Archives for October 2017

Winter is coming, keep somebody warm this winter.

This is a great time to purge your closet, and a great time to help keep somebody else warm.  Part of becoming minimal is to not be attached to stuff that you don’t need.  I know that you will need winter clothes, but come on, do you really need all of those winter clothing items in your closet?

Step 4 of “10 Steps to Embrace Your Inner Minimal” is to clean out your closet.  Since winter is coming, and you are swapping your summer clothes for your winter clothes, now would be a great time to skip over steps 1 through 3 and go straight to step 4.  Of course doing steps 1 through 3 would be good for you too.  Make sure that you hit all of your closets in your bedroom, hallway, next to the front door, garage hooks, guest bedrooms, your car truck.

As you move your summer clothes to the back of your closet, and you bring the winter clothes up front, just do a little extra.  Find everything that you wore last year and put it up front.  Any winter clothes that you did not wear last year, just place them outside your closet.  Now that your summer clothes are in the back of your closet, your winter clothes is in front of your closet, and the stuff that you didn’t wear last year is outside your closet, just close the closet door.

Quick list of things to consider:

• Coats
• Sweaters
• Raincoats
• Ski pants
• Boots
• Blankets
• Hoodies and sweatshirts
• Scarves
• Gloves
• Hats and beanies (tuque for my Canadian readers)
• Heavy socks
• Camping gear (sleeping bags, tents, heaters, stoves, tarps)
• Did I forget something?  Please comment below to let everybody know.

Now, take everything that is not in your closet and take it down to the Salvation Army donation station or your favorite charity.  Wow, wasn’t that simple?

If you want to take this one step farther, while you are moving your summer clothes to the back of your closet, take all of the summer clothes that you did not wear this past summer and place them outside your closet as well.  But don’t mix the summer and winter clothes.  Wait until the end of winter and donate your summer clothes.  This will help the donation station to not have to store the summer clothes all winter, and then they can sell them first thing next summer when you finally donate them.  Keep your summer clothes aside and ready to donate.  Do this incase you need to make a sudden life change and then you can quickly unload the clothes at a donation station.

Seriously folks, if you have a jacket and socks, you have more than many.  Share the love, share the warmth and minimize your life.

Please tell me your thoughts on what you just read.  Can you add value to my post?  Then please reply and share.

Yet another celebrity is in financial trouble.  You’ve seen the headlines telling us about that famous TV or movie star that can no longer afford to pay their rent or mortgage.  What you don’t see in the headlines are those stories about the tens of thousands of other people, those not so famous, which can no longer afford to pay their bills.  It’s a common occurrence, and mostly caused by spending more than you should.

I know, you gotta be saying “tell me something that I don’t know, Mr. Obvious.”   Well, yes, we know it but don’t do anything about it.  The famous people’s troubles vs. the normal person’s trouble is all a matter of scale.  These famous people make a lot of money, and then they spend lot of money.  By comparison, take your annual income and then add some zero’s to the end.  Let’s assume that the number that you come up with is that of that famous person.  Wow, that was a big number.  Now add a similar amount of zeros to the end or your mortgage/rent, and then to your car, and then to your having fun fund, and so on.  That number would be the famous persons spend.  Basically, your income vs. spend is the same percentage as those famous people.

Ok, we did the math, now cut that income number in half, because you (or the famous person) are now retired.  I’m only cutting the number in half for now because I’m sure that there is still some sort of income.  I’m sure that you will still make some income, but not the income that you made when fully employed.  But be careful of the spend.  You may still have that hefty mortgage payment, car payment(s) and credit card bills.

By living within our means as our financial situation changes, we are better equipped to handle what comes next.  Our biggest enemies are our laziness to not address what is happening around us, and our ego that makes us fear what others think.  Don’t take either of these enemies lightly, they are real, and they will screw you over.

Short story time:  I once had a huge hangup over a woman.  It consumed me.  A friend told me flat out, the world is full of women, move on and find a new one.

This is great advice.  If your ego makes you worry too much about what people think, then find new people.  As for the laziness; if you are around the right people you will just get it done.

There are many times in our lives that we make changes.  We get a larger place to live when kids come along, and then and even larger place when more kids come along.  When the kids leave we should adjust our life accordingly.  It is so easy to adjust up, so why is it so difficult to adjust down?  the adjusting down is where we fail.

Retirement encompasses many, many years of no working income.  Many don’t minimize their lives early enough.  We continue to spend during those years that we should be saving and we end up endangering our retirement life.

Be aware of where you are in life.  Don’t over spend, and adjust your life accordingly.  Don’t be afraid to adjust down.

I’d like to hear your thoughts.  Please comment below as many others would also like to hear your thoughts

Could you live in a tiny house?  I could!  At least I think I could, but do I really want to.

If you don’t know about tiny houses, they are just that.  They are a house, and they are tiny.  The typical tiny house is trailer mounted, made of typical house construction, and is no bigger than the trailer.  Think about a flatbed trailer that carries ATV’s or cars.  They are typically eight feet wide, and anywhere from sixteen to twenty feet long (give or take).  Doing the math, 8 x 20 = 160, or rather 160 square foot home.  Could you live in 160 square feet?  You’d better downsize first.  While 160 square sounds small, and it is, but most tiny houses add a loft where a mattress is placed to make up the bedroom, so add 8 x 12 for the bedroom.

With the loft we are up to 160 + 96 for a grand total of 256 square feet.  As a single guy, I could do it, especially after my minimal purge.  You’ll most likely have power wired in the trailer, so you could plug in, maybe located in somebody’s back yard.  Optionally you could choose to rough it and have candles, lanterns, propane for heat and cooking, and maybe a small wood burning stove.  I found a one square foot wood burning stove that would heat a tiny home just fine, even in the dead of a Colorado winter.  You could have the tiny house plumbed for water, or you could haul water in.  There are a vast array of waterless toilets, and people have been bathing without running water for millennia.

The problem however comes when you try to find a place to park your tiny house.  I could talk a family member or a friend into letting me park in their back yard.  Or I could pay somebody a small amount to let me park on their property.  I could even buy some land and put it there.  This all sounds good until the city or county finds out what you are doing.  Most municipalities, and the federal government, have laws about dwellings, and the specs on a tiny house raise big red flags.  Laws control the size of a house, the amount of time that you can live in a temporary home, which includes tiny houses, and how long you can live in a temporary home if you are in somebody’s back yard.

Story time:  My folks travel full time, and they have done so since the mid 1990’s.  They are members of a large resort club.  As a member of the resort club they can stay up to two weeks at any club and then they must vacate for at least one week before they come back.  So basically they travel in spurts of one to two weeks and any location.  They go North in the summer and head South for the winter.  An option for members is to stay for an extended amount of time at select parks.  They can choose to stay up to six months at a time.  However, at the six-month mark, they must vacate due to law.  Most of these parks are designated and travel parks and not mobile home parks, so six months is the longest amount of time.  A person, and their RV or tiny home, must vacate the property for at least two weeks before they can come back to stay six months again.  My point here is the law.  There are laws, and you can’t get around the law.

There are travel parks where you can park your tiny house, hook up to power and water, get cable TV, have black water hooks and the whole shebang.  If you are going to do this, you’d might as well just by an RV or a travel trailer, which I’m looking, well, because, I’m only kinda minimal.  If you build a tiny house yourself, you are looking at a $20k to $40k spend.  If you buy from a tiny house builder you are looking at $50k to $70k for decently appointed unit.  I admit, tiny houses are so much cooler than a travel trailer or RV.

Ok, now you have a tiny house and it’s time to move.  What will you use to move it?  Tiny houses are very heavy, and most small trucks, and some large trucks, depending on the size of your tiny house, are too small to pull a tiny house.  The whole idea behind a tiny house is to minimize, so why would you drive a Ford F-350 around just to be able to move your home?  If cost is no problem for you, and you like having cool stuff, then by all means, buy that 26 foot tiny house and pull it with your F-350 Platinum, and I’ll park my similar rig next to you after I win the lottery.

Living in a tiny house for me would be a big YAH!  However, not knowing when I’m getting in trouble with the city or the feds would be too much stress.  I would also need to buy a $60k truck to pull it.  Unfortunately, the cons outweigh the pros, so for me, right now, a tiny house is a nah.

I’d like to hear your thoughts.  Please comment below as many others would also like to hear your thoughts.

 

Let’s talk coffee.  I could debate good coffee vs. bad, or Starbucks vs. your local brew vs. home brew, but I won’t.  I’m not talking flavor, I’m talking cost.  Living minimal has a lot to do with what you make vs. what you spend.  Have you ever summed your total yearly cost for coffee?  What would you have remaining in the bank each year by cutting your personal coffee spend?  Let’s take a look.

Story time:  A previous employer made a drastic change in their coffee buy for employees.  This employer was convinced that employees were stealing coffee.  Management figured that employees were taking full cases of coffee packets home with them.  They thought that stealing was a significant reason for such a high monthly coffee service cost.  This company of 800 employees was spending more than $13,000 per month on coffee service.  Costs included coffee packets and coffee maker rental.  They changed to a service that made it more difficult to take coffee home.  I don’t know if they saved, and the new coffee was good, but their theft premise, from my point of view, had little merit.

Well, I did the math for the company coffee spend.  They had 800 employees and let’s assume half drink coffee.  With 400 people drinking coffee, that would be $13,000 divided by 400, which equals $32.50 per person per month.  So, the company thought that people were stealing, when in fact, $1.00 per day per coffee drinker is a reasonable cost.

So what about your cost for coffee (not to mention the calories if you use sugar/cream.)  A typical Starbucks coffee averages more than $2 ($2.40 in my area), which would be $60+ per month on average, or $730 per year if you bought a plain black coffee every day.  If you by the super mocha-locha iced frappo drink you are looking a much higher spend.

Occasionally I buy hot coffee, but I normally use the office coffee service, or brew my own at home.  I should stop completely, but then again, I’m only kinda minimal.  Before my purge I had the high-end super duper Kitchen Aid coffee maker.  While I still use Kitchen Aid for the quality, I use one of their small, single serving models.  I got a great deal on Amazon (KitchenAid KCM0402OB Personal Coffee Maker) for my coffee maker.  It’s easy to use and takes little space on the counter.  I don’t buy the cheap coffee (you know, the one in the yellow bag labeled “coffee”), but I don’t go overboard with the really expensive stuff either.  My overall coffee spend is about $5 per month, or $60 per year, not $60 per month.

It is the small changes like coffee spend that can make a significant difference in what you have in your bank account at the end of the year.

Caveat:  If coffee is your life, then live life to the fullest.

If you struggled with this issue or can inspire others on this subject I would like to hear your story.  Please comment below.

I hear it all of the time.  People want to minimize, but they keep telling me “I just can’t get rid of it.”  If you truly want, or need, to minimize, you will be able to do it.  The toughest part is just getting started.

If you want to make a change in your life, or you are expecting a sudden change, you should start right away.  A need to change can come out of the blue, and when it does you may not have time to do it properly at that time.  An unexpected change might come in the form of a new job opportunity, the loss of a job and the need to move, or having to go help a family member for an extended amount of time.

When the need to change comes, you will be less able to pick and choose what you keep or get rid of in an efficient manner.  By minimizing early, when the time comes you will have less stuff to worry about, and you will be able to make better choices when it comes to weeding out stuff from things.  So get started now.

If you are having trouble getting started, take a look at 10 Steps to Embrace Your Inner Minimal.  Use these 10 steps to get started. These are the steps that I used to minimize my life.  It took a couple of months for me to get everything down to what only fit in my Jeep (The Purge), but I did it and so can you.

Minimizing is not a quick endeavor.  Don’t get me wrong, you can pack your Jeep and drive away from the rest of your stuff, or you can do it super methodically and never get it done.  In reality, if you follow my steps you can get it done in just a few weeks.  You might even find that you can move from that two bedroom apartment to a one bedroom, or a studio, after you minimize (if you’re single).  I have a single friend that lives in a three bedroom house, and it’s full.  She actually is the one that motivated to write this article.  She want’s to minimize, but she just can’t seem to get rid of anything.

All I can do at this point is encourage and support her.  It is up to her to minimize her life, just as it is up to you to minimize yours.

If you struggled with this issue or can inspire others on this subject I would like to hear your story.  Please comment below.