FINANCE: The Importance of Breaking the Shopping Habit

To fully embrace minimalism and put an end to the accumulation of clutter and the amassing debt, you need only make one change to your life:

Break the habit of shopping for leisure.

MIND: Redefining "Enough" and Ending the Cycle of Want

The minimalist lifestyle and philosophy are built around a central idea--to focus on living your best life by eliminating the excess that holds you back. The catch? To determine what is excess, you must first define enough.  

HOME: Clearing Clutter in Waves

The past few days at my home have been built around several long sessions of clutter-clearing.

How is it that a family who has adopted a minimalist lifestyle, purged more than half of their belongings, and has completely altered their buying habits still has so much clutter to get rid of?

It's not so much that there's more clutter, it's that the minimalist mindset has helped us to be more aware of what we use and what we love. Because of that, we can see that after the initial purge earlier in the year that we're still not using the majority of the things we kept.

Enter stage left: the second wave of decluttering.

TRAVEL: Becoming a Nomadic Minimalist

Like many people the minimalist lifestyle attracts, I yearn to live simply and to travel light. In fact, the idea of cutting my roots and moving anywhere at any time was one of the key motivators to parting with the bulk of my material things.

When culling my possessions even now I stop and ask myself, "If I packed up tonight to move across the country, would I take this with me?"

There are a few things that make the cut, but most things that have served their purpose in my life and no longer add beauty or benefit are donated to charities.

Living anywhere you want at anytime requires self-discipline when it comes to both working independently and curating your material goods. If it's something that truly appeals to you, then the learning curve can be a very short one.

WORK: What To Do When You Can't Control the Chaos

Your home is your space. You may share it with your family, your roommate, or maybe just your cat, but you have a say in how much or how little your home contains and how those contents are organized.

You feel peaceful and relaxed at home because you've worked to keep it clutter-free and efficient to live in and maintain. It's your sanctuary.

What about your job? If you work in a large office or for a big company, you may not have much pull when it comes to office clutter and organization. If you're like me, it can sometimes feel like you're sharing a workspace with dozens of roommates who don't understand the ripple effect their chaos has on their coworkers or the overall feel of the office.

HOME: How Hoarding Led Me To Minimalism

I grew up in a home with stuff packed into every nook and cranny.

The attic was full. The closets were full. Every horizontal surface in the house was a shrine to one kind of collection or another. Weekly cleaning took all weekend, and if you had the misfortune of being tasked with the duty of dusting, let's just say you knew you probably shouldn't make any other plans.

My mother was the daughter of two lower-middle class Americans who married and subsequently struggled to start a home and family during the Great Depression. Fear of scarcity was deeply set in my grandparents' DNA once the economy began to recover. Their way of thinking and reacting to material goods had been forever changed.