Waffle

More proof that "If you haven't used it in a year, throw it out" would be a very bad rule for me to follow in my decluttering efforts: three albums that are in heavy rotation at home right now are Klaar by Doe Maar, and The Dream Society and An Introduction by Roy Harper. I hadn't listened to any of those albums in five or six years, maybe longer. I particularly enjoy The Dream Society a lot more than I did when I bought it. Of course, they are all in heavy rotation in my iTunes playlist, so I don't technically need the CD's anymore.

Meanwhile, I gave away a good A4 scanner that I was still using until a month or so ago, because I now have the big scanner at home. My Epson Photo Perfection 1660 served me well for years and in fact offers higher optical resolution than the A3 scanner, but the A3 scanner is what I actually use. I don't miss the 1660, in fact I rather enjoy looking at the empty spot on my desk where it used to stand.

Yesterday's financial decluttering sure delivered results fast: my tax forms are filled in and ready to send (after scanning them so I have a copy), and let's just say that if my calculations are accurate, which they should be because it's, you know, my tax form, I'm a happy pauper indeed.

I don't keep paper copies of my forms and haven't done so for a while... but I do still use paper forms. They're multi-platform, portable and I find them easier to use than the Tax Administration's various PDF's, web apps and standalone apps. As long as they keep sending me paper to fill in, I'll keep using it.

The other day, in the midst of what looked like becoming an ongoing conversation about tightwaddery, I posted about decluttering for the first time in months. That's no coincidence. There are four aspects of my life that I tend to get antsy about at the same time: money, clutter and mess in the house, my terrible time management, and my terrible organisation. These subjects are closely related: my disorganisation and clutter affect my ability to budget effectively; my poor time management affects my ability to budget, but also my ability to increase my income and my ability to fix the other problems.

Last evening, I did some financial decluttering: I went through the many files in the desk safe and threw out:

1. anything that was more than 10 years old (10 years being how far back an audit might go in theory);
2. anything sent to me by the Tax Administration, the local authority, my insurance company that was strictly informational except the very latest version of the document in question;
3. anything that was the debris of my financial administration, i.e. empty tax return papers, "sketches" of my old tax returns, scribbled notes, etc. It's possible that these things might be involved in an audit in the future, but I'll take that chance.

I also sorted everything that was unsorted, which I'm afraid was a lot. It was the most tedious way I could think of spending a Friday night, but it did help me feel better about a number of things:

1. I found out that I had everything I need to be able to file my tax return quickly so I can be on time for the extended deadline of September 1 (budgeting, time management, organisation)
2. I also found out that I had paid National Health Insurance advances over 2007 and 2008, which I should be getting back now that I'm on a salary and paying taxes/national insurances by the month. (budgetting)
3. Looking at my bank statements, I realised that for all the disorganisation in my budgeting cycle, there's one thing I'm pretty good at doing, which is saving. I put € 1600 in savings the month after I came back from Aggie's, and have enough saved up to cover a month and a half's frugal living expenses, a plane ticket (return) to the US if booked early and coverage for the financial time bomb I mentioned earlier. That time bomb will be defused once I've filed my taxes (budgeting)

So that's making me feel good about myself. I'm still not done with this round of decluttering and it's going to be a difficult one, because the last one was less than six months ago. But I need to do it just so I can move all the stuff from the studio there. There's a lot accumulated there over the past seven years.

More proof that the improvement areas in my life all relate: because I did not allow myself to go to the supermarket over my lunch break this week (budgeting), I was able to have shorter lunch breaks (time management) and I could use the time to make phone calls, dealing with some studio-related issues and contacting a driving school (organisation). That made my lunch breaks the one moment during the day when my own disorganisation didn't bite me in the ass constantly.

It's said mostly about items of clothing in your closet, but I've heard some radical declutterers apply it to just about anything. It's bullshit. I have personally brought back items of clothing from retirement after 5 or even 10 years. For example, I used some of my gnarliest old band sweaters for winter running early this year. The big old drawing table in my bedroom has been gathering dust there for years and years now, but when I'm done moving my stuff out of the studio I'm leaving in a month or two, that'll be the one I keep (if anyone is interested in buying the lightweight white drawing table that I'm now using in the studio, please let me know). Typically, if it's still functional, I'm not going to throw it out. There's stuff I want to sell on eBay though — but "did I use it in the last year?" is not a criterion. Rather it's "would I want to keep it if I moved house?" The answer is "no" for some items I bought in the past year, and "yes" for some items I haven't even seen since moving into my apartment.

(This has been on my mind on and off since I started decluttering in earnest back in February, but this post was triggered by a line in this post, which is otherwise pretty good)