Storage

The first couple summer during my college years, I went home. I hauled all my dorm room stuff down to the local U-Haul self storage warehouse. It was an industry that I hadn't even heard of up to that point.

Now it seem self storage units are popping up across the country like kudzu as people realize they have too much stuff for their homes.

I have strong pack rat tendencies. I like to save stuff "just in case." Various things might be useful again after several years. After being overwhelmed with stuff that wasn't giving me any enjoyment, I thought about spending the money on a storage unit. I began looking at prices.

Of course, the stuff I'm talking about wasn't exactly gold bars. In some cases it was obsolete computer equipment, apartment hard ware, misceallaneous house hold goods, AV stuff, and assorted random things.

I finally settled on a different type of self storage:
Target. Or Best Buy. Or Costco. Or whomever. It doesn't really matter.

At some point it dawned on me that it would probably be cheaper to just throw stuff out and replace it with something new if it turned out that I did, in fact, need it later on.

This freedom to get rid of stuff has helped me reduce (certainly not eliminate) excess clutter in me life. It's cheaper and less stressful to replace stuff in many cases than to store it.

Buying a replacement for something I threw away is no longer a waste of money. It's simply a form of paying my "storage fee."