[Editor's Note: My wife and I have been flirting with minimalism (you know, reading books and talking about it, not actually throwing anything out) so this post is timely for us. It was originally written by The Physician on Fire, but it's pretty timeless. If you've never heard of minimalism, this is a great introduction. Enjoy!]
Thrift stores are only one of several sources of new or new-to-us clothing. We receive clothing as gifts. We might pick up a shirt as a souvenir. We pick things up from Amazon Fashion. We even shop at actual retail stores on occasion. We hit the clearance racks, of course. I am a relatively frugal physician, you know.
Our little walk-in closet has been feeling a bit overstuffed. A while back, my wife told me about the “one in, one out” principle. When you add a piece to the wardrobe, something’s got to go to make room. The math makes sense, but it’s hard to get rid of something that’s still good. Something you might wear. Something you might miss if it’s no longer yours.
The Tennessee thrift store was one of the best organized I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen a few thrift stores. I looked past the clothing aisles. As a non-adopter of the “one in, one out” rule, I’ve pretty much run out of room for more clothing, so I hit up the bookshelves instead (not that there’s much room on our bookshelves, either).
For forty-nine cents, I picked up a gem of a paperback that spoke to me: Scaling Down. Living Large in a Smaller Space by Culbertson & Decker. What did this book say when it spoke? On Page 3, it said “…people spend the first 40 years of their life enthusiastically accumulating and the next 40 years trying to get rid of the excess.” As a forty-something lifelong accumulator, I’d say that sounds about right.
A Physician Takes a Step Towards Minimalism
The Scaling Down book was published in 2005, before there was a Minimalism film and minimalist blogs such as Break the Twitch, Becoming Minimalist, and The Minimalists. While I’m not sure if any form of the word minimalism appears in the book I picked up, it really is an excellent manual explaining how and why we should start to get rid of the excess stuff in our lives. A minimalist book before minimalist was a cool thing to be.
“…people spend the first 40 years of their life enthusiastically accumulating and the next 40 years trying to get rid of the excess.”
The point of the book, and the minimalist movement, is that you can and will live better with less. Physical clutter becomes mental clutter. The state of the junk drawer and storage closet can affect our state of mind. We spend too much time and energy storing, maintaining, and organizing so much stuff, and when we might actually want or need that one thing, remembering where it is and finding it can be a challenge.
We Have Excess
This was the case with our closet. I’m not sure which shorts fit best, but I know it’s in that pile somewhere. Probably needs to be ironed. I’ll just wear what’s on top this week. I’ve got a few polo shirts that fit nicely, but the collars are Perma-creased from being squeezed amongst so many other polo, cocktail, athletic, and Hawaiian shirts.
The book’s authors state that they are often asked for a magic bullet. While they don’t have one, the closest approximation they can offer is to start by getting rid of half your stuff. Rip it off like a Band-Aid. I like it. I decided to do that with the closet.
Another minimalism book that has been quite popular, and mentioned in the blog before, is The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Kondo. While I haven’t read it, my wife has, and half of the closet is hers. The author of this book recommends taking everything out and putting it in a big pile in the middle of the room, a tactic employed by the good doctor known as the Happy Philosopher. Since my wife and I are attacking the closet together, we decide to use this strategy, too.
Dealing with the Excess
On a recent post-call Monday, we approached the undersized, yet bloated closet. On my side, hangers weren’t really needed. Force clothes apart, squeeze shirt in, let go, and it all compresses once again nicely. My closet is an anti-gravity chamber. I still used hangers to keep up appearances, but they were decorative hangers. Here are the Before pictures.
Step 1: Empty the closet
While we didn’t exactly toss it all into one big pile, it didn’t take long to empty out. I hadn’t seen the closet look like this since we moved in nearly three years ago. The rest of the room didn’t look so good.
Step 2: Inventory
I counted 88 tee shirts, 94 hanging shirts, 20 hats, 8 belts, 6 sweaters, and 4 jerseys. I had verbally committed to parting with half.
Step 3: Decision Time
I thought this would be the hardest part. Many items were gifts. Some have a story or hold sentimental value. I’ve made memories in these clothes, some of which were vividly recollected as I sorted through the cotton and polyester mountain.
See ya later, Bob.
Like the time I saw Bob Dylan kick off his European tour in Stockholm’s Epcot-esque hockey arena formerly known as Globen as a medical exchange student. Or the time I presented research as an undergrad at the Society of Transplant Surgeons meeting in Chicago. I’ve had the red #23 jersey from the surgeons’ hockey game for nearly twenty years, and I probably haven’t worn it since that night.
It wasn’t tough at all. Not only had I verbally committed to parting with half, but I had also mentioned it on this blog. I wasn’t about to tell you all how I failed. While I did send quite a few items to the donation box that I felt I might miss, I know deep down that I wouldn’t.
The Scaling Down book has an answer to every imaginable excuse we tell ourselves for hanging on to things we don’t really need. When all was said and done, I had jettisoned 44 tee shirts, 47 hanging shirts, 10 hats, 3 sweaters, and 2 jerseys.
Step 4: Reassemble
The closet came back together nicely. Hangers are once again required, and I can slide garments back and forth with ease. We have a couple empty shelves, and I haven’t had any inclination to fill them up with anything new. The empty shelves are badges of successful minimalizing, and I wear them with pride.
Step 5: Donate
My wife and I went through the gargantuan garment pile piece by piece, logging what we were giving away with enough detail to assign a reasonable value to the Himalayan clothes heap. I like to use the Salvation Army’s Donation Value Guide to assign a dollar amount. We boxed everything up into three decent sized moving boxes, and dropped them off at our neighborhood Salvation Army.
Step 6: Reflect
I've got a fever. Saturday Night Fever.
After one week, I hadn’t fished out a single article of clothing from the box pile. I didn’t feel one iota of regret. I managed to say sayonara to over one hundred items, but that means I still have over a hundred left, including this 100% polyester bad boy that over the last two decades has survived many themed and non-themed parties, and two spring breaks in Acapulco.
My first step towards being more minimalist was a good one for this recovering maximalist. It worked! It felt right. It was cathartic.
We’ve got many more rooms and areas to cover, but if we can approach them with the same no-holds-barred, this-might-hurt-a-bit attitude, I believe we will achieve our goals of lightening our load, simplifying our lives, and actually knowing what we have and where to find it. I wish we would have done this three moves ago.
For further reading on minimalism, check out Minimalism versus Frugality: Can They Coexist? as I delve further into my thoughts on minimalism, and how it can be at odds with a frugality mindset.
What do you think? Are you a minimalist or a maximalist? Why? What steps have you taken towards minimalism? Comment below!
thanks for posting this. clothes in my opinion are one of the worst ways to put money into. a few high quality items such as fleeces, jeans, shoes, socks, some versatile shirts and enough business wear to blend in at important social functions. otherwise the many people in this world that plow small fortunes into various clothing items that may not even get worn but once a year are true suckers.
at least a car, if you spend more money into it, may provide tangible benefits such as better safety feature, more comfort, or better handling. and you can also sell a car back.
a McMansion, as much as they get derided on financial blogs, can still provide pleasure for an entire family. again it can also be sold and maybe even for a profit.
but clothes, meh. you can look good not spending that much. for those that argue but i want to look better, take close look at the models that are advertising the clothes at Wal-Mart or Target. They still look amazing and the clothes look good too. Its more about how fit and in shape you are, and how well they fit you.
Very nice post and totally agree with physical space take over mental space. I recently moved from my second smaller apartment. The ease of moving and cleaning smaller space was no match to first big house full of stuff. It is painful to just throw but donating with an understanding that some one will use it is much better.
Books and stuff can be sold at amazon or eBay.
I read an article “I’m getting rid of one thing every day for the next 30 days ” and I took the challenge as well. I started with my home office. I was amazed at some of the old stuff I was still holding on to. If it had any sentimental value but still needed to go I took a picture… like my old Blackberry. It’s been a great liberating feeling to declutter and now I can actually find stuff. I really need to do this for 365 days.
“to assign a dollar amount.“
Under the new 2018 tax law it sounds like it will be much harder to take a deduction for things like donations.
My advice….NEVER part ways with that Saturday night Fever Shirt.
Thanks!
PoF, you still have a lot of baseball caps!
I’ve been living a minimalist lifestyle from around the start of this decade, and it’s been a great choice for me. The financial benefits are obvious, but the mental freedom of not being emotionally attached to a bunch of material garbage is even better.
One thing I may suggest is to avoid the thrift shops and pay full price for the articles of clothing that appeal to you. I started doing this a few years ago and spend less total money now than when I would buy stuff on sale and clearance. Better to buy a high quality shirt that fits you perfectly in a color that you love and wear it for 10+ years than to buy a cheap one that you throw out or donate after a year or three. My closet contains a small fraction of the clothes as the After Picture shown above, but I wear everything in there regularly and rarely go shopping because the stuff lasts for a long time.
Great article! I’m inspired to go tackle a closet 🙂
About every year of so I try to wear all my clothes. To resist wearing the same thing from the top of the pile or front of the closet, I don’t wash them after I wear them until I am done. This forces me to actually try on the things I keep not wearing and decide whether they are keepers or not. Even cheap low quality clothes don’t wear out if you don’t wear them often. I also do the same with underwear every so often, but do wash them and stash them away in a bag.
It is also kind of fun to wear something different for 30 or 40 days in a row.
I commend you for taking these steps! I wouldn’t call myself a minimalist by a long shot, but I do try to control the clutter in this one area of my life. I still have way too many clothes, but a few conscious decisions can go a long way. I review my closet at the end of each year and donate anything I haven’t worn this year. There’s a trick where you turn your hangers around backwards to do this, but that was too much work for me 🙂 Instead I use a metal hanger as a place holder, and I put my clean clothes at the end when I hang them back up.
One thing that I’ve been able to overcome is the idea that you might wear it again so you should keep it. The way I look at it is I have the means to buy a similar piece again if it turns out to be the case (which I’m not sure it ever has). In the meantime, someone else can use the old version. This idea really struck home with me when we were helping my in-laws downsize. One thing we found in their attic were some baby clothes with tags on them from when my husband and his sisters were little. Who wants those now? But someone could have worn them if they had been donated after they decided they wouldn’t need them.