MollysBrother.com

Eliminate The Expense

Last week, I did something I hadn’t done in nearly eight months: I visited my storage unit. Now, I have the smallest storage unit that Public Storage offers but the monthly expense still comes in at nearly $80 a month. Interestingly, enough, I’ll drop $80 on a dinner or a night out with friends and think nothing of it.

But this $80 monthly expense really bothers me.

Here’s why: It’s a totally unnecessary expense that I want to eliminate. I stood in the hallway of the public storage warehouse and looked into that tiny, cramped closet filled with bankers boxes, lamp stands, a couple TVs, and a mattress. With a scowl on my face and hands on my hips, I’m thinking “Why the F do I still have this storage unit?” (I was angry, so you can imagine that the “f” stands for something more than “fudge.”) The answer quickly came to me: laziness.

So I started sorting my things immediately (hence the recent book sales on half.com). My goal now is to eliminate this expense entirely. I mean, $80 a month is totally manageable. But when I look at $80 a month over the course of the year (and I’ve had this storage unit for the last two years), all of a sudden, it’s starts to add up to real money!

Honestly, I don’t need a single thing that’s in there. So, I’m slowly selling things off bit by bit. And what doesn’t sell, I’ll take to a thrift store. What the thrift store won’t take goes in the dumpster.

Selling things from storage has only motivated me to find things around the house to get rid of, too. It’s when I’m in one of these moods that I realize that, over the years, I have accumulated so much crap.