Decluttering and Minimalism
Over our lives, we naturally accumulate a lot of stuff. Old clothes, small appliances, books, paperwork, decorations, souvenirs, gifts, children’s toys, mementos, and so much more. We often hold onto items because they mean something to us. They remind us of the past or connect us to a person. They hold emotions and feelings and memories. However, they also take up a lot of space.
At some point, they start to cause clutter. They make it difficult to clean, because they accumulate dust. They fill up your garage or your basement or your spare bedroom. They discourage you from using certain parts of your home. They slowly start to detract from your life rather than enhance it.
The years before your retirement (as well as the beginning of your retirement) are the perfect time to go through what you own and reclaim your physical space. You’ll likely find that, as you do this, you’ll be reclaiming some mental space as well.
How Clutter Happens
No one sets out to clutter their home. It just seems to happen over the years. Your children outgrow their toys and clothes, and you don’t have the heart to get rid of them, so they end up in boxes in the basement. You are given gifts by people you care about and, even if you rarely use the items, there’s feeling and meaning behind them, so you keep them.
A lot of us also keep things we no longer need or use, “just in case” you need them in the future. This includes old electronics, clothing, small appliances, miscellaneous cables, and other items.
Plus, there’s the clutter we all get from buying things we probably don’t actually need. Knick-knacks, odds and ends, decorations, all the things we pick up randomly throughout our lives because we think they’re fun or cute or pretty. Over time, it gets to be too much.
In short, clutter happens slowly and builds up over time. However, now that you’re near retirement (or already retired), this is the perfect opportunity for decluttering.
Why Decluttering, Minimalism, and Retirement Go Together
Minimalism and retirement are a natural fit. For most people, one of the goals of retirement is to live a calm, stress-free, and peaceful life. Cutting down on clutter goes a long way to achieving those goals.
If you have fewer things taking up space in your home, there’s less to clean. There’s less dust, less need for upkeep, and more places to clearly store what really matters. Plus, less clutter makes day-to-day life easier and that helps you enjoy your life, instead of just managing it.
If you have to move ten boxes out of the way to get to your tennis gear in the garage, it becomes more difficult to play tennis. If your shed is filled with old tools, rusty bikes, and a lawnmower you’ve been meaning to fix for a decade, that makes it harder to get to your gardening things. Clutter discourages you from living the life you want.
It also causes mental stress. If you’re always looking at mess and disorganization, your mind starts to feel messy and disorganized. That’s the last thing you want in your retirement years.
How to Tackle Clutter
For a lot of people, clutter that has built up over decades eventually becomes too overwhelming. There are just so many things that it’s hard to know where to start. A good way to look at the process is you don’t have to do everything at once.
Your home didn’t get filled with clutter over the course of a weekend, so it’s not reasonable to assume you’re going to solve the problem in a single weekend either.
Start with one room or one area. Maybe it’s the basement, maybe it’s the garage, maybe it’s the spare bedroom. Focus on a single space and start there.
The easiest way to get the process start is to make three piles: keep, donate or sell, and throw away. The throw away pile is usually the easiest to get through. Throw away anything that’s broken, too old to be of any use, or otherwise in a condition where you can’t see yourself or anyone else using it. Things like paperwork and documents can be scanned or photographed, then shredded.
An area where a lot of people have trouble is differentiating between “keep” and “donate or sell.” Some items are obvious. If it’s something you use regularly, then you should probably keep it. However, if you haven’t touched it in the last year (except maybe to move it out of the way), then you have a choice to make.
Whether we like it or not, items hold meaning and that can make them tough to part with. As you go through items, think about whether they mean something special to you or if you’re just keeping them to keep them. If you decide to part with them, add them to the donate pile or try selling them to make some extra money.
Sometimes, you can take photos of meaningful items and that’s enough to keep the memories alive. Other times, you’ll decide that you simply can’t get rid of something. That’s okay too. This is a process and part of the process is keeping things that make you happy. You may have to go through everything again later, but that’s fine.
Decluttering and embracing minimalism can certainly take some time, but it’s ultimately worth it. Not only will it make your retirement years more enjoyable, but it will be less for you or your loved ones to deal with as you age.
