Reasons To De-Clutter: Clutter Costs You Money!

Written by Andrea on April 4, 2008 | Comments (0)

I cleaned under my sink about a month ago, and found 2 bottles of Robitussin cough medicine. They were expired.

I suspect I purchased them a year ago when they were on sale, and then in a cleaning spree, stored them beneath the sink in my bathroom. Other things were then put under the sink in front of the items and they just were pushed toward the back and forgotten.

How much money was wasted? I’d say I tossed $5 -$6 in the garbage can.

Clutter can be very costly.

I am sure that no sooner than I had put those bottles under the sink and forgotten about them that I turned around and purchased new bottles from the store, and many bottles since. In addition to that, my recent de-cluttering under my bathroom sink also revealed a wealth of lotions and skin potions that had been long forgotten.

What have I done to prevent this from happening again?

The first thing I did was to start with that initial de-cluttering. I cleaned under all of my sinks and medicine cabinets, checked for expiration dates, and then re-organized all of my medicine and beauty products.

I took one kitchen cabinet over as the family's “medicine cabinet” and organized it in a way that you cand find what you need in a single glance. Smaller medicines and bottles were put into plastic containers to make them easy to pull out and search through.

Lotions, creams and cleaners were distributed among the family members -- with extra toiletries put in the linen cabinet in a box where anyone was free to take whatever they needed.

There will be no more toiletry or medicine purchases until all of the items in the house are used up. This means no more makeup until I am completely out. This means that I will not purchase from makeup counters no matter how convincing the sales people are. This means I will check out inventory before making any purchases from now on.

I will also work on staying organized so I will no longer end up buying products I already have.