Not Just a Fad: 3 Legit Reasons to Declutter After 50!

[Music] hello and welcome to the life tidy my name is Catherine on this channel I talk about minimalism and organization and decluttering and those sorts of things from the perspective of someone who started her minimalism Adventure after the age of 50 and the unique challenges and opportunities that this intentional way of living and shopping and decorating and whatever organizing our homes has for people in our age group but I do feel like most of the things I talk about on this channel can relate to younger people as well but they just wanted to create a place for people over 50 to think about becoming more minimal and in today's video I want to talk about three reasons that people over 50 should consider the possibility of becoming more minimal with their possessions in their lives three reasons why like minimalism is like it can be seen as like a fad or like just an aesthetic like everything has to be gray and neutral and I'm not talking about that I'm talking about decluttering and minimizing our stuff to the point where the things that we keep truly add value to our lives and truly have meaning to us and are useful and necessary and they add something to our life it's not just stuff that we have and a lot of people our age have a lot of stuff that we never even look at a lot of stuff in storage a lot of stuff in closets a lot of stuff that we're keeping because it belonged to somebody who came before us or because we might need it someday or because we don't know how to get rid of it we'd feel guilty getting rid of it if it's sentimental or somebody gave it to us and in this video I'm not going to be talking specifically about how to deal with all that stuff I will make future videos regarding those issues today I just want to talk about three reasons why probably everyone over 50 could benefit from thinking about becoming more minimal in their possessions and some of this might seem a little harsh but it's things that we need to think about okay so reason number one I'm just gonna say this like as flat out honest and plain as day as I can your children do not want to be responsible for figuring out what to do with your stuff after you die especially if you have a lot of stuff and this this is really the whole reason I started on my minimalism Journey like seven years ago is I went to an estate sale because I wasn't a minimalist at the time at all I mean I wasn't I didn't have a ton of stuff but I definitely wasn't trying to be minimal and so I was at an estate sale looking for treasures and this person it was one of those sales where you go in the house and in every room there's stuff for sale and this person was obviously a collector of collections I mean every room was full of stuff just overwhelming amounts of stuff and I remember walking through the house feeling this it's almost smothering sense of oh my goodness this is so much stuff and got down to the kitchen where the I'm assuming the children of the deceased were running the sale and they just seemed completely overwhelmed like completely overwhelmed and people would come and say would you take 25 cents for this instead of a dollar and I just in in this one moment where somebody was bargaining which I mean it's okay if you do that at estate sales but this is you know this is these people's deceased relative stuff and they're probably already struggling with the overwhelmingness of it and trying to sell it and people are Dickering about price and I just I walked out of the house my friend was still inside looking for stuff and I stood out in the fresh air and I was like I will never do that to my children I I never want to make my children have to be responsible to figure out what to do with a house full of stuff and the thing about being our age is a lot of times we've lived in the same house like my husband my family and I have lived in our house for 17 years you can just fill up space because it's there and you have it and when your kids move out oh my goodness there's more closets I can put stuff in and more rooms I can do stuff with and so we have a lot of stuff and our kids I just I just feel like we need to stop and think about what's going to happen to our stuff after we die we're all going to die nobody gets out of here without getting out of here it's just it's part of life and so we need to be thinking about what's going to happen to my stuff and I don't think it's fair of us to say ah my kids will deal with it because some of us have lived through the process of dealing with our deceased parents stuff and it's emotionally and physically and mentally exhausting in every possible way and I just really think it would benefit us and our children if we took the time to be responsible for our own stuff and figure out what what needs to go so that at the time of our passing the things that we still have remaining our children will know are important to us because it's the few things we've kept and again I'm not saying we have to go to the point where everything is gray and beige and we don't have any sentimental items or there we only have one little boxes but I'm not even talking about that I mean the chances of people our age becoming like an extreme minimalist are probably minimal but we can definitely downsize and get rid of probably thousands of items that we can save our children from having to deal with later and I know none of us like to think about the time time when we're not going to be here anymore but it's going to come and why not start preparing for that by figuring out what to do with your own stuff for which you are responsible and which you don't want to pass that responsibility on to your children when you pass away okay reason number two and this again is probably going to sound harsh again it's just a harsh reality of life is if you minimize now while you still have your wits about you and while you still have physical energy and health you will get to control what happens to your items if you wait and being in Ministry we have seen this time and time again if you wait until your health is at such a place that you need to move into an assisted living or even a you know extended care or anything like that and you're going to move out of a five bedroom house into one or two small rooms in a facility in a matter of a limited amount of time and you don't have the physical energy or maybe the mental energy or anything to do that process other people are going to decide what you keep and what you let go of you are gonna you are letting that decision go out of your hands by not making that those decisions now and it it is amazing to me first of all it's amazing to me how much stuff people can manage to cram into a little tiny room in one of those facilities because it's hard in those in those quick moments where you have to make quick decisions to decide what to get rid of and so people just bring mounds of stuff with them and then their their space is just overwhelming not even there's not there's no joy in having all that stuff around you it's almost like burdensome and it's burdensome for the caretakers who are taking care of you because they're always having to work around all your junk your stuff sorry it's not junk but it can feel like junk to other people like why on Earth did she bring this so I just for the sake of you keeping control of what matters to you and what gets to come with you in such a time as if you need to be in a smaller place start doing it now so that when you do move into have to move into a smaller place it's easy for you to decide what to take and you do build those decluttering muscles the more you do it it's really difficult when you first start but it gets easier and easier the more you do it so just start start in a place that isn't I will give one tip tidy tip for this video start in a place in your home that isn't sentimental to you don't start with you know all your grandmother's old quilts and things like that that are sentimental to you that would bring you guilt if you decided to declare them start with places that don't really matter to you maybe like under your kitchen sink or your utensil drawer or the closet of stuff that you have in your kid's old closet that used to fit you in 1978 but doesn't fit you anymore but you're keeping it just in case you lose weight start at a place like that in your home and build up those decluttering muscles learning how to make decisions about what's worth keeping and what's not worth keeping what's worth holding on to what's not worth holding on to what is adding value to my life and what is just cluttering up my space you build those muscles over time and if you do that then when the time comes that you have to move into a smaller place or even move in with one of your children or whatever the future holds or may hold then that whole process will be just that much easier for you and the people who love you and the people who are taking care of you so that's reason number two to think about minimizing your stuff and reason number three and this is probably the most significant one because it deals with the present is having less stuff having less clutter having fewer items to maintain and dust and organize and wash and store and reorganize just makes your everyday life easier and more streamlined and so then you know if you have a health issue cleaning your house isn't this ginormous burden it's just you just you streamlined it down to the things that you need and use and that really add value to your life and things can get done in so much less time whereas if you have curio cabinets full of things and you know every time you want to clean your house it's like this proceeding of dealing with all that stuff it's exhausting and so you can just streamline your day-to-day life when you have less stuff when you open your cupboard door and you need to get a bowl and you don't have to take the dishes out to get to the bowls and you don't have to move the boxes of rice you know to get to whatever you're looking for you can just look in and grab what grab and go it's so much easier you save so much time time time is the thing that as older people we begin to Value more and more and we want to spend it with the people we love doing the things that add value to our lives and we don't want to spend it maintaining a bunch of stuff that we don't really care about anyway but just have because we don't know what to do with it or we don't realize that we can give ourselves permission to get rid of things or the many of the other reasons we keep stuff and like I said I will probably be making videos again about those subjects because I the last ones I made were um a couple years ago now and I just feel like I've learned even more through the process of the past couple of years to to share with you guys but for this video just think about how much easier your life will be if you have fewer possessions around you all the time also you will save money because I don't know about you but when I had closets full of stuff like I I knew I had a pair of gloves let's just use a pair of gloves for an example I knew I had a pair of gloves but if I was going to find it I was going to have to dig through all the kids gloves and boots and dump out the bin in the bottom of the closet and then that would be a huge mess and it would take me a while to find them and sometimes gloves is probably a bad example because you wouldn't just go buy another pair of gloves maybe a scissor maybe you can't find a scissor or a thing of Scotch tape or stamps whatever it might be if you don't if a plate if you don't have a place for everything and you don't put everything in its place sometimes it's just so much easier to go to the store and buy another one like yeah I need glue sticks and I know I have them so I'm wearing my garage but I'm not looking for them and you spend money replacing things that you already have just because the process of finding the things that you already have is overwhelming to you and I like to use the example of this when we first came to the church that my husband is serving in as senior pastor this was 17 years ago and I started organizing there was a lot of closets and a lot of storage place in a lot of places where stuff was kept and I literally found throughout the course of the building one of those big bins that you know that you have in your garage for your snow boots and you know whatever big big I filled a big bin with half empty three-quarter empty Barely Used not even open bottles of Elmer's Glue and other glue sticks and things like that big ginormous bin and it was just like two years ago that we had to buy glue again for projects that we were doing in the church because I put them in one place and I let all the people who plan lessons and activities and everything know where they were so they didn't have to go to the store and buy it because they knew we already had it and that saved the church so much money and the people so much time and we used over the course of 15 years 15 years you guys 15 years worth of glue that was just hiding all around the church and whenever somebody needed glue they would just go buy it because nobody knew where to look for it because everybody just did their thing and then put it somewhere and we can do that in our homes we do do that in our homes and especially if we have a lot of stuff and especially if we have a lot of places to put stuff you know like it doesn't if I have an extra empty closet down the hall I don't have to make it make sense where I put stuff I can just shove it in there and it'll be good but then when you need it like where did I put that do I want to do I want to go look downstairs for that do I want to look through the closet now I'll just go buy another one and so you can save time and money and stress by having fewer possessions so that's my third reason to consider minimizing your possessions if you are over the age of 50 and really any time in life but especially if you're older because we have less energy than we used to and we want to spend it on the things we want to spend it on not maintaining and cleaning and cleaning around and reshuffling things looking for things the stuff that we own we want to own the stuff that we need and that adds value to our life and minimize everything out else so those are my three reasons to seriously consider minimizing I'll say it like that let's minimize because I I don't expect everybody to become a minimalist it's not a lifestyle for everyone but we can all benefit from having less stuff especially in our Western culture we just tend to accumulate a lot of stuff and we're saving it for in case we need it later or we're saving it because we would feel guilty getting rid of it we're saving it because we don't know that we're allowed to declutter our our own things for saving it because then my kids will take care of it when I die don't do that let's take responsibility for our own stuff and make our own life more streamlined and more easy and make those difficult transitions that are going to come for many of us when we have to move out of our home into another place just that much easier so I hope this video gave you something to think about and maybe to get started on the minimizing process I will be putting videos out coming forward about how to do that where to start tips and tricks and things that I've found that worked and things that I've found over my process that haven't worked and to just you know help us along in this in this community to to streamline our lives a little so that we can focus our time and energy on the things we want to be doing with this final season of Our Lives and I get it you know if you're 50 you might have 30 or 40 more years of life but you might not I mean nobody really knows and so it's just wise to be thinking about the future you've probably planned something for retirement I mean it's just wise to think what's going to happen to my stuff before and when I when I pass away and to take responsibility for that all right so I hope you guys have an awesome some Week start in a place maybe this week start in a place that is not difficult for you one things a lot of people recommend is just go around and look for actual trash I mean we have we have piles of mail that we need to go through sometimes people open a can of you know soda or whatever and then leave it there and one thing is clutter does accumulate clutter so if a place is cluttered people are gonna be less likely to worry about not adding to the Clutter so if you can streamline that other people will probably take better care of your space as well that's just another free that's a freebie tip that wasn't in my list but it's true so all right [Music] here and I will see you in the next video

Channel: The Life Tidy

Views: 386,135

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Id: celv8TTTYU4

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 05 2023