there thinking we were saving money. In reality, with the exception of things that do not spoil like laundry detergent and toilet paper, we threw out food we bought in bulk because we simply could not finish them.
If our family had 4 or more people, then these stores may make some sense, but it’s just the two of us. There’s no way we could finish a huge box of chimichangas, 2 pound box of cold cuts, or the 3 pound tub of butter.
I found out I can just go out and buy something IF something does run out. It’s not the end of the world. It wasn’t like I had to drive an hour to get to a store. Why buy things now in bulk and spend money now instead of buying things when needed?
I managed to save more money when buying a four pack of batteries rather than the humongous 24 pack of batteries, or buying a 20 pack tea bags rather than the 200 pack, or buying just one cereal box rather than buying the two 3 lb boxes of cereal. You’d be surprised how much money we saved by NOT buying in bulk or in super-duper-ginormous pack of something.
- Too much food items, filling up the pantry, or the refrigerator
We were just as guilty as everyone else when it came to buying too much food. When we lived in that same townhouse, we bought too much of everything. On a typical grocery shopping trip, we would stock up on a 12 pack of beers, 5 pound bag of oranges, two tubs of ice creams (because it was on sale), two pounds of bananas, 10 cans of canned soup (because it was buy ten to get them at $1.25 each), 5 pound bag of frozen fish sticks, etc.
We had so much food we rarely touched in our pantry alone, to survive a nuclear winter! We probably had too much food in our fridge to last us a month without going grocery shopping!
The point is, when we stock up on these food items because they’re on sale, then we may never finish them. Too often, we ended up throwing out leftover food items that spoiled, like bananas, frozen foods, ice cream (they smelled funny after sitting in the freezer one too many months), or vegetables we had forgotten about in the bottom drawer.
Buying when needed is a good strategy for your pocket (and for the environment), as you’ll be consuming less AND throwing out less.
Since our early retirement, we’re trying not to go overboard when grocery shopping. We haven’t been perfect, but then no one is. We do however, try to buy for either a week’s worth or two weeks worth of groceries at a time, depending on how far the drive is to the supermarket.
If the drive is within 15 minutes, then we’ll choose to shop weekly. If not, then we’ll most likely shop biweekly. We have been good (most of the times) to buy as needed and to not stock up.
In conclusion:
Going through a downsizing is a traumatic experience for most people. It’s simply overwhelming to try to undo a lifetime of buying and storing stuff. The added stress of separating from sentimental things are what’s really difficult…
After going through our own downsizing then our parent’s, we know how important it is to start downsizing as quickly as possible. Starting with two items per day to get rid of, is a good start…
Lifetime’s worth of stuff we all accrue is sadly unwanted by the time we all pass away. No one wants our thousand family photos or a memorabilia from a trip taken aeons ago…
Things that have value is not in things, but rather in collective memories of time spent together (good or bad). No one truly dies as long as that person is remembered…
I’ve learned (yet again) that personal stuff becomes someone else’s junk when we pass away. The time spent to get rid of all those things is hard work for those that remain to clean up after us.
Better to keep few items we really cherish so they’re not overwhelming. After all, memories are why we live. We don’t live to buy things which becomes a burden to our loved ones…
Thank you all for reading!
Jake
Wandering Money Pig
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