Calculating the Cost of Keeping Your Junk: Is It Worth It?

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Keeping Your Junk

Some people develop a strong emotional connection to a certain object, and that’s fine. It only becomes a big problem when you develop a connection to everything you buy or have. Over time, these things become junk. We often fight with our inner demons about whether to throw things or not, if something will be used later down the road, if it’s useful now, and before you know it, you’ve got a mountain of things you’re not even sure if you need.

What do you do? It’s time to do a little math on the things you own.

It involves looking at the cost of your living space, and calculating that with the proportion of the area occupied by the stuff you don’t use.

You can use the price you paid for the purchase of your home as a figure or if you know the current estimated value, better still.

Let’s say you paid $500,000 for your home, and you used 20 percent of its area for impractical stuff.

That means you’re paying $100,000 for storage of space. How did we get this amount?

Here’s the formula to calculate what each square foot of your house is worth:

Value of your home ÷ Square footage of your home = Value of each square foot

Value of your home ÷ Square footage of your home = Value of each square foot
When you know the value that each square foot holds, you know what to do each time you see a square of clutter. Put a price tag on it, and see how it costs you.

This amount ($100,000) plus the cost of heating and cooling is definitely going to increase your bill, so just imagine you actually rented space to keep this stuff.

When you think of things in this kind of perspective, you can definitely see a more objective approach toward keeping or getting rid of unnecessary clutter.

Check your emotional cost of storing junk.

Still not convinced that you need to declutter? That’s okay. Now, we weigh the emotional costs associated with clutter. Financial costs aren’t the only ones related to our things. There are also emotional costs connected to it. While you may not be able to set a dollar value on these items, it carries significant weight on your decisions. How do you feel when you hold a certain item? Do you feel sad or happy? Does it bring back certain memories? What memories do you want to feel when you touch or carry an object? How you feel will tell you whether to keep or toss something.
Check your emotional cost of storing junk.

Bottom Line

For many of us, putting a price tag on our junk helps us think differently. With junk, we always weigh the emotional cost, but when you put in the actual cost of the space we take to store junk, we realize that we can actually live without it. If you live in Raleigh and you’re in the process of decluttering your junk, give your local Raleigh junk removal a call.

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