Save Money by Organizing What You Have

The failing economy has a drastic effect on all of us -- it's reached the point where we're all starting to suffer from "Crisis Fatigue." How much more can we worry? Well, LT has an idea for saving you a little money. (Don't we always?)

Don't buy anything else -- not one single thing -- until you have organized and inventoried what you already own. You would not believe how many duplicate items you have in your house. Everyone does.

You can't find your hammer, you need to hang a picture. What do you do? You go out and buy a hammer... even though you know you have one somewhere! You're going to a party, you know you have an evening bag to match your hot gold shoes but you don't have time to dig through your collection of bags. So you buy a new one. I even had a roommate in college who used to make cookies all the time, but she never knew if she had vanilla extract. When I cleaned out the cabinets to move, we had more than a dozen bottles. My mother seriously questioned if my roommate had a secret drinking problem ... I could hardly reveal to her that if we were drinking, vanilla (minus the infused vodka) was hardly what we'd go for!

Regardless, the fact remains that being unprepared is the no. 1 cause for excess items in your possession. If you don't let one item go when you buy a replacement, pretty soon your space and your life are overwhelmed with duplicates. Most of what you own isn't even close to worn out, but to avoid the stress of the search, you just buy something else. It's a hard habit to break, especially when the solution involves purging and sorting. I know, I know.

But there are two major benefits to assessing and making accessible what you already have: 1) You help the environment by putting put a dent in the cycle of consumerism, which is only sustained by our need and demand for new products to be produced. And 2) You will save hundreds of dollars that can be socked away for rock-bottom stocks that will make you rich when the economy turns again. So there you have it, a short-term goal (get some more awesome out of what you already own) and a long-term goal (get rich off this whole bad economy panic).

Can't beat that for a Monday!