Written By Patricia Rouzer
CARROLL COUNTY, JANUARY 2, 2008 — A landslide of gifts has been long bought, wrapped, given and received. The frantic round of parties that began around Thanksgiving ended in yesterday’s wee hours with a toast to the New Year.
Feel the already waning holiday afterglow transform to nasty flop sweat. Not one to waste a day, Uncle Sam has sent his annual greetings for a prosperous new year in the guise of your personal, pristine copy of the 2007 IRS form 1040. Credit card issuers add their warm New Year’s greetings in envelopes fat with bills.
Your Christmas tree is dropping needles like a hound dog sheds fur. The house is strewn with abandoned gifts; some never to be used, worn or even seen again.Toys and gift boxes litter the living room. Articles of clothing litter every piece of furniture. There is stuff everywhereÉstuffÉso much STUFF!
Vanished is the holiday magic. Is this some hideous, fruit cake – induced nightmare? Alas, no. Welcome to post-holiday reality!
Take a deep breath. Fight the urge to repair, sans family, to a tiny grass hut on a distant tropical island to live in simple, solitary splendor. It is a new year for a new you, so the clich goes. It is time to get organized. It is time to take back control of your home and your finances. It’s time to simplify.
Nice thought, but experts warn that when planning on getting your house and your finances in order, do not think it is going to be easy. Or quick. If you really want to get things under control you have got to make a major investment of your time, energy, intellect and gallons of real, physical sweat.
You will have to negotiate with family members, decide what is important; and more important what is not. And if and when you get your financial and domestic houses in order, recognize that only more hard work, self-discipline and constant vigilance will keep them that way — not just at the holidays, but every day.
On a brighter note, you may take small comfort in knowing you are not alone in fighting that burgeoning mountain of stuff.
“Lots of people have real clutter problems,” said Jo Israelson, a Union Bridge artist who has for years,made her living as Jo the Clutterbuster, a professional declutter, helping clients get their homes and their lives in order.
“It is partially a result of our materialistic society and partially a byproduct of our tendency to assign emotional value to things,” said Israelson. “Most of the work you have to do to declutter and simplify your life is emotional, not physical. Cluttering and decluttering have a huge emotional component. There is a whole section at Barnes & Noble devoted to books about decluttering.”
Adding to the trauma of parting with stuff is a growing Antiques Road Show mentality that infuses us with the belief that the hideous and holey armchair we bought at a neighbor’s yard sale for five dollars is a actually a precious antique. How horrible if we sent it to the Good Will only to find out it later fetched thousands at auction! Just put it in the attic.
Israelson has, over the years, seen and helped clients dispose of enough detritus to merit naming a landfill in her honor.
She noted that although our homes may be cluttered all year, the holiday season’s frantic gifting sets into overdrive our tendency to attach cherished memories to inanimate objects. And because objects inspire in us warm feelings toward people who gave them, we heartily resist throwing them out, no matter how ugly, useless or downright disgusting they are.
When preparing to declutter, said Israelson, “You have to have focus. You have to decide what is really important; keep what really gives you joy and get rid of the rest.” Her rule of thumb for decluttering is to throw out a quarter of your stuff, donate another 25 percent and keep the rest.
You can be proactive, heading off that next useless gift, but that, too, is emotionally painful. It is hard to tell Mom you can’t use another of her hand crocheted neckties, or informing your favorite Uncle Jim that spicy food brings on dyspepsia, so please don’t send another bottle of super hot jalapeo gourmet mustard like the one you gave us last year. Israelson would applaud you for doing it, but she fully recognizes it would not be easy.
Fear, irrational or otherwise, can also be a clutter-keeping motivator. For example, when helping a married couple, Israelson came across a bowl, still in its original box, that had clearly never been used. When she suggested donating the bowl to a charity, the couple blanched. It was a wedding gift from an aunt, given more than 20 years ago.
“They said they couldn’t possibly get rid of it. What if the aunt came to visit and the bowl was not on display?” she said. The aunt would surely be very offended.
In response, Israelson asked two questions: In 20 years of marriage, had the aunt ever visited their home? No. Did the bowl give them joy? Well, no. Bowl gone; fear of offending Auntie conquered (maybe not so much).
Is this sounding rational? As Israelson said, making decisions to rid yourself of clutter are seldom really easy. Actually doing it is even harder.
It takes energy, mental discipline and a spot of courage to weed through possessions, evaluate them and decide what is worth keeping and, perhaps more importantly, what is not.
Paper is particularly invasive, Israelson has found. From the kids’ artwork on the fridge to secretly stashed notes penned by long vanished lovers, from old bills and unread magazines to newspapers piled by the door, paper clutters our lives and our living space. Keep important documents, discontinue the magazines and scan the children’s artwork into your computer.
And speaking of kids: They change so quickly, shoot up so fast, leaving piles of outgrown clothes and toys in their wake. And many a mom retains fond memories of her precious baby by hanging on to his clothes and toys-even though the child is now 27. Israelson’s advice is to cherish the real person, not the clothes he used to wear or the toys he used to play with.
So now that you know how painstaking and emotionally difficult decluttering is going to be, are you still committed to doing it? If you are, Israelson advises you to start in the most cluttered places: the attic and the basement, where for years you have mindlessly dumped things you did not know what to do with and lacked the courage to throw out. Once you have decluttered those, you will have space to store things that you want to keep.
Israelson said it can take six to eight hours to clean out a single closet (“Did you realize people consistently wear about 20 articles of clothing, but we keep things we never wear because we hate to admit it doesn’t fit, isn’t comfortable or doesn’t look right?” she said.) Basements and attics will take much longer. Ouch!
Israelson notes that although this year’s holiday clutter damage is already done, there are ways to head off the December 2008 avalanche.
“I suggest consumable gifts or charitable donations,” she said. “Give theater tickets or a restaurant gift certificate. Donate money in your loved one’s name.” Voila: No holiday stuff hangover.
One more thing: Mother was right. You should to have a place for everything and put everything in its place.
“Develop a system to organize everything; even your financial information,” she said, “That way you won’t be searching through bags of receipts and papers at tax time.”
And speaking of taxes and bags of receiptsÉ
Lee Sturgill, a Certified Public Accountant, attorney and certified evaluation analyst who heads the Westminster accounting firm, Sturgill and Associates, LLP, noted that holiday financial strains can breed domestic discord.
“Did you know,” he said, “that the highest divorce rates of the year are in January because, in large part, of the financial strains of the holidays?”
You can head off that agony by developing a budget and, of course, living by it. Easier said than done, apparently. Developing a budget sounds simple, but it is a rigorous, time-consuming process.
“A lot of people start with good intentions,” said Sturgill, “but they never really put it together, so they don’t have an accurate picture of what is coming in and what is going out.”
He pointed out that the first mistake people make when compiling their budget is not being brutally honest about their spending.
“A budget doesn’t do much good if you budget to eat out once a month and you actually go out twice a week,” he said. But even a carefully crafted budget is of little help if you are not willing to stick to it. A budget should include costs for housing, automobile payments, credit card payments, insurance, food, entertainment, utilities, etc.
“You should also include money to invest for your retirement and college tuition for children, if that is appropriate. You should treat that as a bill you pay to yourself every month,” Sturgill said.
If you get sick or lose your job and get way behind on your bills or your mortgage, do not adopt the ostrich approach.
“Call the credit company; work out a payment plan,” he advised. “Call the bank that holds your mortgage and explain the situation. They will work with you. They don’t want to take your house and they will help as much as they can.”
Credit counseling agencies can also help people whose debts far outstrip their income. In the past, some agencies charged high fees and operated disreputably. They are now regulated. Still, Sturgill advises people to check with the Better Business Bureau or a local bankruptcy attorney before engaging a credit counselor.
On the subject of taxes, Sturgill said that people who are employed full time usually have taxes automatically deducted from their pay, so that tax time is not a problem.
“Some people have more withholding deducted than they need to cover their taxes. They use their withholding like a savings account,” he said. The problem is the government pays no interest on excess withholding. Still, for some, it is better to receive than to give at tax time – especially for the fiscally undisciplined who are forced to scramble, or worse yet, borrow, to meet their tax obligation.
For those unable to pay what they owe the IRS at tax time, Sturgill emphasized that they must still file on time and should send as much money as they can with their filing.
“If you can’t pay your tax obligation, you can contact the IRS and the state and work out a payment plan,” he said, adding that payment plans will include penalties and interest. Better that, however, than to get on the tax man’s wrong side.
So how does the tax accountant handle his own taxes?
“Well, let’s just say I always file for an extension at the earliest possible date, because I’m too busy doing tax returns for my clients to do my own,” he laughed. And, he admitted somewhat sheepishly, he filed his return in October – right on the filing deadline.
See? Nobody’s perfect. Feeling better?
