One of the Obstacles of Decluttering

It doesn't take days, week, years to get 'value for money' because really, such a thing never exists. When the money is gone, it's gone. So why torture yourself that you should be using something that you spent money on if you don't like using it.

When we moved to Spain, we decided to do it 'all or nothing'. We wanted a clean slate and made the decision to only bring what we could fit in our regular Peugeot estate car. Once we'd accounted for 3 adult-sized humans and 2 dogs, there wasn't a great deal of room left.

After 18 years of being home-owners, with a large house in the UK full of 'stuff' that we can accumulated over those years, we took de-cluttering to the ultimate extreme.

We started off slowly, emptying a cupboard at a time & making neat piles of what we definitely wanted to keep, things that were 'maybe, if we have enough room' and then things to sell or give to charity.

After about 2 days, it became apparent that, having covered only 1/20 of the house and the 'keep' pile being more than we could fit in the car, something was going to have to give.

And this kept cropping up.....

As we were clearing stuff out, listing it on second hand sites and taking SO MUCH stuff to charity shops, I kept saying "what a waste".

A waste of money I was referring to.

I felt like because I had spent thousands of pounds on curtains, for example (don't ask!), it felt wasteful to get rid of them.

I felt like I was literally throwing money out.

But here's the conclusion I came to after a bit of banging my head against a wall, pining for my soon-to-be donated crystal wine glasses and generally having a shit-fit about it all......

Nothing is finite (except our time). Energy flows, money flows.

So first of all - the money - it's gone.

It was gone the moment you handed it over in exchange for whatever. It doesn't take days, week, years to get 'value for money' because really, such a thing never exists. When the money is gone, it's gone. So why torture yourself that you should be using something that you spent money on if you don't like using it.

I repeat: The money is gone.

EXCEPT, it's kinda not. I mean, THAT money is gone, but money (contrary to what the media would have you believe) is NOT finite - it's in flow all the time, it's being exchanged for time & goods and it's easy to generate more and so for that reason, who cares what happened to your money yesterday, because there's more in transit! Flowing......

(I know - that IS a tough one to get ones head around if money feels like it is NOT flowing for you right now, but that's another blog post...)

And if you STILL want to place a value on the investment you have made on 'THINGS' - well then you can put it down as learning and EVERYTHING you learn is transferrable...

For example, one of the ladies on my Freedom Fortnight Challenge commented on my Day 2 Challenge: De-clutter; that she threw away several pairs of Jeans cluttering up her closet...

"Like the Lucky Brand jeans I tried on that I LOVED, but didn't buy bc of the price. Instead I ended up with several from Old Navy that didn't really fit right so I never wore them. In the donation bag they went! If I bought the Luckys I would have worn them all the time. Live and learn!"

She's living, and she's learning. And that's what this is really all about, isn't it?

Oh, and before I sign off... The move... Well, suffice to say that for a few weeks the 'keep' and 'maybe' piles grew at a considerably more rapid rate than the 'donate' one! But when it came to it, we knew what we really wanted, and we re-evaluated and YES! We made it to Spain with just an estate car (with a massive roof box and a bike rack on the back - but, you know, we still DID IT!).

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