Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
How Being Organized Can Save You Money
Okay, I admit it: Deep in my heart, I am a cheap, cheap girl. Nothing galls me more than wasting money, and one thing I see a lot of in my client’s homes is waste. When you are disorganized—when you are operating from a place of unmanageability so you are not on top of your game, you are inefficient, and this costs you money.
The most glaring example of this is late-payment fees. I have never in my life paid a bill late. Okay, once, when I went to Russia with my parents in 1992, I forgot that my rent would be due while I was gone. I got home to a worried message from my landlord, who thought it was so out of character that he was worried something happened to me. Because I was always broke and living on popcorn to be able to pay my bills on time, I assumed that if people had plenty of money they would never pay bills late. Not true, apparently. Let me just channel Suze Ormon for a moment and say, Why, why would you ever just give these companies money? I know why: ’cause your desk is a mess and you forgot the bill. Let’s fix that, now. You can’t change the world economy, but you can keep your side of the street clean.
The second way I see people waste money is by buying duplicates because they either don’t know what they have or they can’t find the ski pants, hole punch, garlic press, whatever it is they know they have. If you don’t know or can’t find what you have, you are fated to duplicate.
People also tend to buy new things because they can’t be bothered to get the old one fixed. From both an economic and an environmental standpoint this is a lousy practice. What’s worse is that they often don’t get rid of the broken item. So, lets all make an effort to get stuff fixed. Keep it out of the landfill. Or learn to fix it yourself. We have a joke in my house: If it is broken, put it on Daddy’s desk. My son Bobby loves to watch Daddy tinker. It’s hard to find repair people, but when you do, it feels so good to pay someone for an actual skill—a dying skill—that I for one, am thrilled to support them.
A lot of the unmanageability in our lives comes from the speed at which we live. When our lives are chaotic, we rush; when we rush we take cabs instead of the subway, we buy lunch instead of making it, we buy stuff in the drugstore that we already have at home because we were rushing out of the house and forgot band-aids/wipes/lipstick.
Sometimes getting organized means slowing down. In our society we often denigrate slowness, even equate it with stupidity, when in reality it is often a symptom of serenity. We often glorify speed as though being over-scheduled and over-caffeinated were marks of success. Not! Often the speediest people are letting the biggest crumbs of money fall through the cracks. So look on the bright side in this slowing economy and slow down too: It’ll save you money.