The roll of tape cost me about four dollars. I already owned two just like it.
I just couldn’t find them. I had a birthday gift to wrap and a party to get to. I hunted for twenty minutes, gave up and drove to the store.
I wrapped that gift in the car, in the parking lot. (My husband held the paper.)
A week later, I found the other two rolls. One was in the junk drawer, under a stack of old menus. The other was in a gift bag on a closet shelf.
I set all three on the kitchen counter and laughed. Then I stopped laughing, because I started to wonder what else all this keeping was costing me.
I had always thought keeping things was free. It’s already paid for, isn’t it? It just sits there.
But keeping things does cost us. The cost of clutter doesn’t come in the mail as a bill, so it’s easy to miss. It comes out of your money, your time, your safety and your peace, a little at a time.
So I sat down and added it up.
What You Paid Is Already Gone
Let me clear up one thing first, because it kept me stuck for years. I would hold up a sweater and think, “I paid good money for this.” Then I’d put it back.
But that money left my purse a long time ago. Keeping the sweater won’t bring it back. Giving it away won’t make me lose it a second time.
So when I talk about what keeping costs, I don’t mean what you paid. I mean what it costs you from today on. That’s the only part you can still do something about.
If the old price still bothers you, I wrote about what to do with things you spent money on. (That one took me a long time to learn.)