theFIREstarter

We’ve just been having a long overdue clear out at home, to declutter and tidy up a bit, and make more efficient use of the space available in our modestly sized home

We also popped along to the first car boot of the year on Sunday, and it was astounding to see the amount of once treasured, now discarded possessions.

Both of these events got me thinking…

One key mistake I see over and over again people ¹ make with their spending is that they spend (a lot of!) money on items that should be long lasting purchases that should provide value to them for a long period of time. You can probably already guess what I am talking about here:

• Upgrading household furniture and soft furnishings every few years (to be fair we are not especially guilty of this, and if we do most of the time we buy second hand)
• Same with electronic gadgets; the amount of charges we discovered for all our old devices is ridiculous enough!
• All the trinkets and decorations people tend to have displayed all around their house, which are in vogue one year and in land fill the next.
• Wearing clothes a handful of times before charity shopping or just binning them.
• Kids toys that are barely played with before being sold on or taken up the dump.

In other words we are consuming items that were not originally meant to be consumables, but advertising and the culture of our society have convinced us that they now are to be consumed.

But of course! We are now a consumer society ², so we can’t really blame people for doing this sort of thing too much, and with a multi billion dollar advertising industry pitted against us, what hope have we really got!?!

The advice for us FIRE types is obvious and written about ad infinitum:

• Realise how wasteful this sort of purchasing behaviour is and become ideologically opposed to it for both your wallet and the environment’s sake!
• Stop watching/reading adverts
• Delay purchases for 7/14/30 days and see if you are still really that bothered about them
• Have no spend days/weeks/months
• Practice various aspects of minimalism / KonMarie methods

the car with the smashed window

Yet for some reason we still find it hard to implement.

I tend to find you need constant vigilance of what is coming into your house otherwise it quickly spirals out of control. Having a child does not tend to improve this situation either, for all of those budding minimalist parents out there, take note 😀

Nonetheless, we have cleared out a fair amount of crap, which has felt great so far, and will try to sell online / car-boot / donate or as a last resort dump the remaining junk.

There is something truly beautiful about having your storage spaces efficiently used and the rest of your house looking tidy as tidy as it can do with a toddler rampaging around it!

We have still got quite a few rooms left to do, but once this clear up project is done it will be straight onto full vigilance mode to make sure things don’t slip again!

This part of the psychology of the process reminds me of the experiment done with an abandoned car:

Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, arranged an experiment testing the broken-window theory in 1969. Zimbardo arranged for an automobile with no license plates and the hood up to be parked idle in a Bronx neighbourhood and a second automobile in the same condition to be set up in Palo Alto, California…..

…the vehicle sitting idle in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week until Zimbardo himself went up to the vehicle and deliberately smashed it with a sledgehammer. Soon after, people joined in for the destruction

Apparently this is called the broken windows theory (I only just found that out!) and you can see how it affects many areas of life, whereby you let a small thing slip and before you know it, chaos ensues. Just check out my email Inbox for any proof of that!!! 🙂

As usual I find just knowing this sort of stuff has a name and is a real and proven effect tends to help.

So fingers crossed for slightly less chaos in the TFS household in future 🙂

I’m going to be (attempting) to write some more short form posts such as the above over the next few months to get me back to posting. Additional reasons for doing so are:

• I often have an idea that is probably worth sharing, but does not need to be/cannot be expanded into a 1000+ word post. It seems silly to not be posting these just because I’m embarrassed (or whatever it is?! I’m not really sure) to post a short post
• I’m only getting about 25 minutes per day on the train to sit down and write nowadays. It’s hard to dip in and out of a longer post in that short time, so I am hoping I can knock out the shorter posts in literally just that 25 minute part of my commute and my posting frequency will start to go back up again (also this might lead to a positive spiral effect and I will start knocking out the longer ones as well as I’ll get some additional motivation!)
• I used to really enjoy short posts of a random thought or saving or DIY tip from ERE back in the day. I think a lot of people would enjoy shorter and easier to digest posts.
• I am currently enjoying said shorter format posts from the Kieran MacRae blog!

That long explanation was potentially unnecessary, but I thought I’d just let you guys know what to expect from the blog over the next few months (if my plan works of course!) 🙂