The Importance of Being Organized

Among my many loves, organizing is one of them. But exactly what does organization have to do with saving money? When you’re disheveled, disorganized and discombobulated, you have no idea what you actually own, so you go out and buy more. It’s a waste of money to hit up the mall and drop cash on a red studded purse when you already have one in the back of your closet, lodged between your gym sneakers and last year’s tax returns.

So it was no surprise I spent the two weekends organizing my cousin Lammie’s** apartment. The biggest problem was her closet. Many people have a lack of space, which creates a challenge, but this wasn’t the case with Lammie. She has more space than she needs. I love Lammie, I really do, but looking at her closet made my eyes bleed. Clothes everywhere, piles of shoes and random items she didn’t even want or need. With some planning and a few purchases, we converted her travesty of a mess into a visually pleasing, functional space.

Keep, Toss or Donate: The first step was getting Lammie to determine what she needed versus what could be trashed or donated. It was like pulling teeth to get her to realize she didn’t need cassette and VHS tapes! Though she kept the tapes (she has some weird attachment to them), I did succeed in getting her to donate 27 purses to Goodwill. Broken items were thrown away and she shredded any documents that were no longer needed.

Boxes and Bins: Stores like Bed Bath & Beyond and the Container Store are a neat freak’s best friends. They offer aisles upon aisles of storage solutions to keep your ‘ish together but it’s way too easy to get overwhelmed with options and overspend. We made it a point to go to BB&B with a short list of what we needed; 2-3 cute storage bins to fit on the top shelf and a simple shoe rack to get the most out of the floor space. The rack was $10 and the bins were $13 each but we had two coupons and saved $5-$6. Bed Bath & Beyond always has 20% off coupons in magazines or a $5 off coupon in circulars. Or you can register on their site and they’ll automatically send you a 20% off coupon to print out.

Today’s lesson kiddies: keep your items organized and you can refrain from purchasing duplicates of stuff you don’t need!

*Names have been changed

Tags: Bed Bath & Beyond, Dollar Tree, Goodwill, organization