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.  

TRAVEL: My Minimalist Basics for Summer Vacations and Other Travel Adventures

 
As someone who lives with less, traveling light is still a concern for me. I took a weekend trip earlier this month and learned that even the few things that I'd packed in a backpack were still more than I really needed (or wanted to lug around) for the short time I was away from home.

With just a few weeks of summer left here, my family is gearing up for a week-long road trip and each of us is planning to pack like a pro using some of the lessons I learned on my recent weekend away. Did I really need three tank tops and two t-shirts in case I changed my mind about what I wanted to wear? No, I just needed to make sure everything was comfortable, flattering, and could mix and match.

This time, it's just the necessities--no frills--in one small bag per person.

Since the trip will be taking us to several different places, we'll need to make sure we're equipped for lots of city walking, some rural outdoor activities, a nice dinner out, and a short stay at the beach. Here's what we'll each be taking:

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.

FINANCE: How Old-Fashioned Advice Changed My Financial Life

When I was in my twenties, I lived like most of my peers: from paycheck to paycheck.

I figured if there was any kind of emergency, either my health insurance or my credit card could handle it. No savings account? No problem.

Any money that I earned that didn't right away go to pay bills went towards my social life, clothes and shoes, or vintage cars. (Okay, I may be the odd duck with that last one, but everybody has their thing.) Accumulating debt wasn't even on my radar.

I was fortunate back then that my plan of not having a real plan for an emergency fund or savings worked out okay and that I never really needed one. Pretty soon, though, along came kids and a house and all of the other things that accompany settling down and taking on more responsibility.

My credit card bills felt like anchors. The fact that I had no savings started to make me twitchy. It was time to get real, to look the scary idea of living paycheck to paycheck for the rest of my life directly in the face, and to do something about it before it was too late.

In researching my best options for getting rid of debt and accumulating savings, I came across one old-fashioned piece of advice over and over again. That advice?

HOME: Minimalism Is Not Just Black and White

When you ask most people what image comes to mind when you say the word minimalism, they will quickly describe to you a stark white room with little or no items inside of it, much like an art gallery in the 1980s and '90s or a surreal futuristic scene from a sci-fi film. If they do describe any decor, it's usually white on white or some other stark black and white palette.

Well, I'm here to tell you that minimalism comes in every color of the rainbow!

Thankfully, there is no set of rules when it comes to what constitutes minimal living for each individual. The items that I need to live my daily life may not fit in a backpack, but yours might. You may need a car to commute to work because jobs in your area are far from affordable living space and there is no public transportation, while I might ride a bike only a few miles to my job each day.

We can both lead minimalist lifestyles, but chances are that they will look very different from one another.

HOME: Quality vs. Quantity (or How Minimalism Helped Me to Have a Stress-Free Holiday)

This year was our first Christmas season as a minimalist family.

Sure, my husband and I have been making strides in the lifestyle for a while, but our children (now 15 and 10) are finally on board and have been enjoying the benefits of having easier access to the things they love while having to deal less with the chaos created by the things they don't. Hey, who wouldn't?

In the past, the winter holidays have been a source of stress and anxiety in our house. Maybe not all are quick to admit it, but we dreaded the sudden influx of Stuff and the responsibility of figuring out what to do with it when the whirlwind of December came to a close. Even getting ready for the holiday was a pain--pulling storage bins out of an overcrowded attic, rearranging the already-tight confines of our living space to accommodate a tree, and carving out a place to stash and wrap gifts were overwhelming tasks.

Our uncluttered home made decorating and wrapping easy this year, but there was still the daunting subject of the Stuff that would be showing up soon.

MIND: 2016 - My Year of No Goals

With 2015 drawing to a close, it seems that most of us are taking inventory of the past twelve months and judging ourselves based on how many of the goals we set were actually met during the year.

It also seems that most of us feel pretty low when we aren't able to check off every accomplishment we'd hoped to achieve. I'm not talking about day-to-day items on your to-do list, I'm talking about Big Goals. You know, the often unreasonable self-crafted measures for success?

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.

FINANCE: Five Things We No Longer Spend Money On

My husband and I have always tried to use our money wisely and have never felt that we needed to buy things just to keep up appearances. These two traits were especially helpful when decided to really clean up our sloppy spending and use the savings to build our emergency fund.

I won't sugarcoat things--it was uncomfortable looking at our finances under a microscope. I can now safely say that a spending analysis is right up there will small children and leggings on the List of Things That Never Lie.

We had a tendency to use our debit cards for nearly all of our purchasing, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. With a card instead of cash, it was too easy to spend without actually feeling like we were spending (the curse), but when it came time to take a close look at our spending habits, we discovered that our bank had an online tool to automatically categorize where our money went each month (the blessing).

What we learned was that we had black holes in our budget that were sucking away our income at a startling rate.

The biggest culprits? These five things that we no longer spend money on:

MIND: My Social Media Detox

It's been almost two years exactly since my last social media hiatus. I'm not proud to say that since then I've fallen back into old habits and have allowed distractions of all kinds to creep back in and derail my efforts of living true to myself and following my passions.

I've decided to take action and not let the constant onslaught of news feeds steer me away from my path any longer.

Similar to Dr. Tall's Social Media Diet, I'm currently putting myself through a social media detox. Consider it an information rehab, if you will. I'm leaving old habits behind.

(If you're reading this from a Facebook or Twitter link, thank the magic of RSS feeds.)

Just like rehab, I'm sticking it out for ten weeks--seventy whole days--without looking for likes, comments, or new followers. This is my cold-turkey attempt to deepen my thinking, expand my creativity, deprogram myself of the app habit, and (most importantly) to spend more time on the things that matter to me most.

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.