All Things Financial Planning Blog

“I’m not attached to my stuff.”  I believe I uttered these words with confidence prior to my recent cross-country move.  And I know I believed them when I said them.  Here’s the catch; after ending up with a rogue moving company, at one point I thought I might not get any of my stuff again. 

That moving story will be shared another time but it drove home a point for me.  I do care about my stuff – at least some of it – a lot.  There are articles I hand-carry in every move.  These include the 1872 family Bible, my estate planning documents, and a few pictures of my sons.  Everything else I have on the planet went into the moving truck that disappeared for a couple of weeks. 

When it reappeared, my $700 snorkel equipment and $600 red Victorinox suitcase were nowhere to be found and not on the inventory list individually.  All that is being rectified through small claims court in Florida.  The rest of my stuff is comfortably being dusted, cleaned, insured and enjoyed once again.

We all seem to have a lot of stuff no matter what our income level is.  There are times when you have to make instantaneous decisions about what to keep.  These include when an impending storm threatens to flatten or flood your home or when fire rages. 

It’s an interesting thing to watch: If you had 15 minutes to gather your most important belongings, what would you take?  Printed pictures, your camera and its digital card, your computer, your bike, your pet, your art, your cash? 

Let me suggest an exercise.  Try walking around your home and lingering in each room long enough to mentally capture what you would take if doom was impending.  Now make a second trip through.  This time, mentally catalog everything you haven’t used in a year, things you have to pay to insure, or clean or have someone else clean that you think you might be able to get by without.  Would eliminating that clutter, I mean those things, improve your life in any way?  You could check out their value on http://www.itaggit.com/ to see if anyone else might value them more than you do. 

Let’s move on to an area where it appears we have an endless abundance of time – television watching.  In Nielsen’s report for the last three months of 2008,) we are watching more than 151 hours of TV a month.  That’s more than five hours a day. 

What could you accomplish if you got even half those hours back each month?  Could you work more, play more, love more, work out more, and travel more?  Actually, if you’re watching that much TV (and somebody is!) you already have a second job since your first one is most likely 160 hours a month.  I am certain I used to be at least a “fiver” years ago before my sister asked me to turn the thing off once in a while because my parroting of the day’s headlines was depressing her.  I took up the challenge and never looked back. 

Now if I’m in a group of fivers I cannot contribute to the dialog outbreaks from say, an episode of ER (never having seen one) but I do get outside for up to two hours a day and my music appreciation has broadened significantly as that’s the replacement noise I’ve chosen for myself.  Time and things matter to the well-being of our financial lives.  Small things add up and as Gandalf, the famous wizard in J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, said: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Bonnie Hughes, CFP®
Principal
American Capital Planning, LLC
Reston, VA / Miami, FL