How to Organize & Declutter Your Home to Save Money

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organize and declutter your home to save money

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There are several great ways how to organize and declutter your home to save money and time.  If you are like me, you probably walk around often looking for every-day items in your house.

Where did I set that permission slip for the kids?

Or where did I put my tape measure or car keys? It can be a lot of lost time and mental stress looking for these items. The fact of the matter is you can use a lot of organization hacks to help with organizing your household to save money. When you organize and declutter your home to save money, you will experience profound effects in your life.

There are a lot of ways how to organize and declutter your home to save money such as creating a weekly menu, going through old items & decluttering, and purging storage units. You can also organize your important household papers and use whiteboards as well to write down tasks to keep you focused on organizing and decluttering in an effort to save money.

According to Psychology Today, there are a lot of benefits to clearing the messy clutter in your life and organizing your household.  It can be one of the best things to do for your piece of mind and wallet.

There are also other areas within your household (in other words not just clutter and items) that you can focus on such as the household dynamics to make changes to.

Changing and organizing your household dynamics will also save you a ton of money and time.

Best Ways to Organize & Declutter Your Home to Save Money

There are a lot of great ways to organize your household to save money and time.  This list below offers some of the best organizational hacks for households available used by the experts.

Create a Weekly Menu

(monthly savings ave. $160)

create a weekly menu to save money
Create a Weekly Menu to Save Money

One of the easiest ways to organize and declutter your home to save money is by creating a weekly menu.

I throw out SO much food simply because I overbuy.  Often times, when I go shopping and see items on clearance I will purchase them because I think at the time that it’s a great deal and yes I will use this food for this meal.

What ends up happening majority of the time is that the expiration date comes, weeks go by, and it is still in my refrigerator!

I know this to be true by either the odor that starts to appear, or the freezer burn that takes place.

That’s why I have started to use other ways how to save money on groceries at the grocery store itself.

Preferences do change sometimes.  My kids make me buy these frozen french toast sticks, so I stock up on them when they go on sale.  Then out of the blue, they switch to Eggo Waffles on me! What the….

Making a shopping list is key.  Sometimes I go shopping with no menu list at dinner time when I am hungry and I start buying everything in sight.  No good comes from this strategy and it ends up costing me A LOT of money.  In fact, this is one of the worst strategies to follow; to go shopping when you are hungry.

Overspending adds up.  I estimate that I have overspent in the past by $40 a week.  A couple bags of salad alone now a days to feed a family for maybe just 2 days a week is about $7.

By creating a weekly menu, I am only buying the items I need for that specific week.  The items I do buy will be used for that time period and I won’t have any waste.

Additionally, I also use recipes that are cheap meals for large families which also help save money in my household.

Buy only what you need.  So there is a double-savings here in food that I am no longer throwing out, and only buying exactly what food I need for the week.

I recently went through a household spending audit and found that the things I stopped buying saved me tons of money per month.

You can see how the weekly savings could easily be $40.  When I go off my list for the week there are no more “hunger purchases.”  This is also a way to stay healthy because let’s face it, if I have a bag of potato chips in my pantry, chances are I will eat them.

An income change (which this is a savings) is one of the signs to revise your household budget strategy.

Go Through Old Items & Declutter

(monthly savings ave. $100)

go through old items and declutter
Going Through Old Items & Decluttering Can Save Money

We all have clutter and sometimes we don’t want to talk about it.  Clutter, it’s like this dirty little secret that we never share with anyone.  Somehow we feel that if someone knows we have clutter, they will think less or poorly of us as a person.  I don’t know why we do this as a society, but we do.  It’s human nature.

Going through old items such as a junk drawer or your garage is an excellent way to organize your household to save money.

The first step is acceptance, yes you have clutter and we all have it to varying degrees.  Let’s move on to making money now.  You have to accept this in order to organize your household to save money.  I significantly downsized residences.  I went from 3,000+ sqft house with an extra big garage to about 900 sqft with NO garage, no backyard.  Therefore, I have clutter, a lot of it.  I accept it and own it.

Clearing clutter is a great way how to save money for a house fast if you are trying to purchase your first home.

Start by going room to room and working.  What I am doing about it and you can do this too is to go through all items, room by room.

Get some empty boxes and start putting items in these boxes that you no longer want or need.

Stay focused on just items right now.  We will cover paperwork later.

Going through clutter and getting rid of what you don’t need is one way how to save money moving cross country that is very effective.

You should do this process of collecting items no longer needed once a year.

Collecting items you no longer have a use for can be converted into money.   This is a great example of how to organize your household to save money.  There are a few ways to do this.

First you can donate them.  This is a great way to give someone or another family who may be down on hard luck some nice items to buy.   You can also get a donation receipt that will help you if you itemize your taxes.  The amount of the deduction will depend on your particular tax bracket and situation.

Or you could have an annual garage sale. If you don’t itemize your taxes, you won’t be able to claim the deduction.  Your option would be to have a garage sale.  Garage sales can be HUGE money makers in neighborhoods during the summer time.

A lot of stay at home moms (or dads…give it up to the dads) are around and able to go to garage sales to look for kids clothes.  The more families live in the neighborhood, the more sales you will get.  Garage sales are a numbers game.

There are so many best places to sell used clothes for cash nearby you that going through your closet is a no brainer.

You can not only sell clothes, but KID FURNITURE!  This is a great way to get rid of big clutter such as convertible cribs or rocking chairs; furniture your kids have outgrown.

I had a large summer garage sale every summer when my kids were younger.  Normally, I profited $1,200 easily with the items I sold.

I used some of the money I made from my garage sale to get out of debt fast and pay down bills.

So for this area, you can average out the sale to about $100 a month overall money savings.

Purge Storage Units

(Monthly Savings $50)

clear out household storage units to save money
Clear Out Household Storage Units to Save Money

After you clear out space in your house you can go address the clutter in a storage unit if you have one.  This is a great way to organize your household to save money.  

Some would say that you should start FIRST with your storage unit but I disagree.  If there are some high-end items that you want to use in your house, then you need to have room to bring them back into your house.

Clearing out a space first in your house has to be done.  Once you find the motivation to start removing items, you will create an area to bring items back into the home.  Mentally, this will also offer you a reward system that if I am able to get rid of some older stuff, then yes I can use that beautiful furniture I have in storage.

I once had a family member who had storage for at least 7 years.  All that was in this storage unit was a very nice desk that was purchased years ago from a furniture maker.  There were also some beautiful oak book cases that were there.  And that was all there was.  These items sat in storage for SEVEN years.

The cost of this storage unit was $50 a month.  That works out to $600 a year and a whopping $4,200 to store this furniture. 

That was twice as much as what the furniture had cost in the beginning when they purchased it.

However, because of clutter this happens to people and it holds them down from making changes in their life and living.

Organize Your Important Household Papers

(monthly savings ave $10)

Organize your important household papers
Organize Your Important Household Papers

This is a big one for me, paperwork.  My kids bring home a lot of school papers.  This would be anything and everything from permission slips, to art projects, to newsletters.  I really don’t think our parents had it this hard.

We have to be so involved now a days at all times with the teacher-parent apps that the teachers use to communicate with parents and my phone blowing up at all times with messages, to emails from the district about weekly happenings, to fundraiser emails, to class projects, it’s just a different world.

Don’t get me wrong it is great to be involved with your kids and as a parent you should.  It just takes up a TON of time.  That is why it’s even more important to make sure your household is organized with all of this paper.

As all papers come into your household, collect them in one spot.  I use a storage bin that is about 18x12x4 and it is located on a breakfast cart I have in the common area of the kitchen.

You can also get free address labels online that you can apply to storage bins as a way to help organize your household to save money.  This way with labels applied, you know what papers are in which bin.

When kids come home, anything that does not need immediate attention gets put into the bin. All mail gets put into the bin.  At some point over the next 24-48 hours I will go through this bin in detail and clear it out when I have better time to dedicate to it.

For Picasso pieces, they get hung on the refrigerator with magnetic clips.  For other less important pieces, I will make a value judgement, recycle and give back to Mother Nature, or dedicate for long term in a separate schoolwork bin located under beds in bedroom of particular child.

Since mail goes in here as well, this system works for bill payment.  When I used to receive a bill, I would carry it all around the house and try to put it by my desk to pay.  Sometimes, the bills would not make it however because I would be redirected to a dog puking, or some neighbor knocking on my door, or that WOW internet guy who is always showing up.

I actually missed a few bills because of this and was slapped with some late fees.  Not to mention when you are late on a bill it affects your FICO score.  If you miss a bill a month, it can easily be over $10 which is a conservative number because a lot of them would be so much higher.

If it’s a credit card bill, and you miss payment, you are going to get hit with a lot more than $10 in interest charges for the month.

Use Laundry Sorters

If your household is like mine, you probably have a lot of laundry baskets with whites and darks all mixed together.  Using laundry sorters is a great organizational hack for your household to use.

use laundry sorters
Use Laundry Sorters

Think about using 3-in-1 laundry hampers or laundry sorters to organize your household to save money and time when it comes to laundry operations.

Even using smaller laundry baskets can save money in your household because you can easily keep your laundry sorted.  Additionally, you can also run small loads of laundry as well if you have smaller baskets.

Use a Whiteboard

While there is really not an absolute monetary change here we can quantify, this is a great change to make within your family dynamics.  Using a whiteboard to write down a weekly menu is a great way to get your family involved with meal planning.

I have a son who has struggles with eating.  I have taken this task of making a weekly menu and have turned it into a family exercise with him.  We plan out our meals for the week together.

Use a Whiteboard
Use a Whiteboard

I do this because I want to get him excited about meals and eating foods.  There is a chart of the four food groups that we use as well when we plan out our weekly meals and sides.

Using a whiteboard is is also a great reinforcement tool to make sure that whatever the meals are that we are planning, both kids will eat it!  The more a kid eats different foods and becomes more accustomed to them, the more likely it will be for them to eat it in the future.

I had mentioned earlier that all of my bills, mail, and kids papers go into a shallow storage container on my breakfast cart.  When I go through that bin and look at my bills, I will also write down due dates or important school dates for that week.

The white board acts as a great tool for auditing your family dynamics, both for finances and for other areas of your family.

Stay Organized

Staying organized is an epic mental motivator and is a great way to organize your household to save moneyFollowing some of the tips above to organize and declutter your home to save money will also change your lifestyle because you will learn to adapt to these new ways of doing things.

You can also use storage bins to help keep your household organized.  There are so many buy now pay later stores online that offer storage container solutions.

Now that you have a clutter-free home, you are going to feel a lot better about your home.  Chances are you won’t be making purchases like you used to and you will live with less.  When you find ways to organize your household to save money and time, you end up with a lot less possessions.

When I went through this exercise I found 8 tape measures!  A problem I had was I could never locate tools.  If I couldn’t find a tape measure, I would just go out and buy another one.  I did this for a lot of stuff that I could not locate because of all of my clutter.  At $5 for each tape measure, that is $40 I spent on tape measures simply because I could not find them in my house!

The other dynamic change you will notice will be time.  You will have more of it now because you won’t spend as much time looking all over the place for things.  You can spend this time doing family activities.

Can You Organize Your Household to Save Money?

Following the best ways to organize and declutter your home to save money and time above is a great way to change your life both mentally and financially.

There are so many organizational hacks you can use in your household to save money.  Additionally, downsizing and having an organized household is a great frugal living strategy.

organize your household to save money if yes how much
Can You Organize Your Household to Save Money?

A lot of people ask can you organize your household to save money if yes how much?

From my examples above, you can organize your household to save money. If you add up the numbers above, you can see that there is about a $320 savings per month.  That would actually be able to make a car or lease payment!

In addition to the financial savings, you also gain back a lot of time because you are not looking for items in the household.

You can spend this newly discovered time now doing family activities such as playing a game together, going swimming, or maybe even a family bike ride. And you can’t put a savings price on that, because those times, are indeed priceless.

HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE YOUR HOUSEHOLD TO SAVE MONEY?

HOW MUCH MONEY HAVE YOU SAVED?

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