Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.
This is going to be my motto for the year. Maybe even for life! 🙂 Stuart and I have had many discussions about how there’s just too much “stuff” in life. We are blessed with a lot of stuff! We are also blessed with people in our life who love us and love our kids and enjoy showering us with stuff. Some of the stuff is useful stuff, some of it is fun stuff, some of our stuff is just stuff stuff, and some is actually problem stuff! 🙂 You know problem stuff right? It’s stuff that was maybe useful or fun at some point, but no longer is for various reasons, yet it won’t just leave!
We try to stay on top of purging things that have become problem stuff. Yard sale it, donate it, recycle if possible or just plain throw it away. Still, with 2 adults who love gadgets and 3 young children who also love gadgets and toys and games and puzzles and coloring and painting etc. ad infinitum, and 2 babies with all the gear and toys and paraphernalia that goes along with that age, it’s really easy to get buried.
It’s nice to have things. It’s not so nice when things have you. And I’ve found that when we surround ourselves with all this stuff, the mentality that we get into is to fix every problem with more stuff. Something breaks? Oh, just jump on Amazon and grab another… in fact let’s get a BETTER one while we’re at it. 😉
This is where the new motto comes in. I feel that for our family we need to be much more aware of what we do have, and use it up the way it’s intended. We still need to purge out quite a bit of the things that don’t really add value to our lives, but create mental stress by having them around. Storage is an issue, finding a place for everything is a problem when you’ve got more “things” than places.
So I guess more than anything the motto is just a changed mindset. I want us to make do with what we have and be happy with it rather than needing to put money into something else. Sometimes things have to be replaced, obviously, but if you have a more frugal mindset that you’re going to make it work with what you have, I think we’ll find ourselves needing to replace things much less often! 🙂