The Cost of Clutter

This is a re-post, somewhat edited, of a piece I wrote while we lived in Israel. During this early part of the year, when so many of us are trying to get a better grip on organization, I thought this might be of use to someone. This post has been linked with Welcome Home at Raising Arrows.

It's very popular in frugality blogs to talk about how clutter is not frugal. Disorganization keeps us from knowing what we have, so we buy more. And you need more space if you have a lot of stuff, too. But generally, we don't put that awareness into real numeric terms.

Although I did not participate (no pantry), I followed the progress of Money Saving Mom's Eat From the Pantry Challenge last month. In the final installment, participants were invited to post about what they learned. What I really got from those posts was that excess food in the pantry--food you can't or don't keep track of--is just edible clutter. And hoarding is not a frugal trait.

So here's a breakdown of the actual cost of clutter, given in US dollars, that can be applied to food and stuff alike.

Stuff takes up space. That's space you pay for either in mortgage or rent (and if you own your home outright, you still pay taxes and insurance on it). You are paying for the space your stuff occupies. Think of it like paying for storage. Our last home was about 1500 square feet, and we rented it for $1175 per month. That works out to about $0.78 per square foot, per month. Over twelve months, that's $9.36 per square foot. That may sound small, but something that takes up eight square feet costs about $74.88 per year to store at that rate of rent. If I own something, I should ask myself whether it's worth the cost of housing it. Is it more valuable for me to store that item or more valuable for me to have the living space?

Now for our next factor: maintenance.

I'm not talking about repairs or that kind of maintenance (although those are costs), I'm talking about the value of the time that you spend taking care of your stuff. Cleaning, anyone? Let's use a modest estimate and say that your labor is worth $10 per hour. If you spend 36 seconds dusting something, you just spent 10 cents of your time. If you dust it weekly, that's $5.20 per year. In the kitchen, it's easy to spend 6 minutes searching for something--that's $1 worth of time. Do that on a weekly basis, and you've lost $52 worth of time per annum.

Now let's apply all of that to a scenario.

Suppose you bought 6 cans of green beans on sale for $0.50 each ($3 total--this scenario is not going to account for sales tax). You didn't actually need the cans, but they were a good deal, so you stored them above the fridge, behind the popcorn, for future use. They take up about 1 square foot (ETA: Yes, those cans are three-dimensional, and so take up cubic feet, but I'm using terms that are easy to work with and common to think about. Not to mention that I'm not about to figure my rent per cubic foot). A month later, you're running low on produce, or time, or inspiration and decide to warm some green beans to go with dinner. You search high and low for those cans for 10 minutes, can't find them, and call your husband to ask him to pick up a can on the way home from work. He does, but buys the name brand at the regular price: $1.29.

A couple weeks later, green beans are on sale again, this time for $0.75 each. You buy 3 ($2.25). In using up your new green beans (which you do quickly, for ease of my later calculation ;P), you completely forget about the ones you couldn't find before. Four and a half months later, six months after the original purchase, you find those six cans while doing a deep clean of the kitchen. You then spend three minutes cleaning dust off of them and another three minutes finding a more visible place to put them.

How much did those six cans of green beans ultimately cost?

Original cost: $3.00

Time searching: $1.67

Replacement can: $1.29

Restocking: $2.25

6 months storage: $4.68 (assuming $0.78/sq ft)

Time cleaning and organizing: $1.00

Total cost: $13.89

You would have been better off buying ten cans of name brand green beans at the standard price.

As homemakers, a big part of our job is stretching our husband's pay check as far as it can go. And, let's face it, most of us enjoy the thrill of finding a really good deal. But there's an element of follow-through that's easy to forget. Our job is one that is all about the long term. Through an infinite number of events, we take on the tasks that feed and clothe our families, allow us to provide for the future, and teach our children the tools they will need for life. We tackle the continuing challenge of making a house into a home. When we focus on each minuscule event, it's easy to be bogged down with repetition and seeming pointlessness. Instead, we need to remember that each of those events is actually part of a process--the process of maintaining a home, educating a child, feeding a family.

When we lose sight of the ongoing nature of our work, we not only become frustrated and dissatisfied, but we defeat ourselves as well! When we enjoy the thrill of finding an excellent deal on canned goods, we can savor that single event, but we must also place it on the continuum of housekeeping. We must follow through and put those green beans someplace easy to find, inventory them (whether mentally or in a physical kitchen inventory), and make a point of placing them in the menu plan.

Life consists of punctuated equilibrium--long periods of reasonable predictability interrupted by highly unexpected, "game changing" events. It is the job of the wife to create the equilibrium her husband's vocation enables. Once we have used those resources to build a framework, our husbands are better able to lead the household through the interruptions. Fostering in ourselves a mindset of long term planning is probably one of the most important things a housewife can do.

Happy New Year!