Woah! This article on Becoming Minimalist was pretty astounding.
Here’s a snippet:
Today, increasing data is being collected about our homes, our shopping habits, and our spending. The research is confirming our observation: we own too much stuff. And it is robbing us of life.
Here are 21 surprising statistics about our clutter that help us understand how big of a problem our accumulation has actually become.
1. There are 300,000 items in the average American home (LA Times).
2. The average size of the American home has nearly tripled in size over the past 50 years (NPR).
3. And still, 1 out of every 10 Americans rent offsite storage—the fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the past four decades. (New York Times Magazine).
You’ve got to go read the rest of the 21 Stats on Clutter over here.
Thanks to Amy for the link to this article!
I read that the average cost of a small storage unit is between $40 and $50 per month (and by small I mean tiny — like 5×5). That’s $480 – $600 a year just to hold on to stuff. Yikes!
So many of these statistics are shocking. The statistic about the average family doesn’t save money is scary to me. The size of the American home tripling in the last 50 years I can easily believe.
My grandparents raised two kids in a 1000 square foot house and never had off site storage. Now many family with four people live in homes 3000+ square feet and still need off site storage.
We try really hard to keep clutter down in our home. When we purchased our current home the family who lived here, hadn’t opened either of their garage door for over 15 years and one garage door hadn’t been opened in more than 25 years. The garage was waist deep with stuff. It was shocking to me. There was even a motorcycle in the garage and all you could see was the handle bar sticking up out of all the stuff.
We have two cars in that garage and have lots of storage space too. Two years ago I went through out house top to bottom and purged a bunch of stuff. It’s so nice to have less clutter in the home.
I don’t shop much at all anymore. I used to shop for entertainment and now I see shopping as a necessary evil. It’s something I do when I need new clothes or the kids are outgrowing items.
Some of the statistics aren’t so helpful, like that 300,000 items in one house thing. How many people live in that house? How did they count the items? My kids’ 20 Lego sets (I have 3 kids, and they have my husband’s childhood Legos, my childhood Legos plus their own…)– Legos alone could be 25,000 in my house!
Great information. Thanks for sharing. I need to share it with my friends too.
These are great statistics, ones I plan on printing out to review regularly. Just imagine – if it is really true that you have 300,000 items in your home, if you culled just 10% of them and priced them at a garage sale for 25 cents a piece, you could make $7,500 if you sold them all! It makes me wonder how they are counting those items, but certainly I think we have way more than we think we do.
One thing stuck out to me about a particular point, though, regarding the rest of the world living on $13,000/year. When I lived overseas for five years, I lived on even less than that, and consumption-wise, I didn’t buy very much. But it also cost a lot less to live there. I was able to buy a 1 bedroom apartment (at the time) for $800, and the cost of electricity per month was $1. Food for me as a single gal was about $20 per month, and I purchased things like meat, vegetables, etc. I could have a dress made by a seamstress for $5, purchasing the fabric for about $2-3. Things aren’t always this cheap, but I do think cost of living is a factor in some of these statistics.
The point that challenges me is the time women spend on shopping. I still struggle with treating shopping as a “leisure” activity, something to do when I get free time. Today I stayed home even though my husband was home to watch the kids and I could have gone out, and chose to fold laundry and organize a few things in our basement. I felt so much richer after seeing how many clothes we already had!