There are many many ways to cut back on spending and you have to figure out for yourself how much you need to cut back, but stop a minute and look around you, at the things around you. All those things cost money. Money that you don't have and now need. Did those things really change your life? Are they making it better? If you lost everything today could you live without them?
When we first hit rock bottom in that little one room apartment we couldn't fit all our things in there. Not even if we stacked it to the ceiling a called Hoarders in to film us. So instead we made a big financial fopa, we got a storage building. Every month we paid money on the apartment, utilities, and that big white elephant storage building. Looking back I can now see that if we had gotten rid of so many things we could have used that money to rent a place that had more than one room and wasn't over an auto repair garage.
This lesson took me nine years to learn. As humans we love our junk but does it really love us? Does it help us get through the day? Does all of it have a function even? My lesson was learned at the beginning of this year. I'm now disabled but in January I was still waiting to hear if I would be or not so I wasn't working and hadn't been for a few years. Then my husband lost his job. That's when we started selling all that junk around us. Thanks to Craigslist.com we were able to sale enough stuff to keep the utilities on until the beginning of March. By then we were living in an empty shell of a house and my husband got word that he couldn't go back to his former career. We couldn't pay the house payment and we had nothing else to sell. We were facing homelessness.
I instantly started researching how to live in your car, living in tent cities, and so on. I wanted to be prepared. Yet we still had junk around us! We couldn't take it with us so we packed everything we needed to live on in one pile, what our pets needed in another pile, what we couldn't afford to replace once we found a way to get back into a home in another pile, then we looked at what was left. You would be amazed on what you can live on when you half to. All that extra junk that we felt we had to have in the past, we it either went to the pawn shop, thrift store, or we gave it away. Things we needed to survive fit in the back of our truck, and the other essentials fit in a 10x10 storage unit which amazed me because the white elephant was 14x20 and was crammed full.
We however didn't become homeless. We were blessed by an RV park that offered us a place to stay in exchange for work. But that's another story. The lesson is not to allow your possessions to dictate and control your life. I'm sure if means a lot that that was your grandmother's trunk but do you really need it to remember her? Would she want you to starve so you could keep it? Or could you sell it and buy the groceries that you and your family truly need.
I can honestly say that yes I sold my great great grandmother's steamer trunk to pay the bills along with our wedding bands. Now that we are slowly getting back on our feet people find it odd that our house is so empty but I must say I don't ever want it to be full like it once was.
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