Lucas' journal: a minimalist mission

[Meezer_Mom]

Music enhances life, so don't shortchange yourself. There are some sites that have free legal downloads, but if you can only find something you want on iTunes, buy it! The artists deserve to be paid for their work just as you are for yours.

Purrrz!

[Tussiemussies]

Enjoying reading your thread, you have a lot of good insights!

[try2bfrugal]

1. Printing - I'm going to do my best to minimise the amount of printing I do. The toner cartridges cost a fortune, and as I work in acadaemia I have the bad habit of often printing long documents at home. In future I should avoid printing any long documents - indeed, I might even go 'paperless'
2. Amazon - oh amazon, you are an evil temptress!! I shudder to think how much money I've wasted there, often on impulse buys that I never even used ... Time for us to say farewell methinks...
3. iTunes - maybe I'm the only person left who actually pays for music?.... hmmmm....

I buy generic ink cartridges from Amazon for $2 and then get recycle rewards at a big box office store for $2 each. Then I used the rewards points to buy staples like toilet paper or computer paper, on sale combined with some coupon like a $5 off a $25 purchase.

I actually do pay for music and videos on iTunes. I think that is cheap enjoyment. I use my iPod every day. If you watch the grocery store ads and watch the Coinstar specials you can often get iTunes gift cards at a discount, especially this time of year. If you have a Discover card you can get 5% off going through their Shop Discover site. If you have a cash back credit card (especially one with a high grocery cash back amount) you can buy iTunes gift cards at the grocery store and get a discount that way.

On the Amazon front - I love gadgets from Amazon. I just buy stuff with a high payback like rechargeable batteries, LED lights and a solar battery charger.

[fidgiegirl]

Also, I think compulivesly buying clothes really reflects an unhealthy psychology - wasting money in order to 'look good' is somehow even sicker that wasting money in order to say, have an 'ideal home' or a 'great library'... it flows from a preoccupation, to some extent at least, with how you're perceived by others, and in that sense probably runs contrary to being authentic and true to yourself.

How very true. I found I had to confront this a few years ago when paring down my books. Having a lot of books didn't make me an academic, or smarter - it just made me a person with a lot of books!

I am thinking about getting rid of our printer. We went for a looooooooong time with no printer, just printed very sparingly at work if absolutely required or going to Kinkos if a bigger job (like Xmas letters), and then bought one (hmmm, why?), and we chose a Kodak because of the "low" cartridge cost, but that sucker never wants to work right, and it feels like we are buying cartridges more often than we would like, and we're pretty mindful about printing. We do write the date on our cartridges so we actually know how long they last, and it's about 3-4 months (black is $10 each for Kodak). But DH prints his eBay shipping labels at home, which is definitely not something we'd print out at work, and it has saved us a TON of time running to the post office. So now we're reluctant to let a printer go, but I was thinking if I could get a cheap laser printer on Craigslist the toner would last a LOT longer and we rarely need color printing, anyway. Some of the toner cartridges are not very much money, or at least not that much more than laserjet cartridges.

Amazon - do you have "one click" turned on, or a Prime subscription? If so, turning those off might help with the impulsive buying. But to be honest, we order quite a bit on Amazon, because the prices are so good. But we try to be mindful about it. Not always easy.

[fidgiegirl]

I buy generic ink cartridges from Amazon for $2 and then get recycle rewards at a big box office store for $2 each. Then I used the rewards points to buy staples like toilet paper or computer paper, on sale combined with some coupon like a $5 off a $25 purchase.

try2bfrugal, what brand is your printer?

[try2bfrugal]

try2bfrugal, what brand is your printer?

We use Canon printers.

[lucas]

Hello friends,

Thanks everyone for your comments and thoughts, and for your ideas about reducing my 'printer bill' - much appreciated! I also really appreciate Earthsky pointing me towards Project333. I knew of Courtney Caver's blog already, but I had no idea she also had a specific Wardrobe-themed initiative going. I've signed up already! The idea of having an overall limit on the number of items in one's wardrobe is great. Some time ago I attempted something similar myself, but in hindsignt it was too detailed. I had very specific 'quotas', ie: X number of jeans, X number of white shirts, X number of t-shirts etc etc.... and in the end monitoring and maintaining it was too unwieldy and became a pain the neck.. (I had even set a specific limit on the number of pairs of socks!). I think any successful project is much more likely to succeed if it is fun, so making minimalism fun (and manageable) is the best way to go...

So I reckon I'm going to adapt Courteney Carver's approach a bit for my purposes. Like she suggests I'm excluding workout gear and underwear from the 'ledger', but I'm also going to keep t-shirts out as well. I just have a stack of black t-shirts, which is all I ever wear as a 'base layer'. (It was funny to realise that there was one area where I was already 'kinda' minimalist. No big selection of different or interesting t-shirts - just a bunch all the same - though there were clearly more than I needed!.)

After some major culling, including several pairs of jeans and trousers and some jackets, I now have 46 items in my wardrobe (excluding t-shirts, underwear and workout gear). This probably doesn't sound staggeringly spartan, but it's about half of what was there before! I'm going to try to reduce this to 40, and then see if I want to take it further. So right now my 'clothing ledger' looks like this:

Lucas' 'clothes line': 46 items
8 pairs of jeans (could lose a few pairs here, methinks!)
4 pairs of trousers
7 shirts
5 hoodies
11 tops/sweaters
3 pairs shoes (1 X boots, 1 X trainers, 1 X 'smart' shoes)
8 jackets/coats (clearly still more than I need here!)


Anyway, today I literally decimated my wardrobe. Now that it looks a bit less chaotic and overflowing, it also seems a lot more managable. Whereas in the past setting limits on my wardrobe seemed too hard, because keeping track of everything just seemed like such a headache, now that it's somewhat reduced I can see that it actually won't be so difficult to monitor how much is there. I guess the more minimalist your life gets, the easier it becomes to keep it that way. (That should have been obvious to me, of course, but I'm a slow learner! ) Another interesting (and slightly scary) thing I realised was that there were quite a few items I bought and literally never wore once. I just bought them, brought them home and put them in the wardrobe, where the collected dust until today, when I put them in a sack to donate to goodwill. That really sums up the madness of our compuslive consomption age. I could also see how I'm still infected by the 'consumer virus' in my discomfort at letting go of some items, even though I never wore them. Once they are given to goodwill, at least someone somewhere will put them to use, but it was interesting (albeit unsettling) to realise there's a part of me that wants to hold on to them even though I know I'll probably never wear them. That, I think, is the epitome of a 'possession' mentality, and what underpins it is the scarcity mentality that drives so much of unnecessary consumption (in my case at least)... well, that's enough of my ranting! let's see if I can't bring myself to get that number down to 40!. Thanks for reading.

Hugs,
Lucas

[SteveinMN]

I could also see how I'm still infected by the 'consumer virus' in my discomfort at letting go of some items, even though I never wore them. Once they are given to goodwill, at least someone somewhere will put them to use, but it was interesting (albeit unsettling) to realise there's a part of me that wants to hold on to them even though I know I'll probably never wear them. That, I think, is the epitome of a 'possession' mentality

Or was that feeling the remorse of having "wasted" time shopping and money spent buying something you never used?

For me, letting go of "I'll fit into that someday" or "I had one and threw it out and needed one; I'd better not toss this one" is a major speed bump to minimalizing. I'm not attached to too many objects. But I can easily get hung up on an item's perceived future value.

[try2bfrugal]

On the Amazon front, I think if you have a budget and stick to it then problem solved. If you have money in your budget for gadgets or whatever kinds of stuff you like to buy from Amazon, or have money saved from not spending some other category, then you get to buy stuff guilt free. Otherwise you have to wait until you have enough money budgeted.

I put a lot of stuff in my cart at Amazon and use the save for later option. Then I move it to the cart and buy it when I have extra in the budget or sometimes when there is a big price drop. Some stuff like energy saving light bulbs, power strips and drying racks (to not have to use an electric dryer) can save more money than they cost in a relatively short period of time.

[citrine]

Great work Lucas!
I was able to start letting go of my clothes about 5 years ago...and I had a lot of categories...high school, in different sizes, office, play, going out, frumpy. UGH! I gave away bags and bags of stuff and it was so liberating.
I have to be very careful nowadays because those tendencies still creep up! I only keep the current size and I refuse to buy any bigger clothes so when I start to feel things getting a bit tight, I have to hit the gym!