“Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.” ~ Hosea Ballou
How much are you paying for your lifestyle, for your ’stuff’?
Does your stuff really make you happy?
How close does your lifestyle reflect your true values?
Do you sometimes feel you are on a never-ending treadmill of buying more stuff, trying to find a place to put the stuff, dealing with all the clutter of the stuff that was supposed to make you happy, trying to find the money to pay for all the stuff, dealing with feelings of overwhelm and helplessness around the sheer volume of it all, and feeling so bad you comfort yourself by buying more stuff?
We all succumb to the messages of Madison Avenue (or wherever the ad agencies hang out these days). Think about this: companies spend billions on figuring our how to get our money. They employ people whose sole job it is to uncover what tactics will get us to buy their products.
They do this in a number of ways: making us feel we lack something in ourselves that their product will make up for – the “right” clothes, makeup, shaving cream, etc.; that people will think better of us if we only have this thing – impressive car, home, kitchen cabinets, panty hose. A particularly blatant ad stated outright that it wasn’t a person’s clothing or car that showed the world who they were: it was their watch!!
Seriously? My watch proves my value? I don’t need to be a kind, honest, responsible person?
Of course, sometimes they have a product that will actually solve a problem we have – it’s good to know there are quality replacement windows out there when ours are cracked and drafty. But to watch the ads on TV, it would seem our chief problem is a severe lack of prescription drugs. Which they happen to know how to fix. With lots of our money.
By and large, advertising professionals are quite successful at what they do. Look around your house: how much of the stuff you have do you really need? And what amount is so much extra, sitting in accusing piles waiting to be decluttered?
And what is that stuff telling you about yourself, really? How much has it contributed to the financial strain you (and so many, many of us right now) may be feeling?
How much of the clutter in our country was paid for with credit? And were the fleeting feelings of pleasure we got when we bought so much worth the pain we’re feeling now?
Maybe it’s time for all of us to get off the consumer treadmill.
Picture the simplicity of a decluttered home and decluttered finances: no debt and money in the bank, room to breathe, freedom to live in the present instead of taking care of the excesses of the past.
How much is that worth?
Tags: advertising, clutter, consumer, declutter, decluttered, finances, happy, stuff, worth
Sometimes debt comes through no fault of your own, but that does not need to mean the end of happiness.
My husband was injured on the job, subsequently lost said job and health insurance, and required nearly a year of rehabilitation, three months into our marriage. We had not accumulated much in the way of savings, and in fact had a small amount of debt from the self-financed wedding and honeymoon. We both had had good jobs (mine self-employed), and more than adequate plans for paying our debt. That was derailed very quickly.
Promised a quick resolution to both the injury and the Worker’s Compensation claim, we stayed in our medium-level apartment ($1150/month) for several months, until it became clear that neither issue would resolve quickly or easily. Despite increasing my work hours to 50-60 per week, living on one income for those few months ate up our small savings and put us into deeper debt. My husband could not collect unemployment until his company took him off their payroll, which they waited until seven months after the injury to do. The “fleeting feeling of pleasure” of paying the rent on the credit card when there was no money in the checking account was worth preserving our reputation as renters, I thought.
Realizing the crisis was not going to dissolve in the next few months, we decided sublet our apartment for the remainder of the lease. We moved in with family for three months, and then moved into a very nice but modest apartment ($700/month), converted from a two-car garage.
When the Worker’s Compensation claim finally resolved, the settlement was enough to pay our lawyer and most of the accumulated medical bills, but we were still many thousands of dollars in debt, and were living month to month.
Left with a slight disability after his rehabilitation that prevented him from continuing as a truck driver, and limited job skills outside his profession, my husband could find only seasonal, part-time, low-paying work ($8-10/hour) despite working with the department of employment security and vocational rehabilitation.
Finally, after a winter of job searching with no offers, and falling slightly more into debt each month (partly due to minor medical issues without insurance — did you know a simple series of ordinary blood tests cost $878?), we decided that to find decent work, my husband would have to return to college. However, with my long hours over the last year, he did not qualify for any financial aid because my income was too high. Yet even with his unemployment compensation, we were still just scraping by.
So, for him to qualify for subsidized loans and a small Pell grant ($600 per semester), we had to get a divorce. With the added expense of school, the debt continues to grow each month. We’ve stopped phone service and anything else we could give up, shop at the Salvation Army store and ding-and-dent grocery, and generally live very conservatively.
We have very little “stuff” anymore, and yes, our lifestyle reflects both our values and our reality. A decluttered home is very nice, no matter how small it is. We love our cozy little place out in the middle of nowhere. We love our cats, I love my job, and my husband loves being in school and moving back toward being a provider.
Decluttered finances, “no debt and money in the bank,” is another thing. Yes, it will be nice when we can be out of debt again, but this is reality: I estimate we will have to live the spartan life for 10-15 years after this setback before we can have “money in the bank” or things like health insurance or vacations.
I have a Master’s degree and a small business that breaks even or a little better each year. My husband had a career with an income that could have topped 100K. I had a near-perfect credit score before the accident. We never thought we’d ever be filling out forms to see if we qualified for public assistance like food stamps (we didn’t).
I never thought I’d see my credit score plummet when I have never, ever missed a payment or made a late payment on any account. How did it plummet? Well first, I actually used my credit when I needed to (isn’t that why you develop good credit?) My score then went down a bit because I was using a larger percentage of my available credit. No worries, I thought, it will stabilize as we pay these debts down. However, once I paid down a certain amount, the credit limit would get lowered because a higher percent of credit had been in use! Then of course, with the lowered credit limit, my percent of credit in use goes up again. Then the score goes down, and the cycle repeats.
My total credit line has dropped more than 50% over the last two years, and every time I pay off an account or pay it down substantially, my line of credit gets lowered to just above what I owe. I figure by the time I get all of the credit debt paid, my credit line and my score will be in the cellar, and all I did was use my credit and then pay it off as fast as I could. That’s frustrating. It will take many years of NOT USING my credit to rebuild my score.
Yes, we have debt now. But it isn’t due to lack of attention, laziness, or accumulation of all the latest unnecessary “stuff.” We are just doing the best we can with the financial upset caused by one accident. And we have chosen to be happy and enjoy life in spite of the seeming unfairness of the circumstances.
What a GREAT message for any time of year!!!
Kathy @ Virtual Impaxs last blog post..Warning: Serious MSIE Security Risk Discovered – AGAIN!
WOW! I couldn’t agree with you more. In our society is it easy to just keep buying stuff as it will fill our lives somehow.
Just so you know, your post motivated me to clean up the paper clutter in my office. It’s been really bugging me as I write and work better in an uncluttered office.
Thanks for your article!
Sara
Sara B. Healys last blog post..Our Deepest Fear: Acknowledging Our Power!