Chances are high that last month you either gave Uncle Sam a good portion of your hard-earned annual salary or (if you were among the lucky ones) you pulled in a few extra bucks. Your take-home pay is your own unique system of checks and balances, with your taxes either tipping in your favor throughout the year or coming due April 15. And chances are that right now you’re either feeling the pinch or have some extra change burning a hole in your pocket. And either way, there’s a new skirt or Murakami hardback with your name seemingly on it.
But how much do we need the things we buy—or already have? Perhaps you spend this time of the year doing a proper spring clean, weeding out your wardrobe, rooting through your bookshelves, and minimalizing your kitchen cabinets. Or you may do a miniature version of that every time you see an episode of Hoarders.
The $50 Week gets a little psychological this month to a practical end: living with less can actually yield a richer experience. Beyond the money you save on not buying (try going without shopping for even a week to see how that boosts up your checking account), there are more murky expenses that come with owning . . . well . . . stuff. Read on to bone up and pare down.
Shop Smart
Manhattanite Laura Cattano has the unlikely résumé of a former shopaholic who now boasts a minimalist style and makes her living helping others organize their lives. As someone who has been there, she has a valuable perspective on American consumption. “We’re taught outwardly, subliminally that when you buy something it will make your life better. We’re taught to buy—that’s what our whole economy is based on,” she says.
However, such a buying culture left Cattano among the significant chunk of the shopping population who purchase things mindlessly and accumulate things that don’t function in the way they ought to for the specific buyer. It’s not a problem with the product, it’s a problem with how the purchaser shops. Cattano’s means of combatting this issue was to treat every store as if it were a hardware store.
“You’d never see a contractor going into a hardware store to look around and say, ‘Oooh! What’s this? What is this tool? I don’t know what it is, but it looks cute. Oh, these nails are on sale! I’m going to buy four packs!’” Cattano explains. “They would have plans. They would say, ‘I’m building this. I need a jigsaw with a four-inch blade. I need 100 four-inch wood screws.’ They have a specific list. So why don’t we do that with every other store?”
Cattano now views every item in her home—from tank tops to bookshelves to chairs to tote bags—as a tool to achieve her personal goals. “If I don’t know what I want from my apartment, then how do I know what I want to buy?” she reasons. Everything in her studio goes toward facilitating a clean, open, and airy life, with her wardrobe sharing the additional purpose of allowing the professional to come off as sophisticated, classic, and chic. “They’re all here to do something for me and they’re here to help me achieve something,” she says of her things. “And if they don’t do that job, then they’re fired. Or I don’t buy them at all.”
Don’t Tip the Scales
“I really like purging things. Getting to the end of a shampoo bottle, it just feels really good to put it in recycling,” says Jessie Sholl, author of the memoir Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean about Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding. “If you think about the really common phenomenon now of having a storage space, we don’t need that much stuff. I feel like if you can’t fit your things where you live, then you don’t need them. We’re just looking for ways to store our things so we can continue accumulating rather than say, ‘Wait, do I really need this?’”
Of course, Sholl recognizes that things will continue to enter her life. And for Sholl, living a minimalist lifestyle has very little to do with the financial benefits (though she admits not owning 30 pairs of shoes has saved her big over the years). “If I buy an item of clothes, I always try to find something to get rid of to just kind of keep that balance even,” she says. If you purchase so many books, sweaters, or DVDs in a single week that a similar take on organization seems like an exhaustive process, you’re buying too much.
Do you need that box set of the complete Schubert lieder? Or can you listen to it on Spotify once or twice and be content? If you have a Netflix account, is buying the Salzburg Don Giovanni to watch once really worth the $40 and extra space on your shelves? And how many times have you bought a book only to read the first few pages, lose interest, and watch it subsequently gather dust on your desk for several seasons? (The iBooks app on my iPhone and iPad has saved me from buying quite a few duds with its comprehensive free samples.)
“If I’m in a store and I’m trying something on, and the salesperson says, ‘Oh, that’s so cute!’ I say, ‘Yeah, it is cute. It looks good. But I’m not going for cute. I’m going for classic chic. So I don’t need to buy it,’” adds Cattano.
That’s not to say that just because your career won’t necessarily be bettered by the newest season of 30 Rock or the latest Geoff Dyer doesn’t mean you can’t own these items if they feed you in another way. But if you can’t immediately pinpoint how owning these items will help you be the person you want to be, then you don’t have to buy it right away. They can live on your Amazon Wish List for another few weeks or months.
Guiding Principles
Another way of looking at the shopping balance is to look at the organizational process that Cattano presents to her clients. On her blog, theorderobsessed.blogspot.com, Cattano lists the following five steps for undaunting organization:
1: Define the vision for your space.
2: Determine function for each area/room.
3: Edit and sort.
4: Reassess what’s left.
5: Design and installation.
When Cattano originally redesigned her life, she eliminated 80 percent of her things that did not comply with her vision or desired function for her apartment. “It’s like investing. If you’re going to get a 401K, they’re going to say, ‘What are your goals? Are you aggressive? Are you conservative? What’s your strategy?’” she explains.
It could be, as Cattano points out, that you don’t want your space to be minimal. As singers, you’re probably going to own more CDs, scores, and binders of sheet music than a writer or professional organizer. “I’m not a minimalist but believe you should only take things into your life that you love,” Cattano professes on her site. The vision for your space may be functional but also inspiring, with your myriad materials readily available. Or you could be fine with storing your CDs in your closet if they’re all digitized on your computer.
Functionally speaking, you probably want a space with a keyboard or piano for practicing. That may take precedence over trading up from a full to a queen size bed or owning a sofa. And that will dictate a lot of what you purchase. Cattano advocates both writing down your vision and then sketching out the functionality.
Editing and Sorting
“I hate the idea that you should get rid of something just because you haven’t used it in a year,” says Cattano, who points out that a cluttered living space may mean that you don’t know you had an item or had no access to it. Recital formalwear may still fit you and look in style but not have been used in the last year. That doesn’t mean it won’t be used this year.
What Cattano does believe, however, is just because a certain item may be useful in the future or came as a gift doesn’t mean it should be retained. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from clients, ‘Oh, that was on my registry,’” she says. The “S” word comes up in this conversation a lot, both from a decluttering and a shopping standpoint. If you’ve ever planned a wedding or baby registry on Amazon.com or at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, you’ve heard this word on an endless loop.
You “should” have the full set of pots and pans because they cost the same amount as the one sauce pan and skillet you were eyeing, even if you don’t cook that often and have no need or space for Calphalon’s tri-ply stainless steel 13-piece cookware set. You “should” have a KitchenAid standing mixer despite owning a hand blender and having never needed an alternative. You “should” have formal china regardless of the fact that you barely use your casual collection. You “should” have cloth curtains in the bedroom no matter how happy you are with your venetian blinds. You “should” realize what I’m talking about here.
Keep this in mind not only when you’re cleaning, but also when you’re shopping. If you’re buying the Decca Ring Cycle box set because it’s a piece you feel you “should” own, then you’re just should-ing all over yourself.
The Other “S” Word
It’s easy to think of this lifestyle as a sacrifice. But Sholl says her minimalism feels like quite the opposite: it enriches her life and fuels her creativity. “I think there’s a connection between having a cluttered physical space and having a cluttered mind. If I’m sitting down to work, I can’t have clutter around me. So there’s that mental bonus I get when I’m in a clear, clutter-free, minimalist-type space.”
“Will I always want new things? Of course,” says Cattano, whose weekends were once consistently spent in stores rather than museums, theaters, or restaurants. “I always feel like I can use another top. But when you’re buying things you love, you always get more satisfaction from the thing rather than the fulfillment of shopping.”
Think of living with less as the financial form of weight loss. It’s a shock to the system if your MasterCard normally gets more play than your piano music. But it ultimately leads to a healthier lifestyle that can accommodate the occasional splurge (we’re all human, as both Sholl and Cattano stress) but generally leave you a lean, mean, money-confident machine. And, like fitness and weight loss, it will also give you some added mental benefits.
“I really like that feeling of thinking to myself, ‘OK, if there was a fire in my apartment, what would I take? My dog and my laptop and that’s really about it,’” says Sholl. “There’s nothing that I would really be devastated to lose. And I think that’s much better.”
