We all hear about it: keep expenses down. Why spend extra money when you don’t have to?
Of course, not always as easy at it sounds. And the convenience of not switching providers or vendors often motivates us to do nothing.
Clean Up
I recently did some periodic cleanup and shredded some bills from over twenty years ago when we lived at another location.
As I fed these sheets into the shredder, I had the opportunity to glance at the amounts I paid for telephone service (landline at the time) and electricity.
While I did receive value for these payments, I could not help but consider how much more my net worth would be now had I been able to save and invest even half of the amounts I spent at the time.
And so it goes in life. We pay for services and for things, and while we get some utility for these payments, I suspect perhaps half of my spending at the time, and maybe even now, is unused or wasted.
Our homes are filled with junk that we paid good money for. [Not in my home…. my junk is in the garage. That’s a joke.] We earned money by working, trading our life’s hours and years for salary. Along the way, everything is diminished and bled by expenses, taxes, insurance, deductions of one kind or another. Often these items are required, so we do the best we can. And it is in the remainder that we attempt to eat and shelter ourselves, to provide ourselves with nourishment, companionship, transportation, and entertainment.
The experience of peer pressure, lust for possessions, desire for bragging rights, all blinds us to the enormous toll our spending has on us.
It is like the story of the borrower (regardless of the many variations of this quote): “If you owe the bank $100, the bank owns you; if you owe $1 million, you own the bank.”
Maybe we came to own our initial purchases when were young, but as we get older, these possessions own us. They occupy space. They collect dust. They need to be stored. They need to be kept safe. They prevent us from being flexible. If we move, we need to have a place to move our stuff to.
So, albeit ever so slowly, I have begun to remove excess stuff from my life. Shredding unneeded documents, giving away unwanted and unneeded items. This process is just begun, and I am accomplishing it with no haste. But it feels like a burden ready to be lifted.
Cleaning up your act? How? Comment here.
The map of the San Francisco Mission District was published in 1909 by the California Block Book & Map Co. Very few books published by this company are known to survive.
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