It's been a while since I wrote one of these, won't bore you with the details as to why :)

The upcoming weeks I will post simple steps that focus on helping you to have a great festive season, stress free and blissful. Today's focus is  on creating a wonderful space in your home for December.

Here we go!

Step 1
Visualize
This should be the first step in any undertaking. What is your vision for your home for the holidays? Do you want to go all out with christmas lights and a tree, and tons of decorations? Or do you want your home to have a calmer glow? What do you want to do to bring light into the cold dark winter months?
Just walk through your home with a notepad, and write down everything that comes to mind while you walk. Then pick one room where you will create the atmosphere you dream of. You can always move on to another when you are done. Not taking the whole house as a goal is a step that will ensure you set yourself up for success. For the rest of the post I will assume you choose the living room for this.

Step 2
Clear
Get some boxes, and remove everything that doesn't fit in your vision for your living room. Box trinkets, frames, anything that doesn't go with the vision you have made for your room. When you do this you remove things that didn't do much for you, but still are in the room because they always were there, and open yourself up for decluttering them later. Put things you want back in your living room in January in a separate box. Tape the other boxes shut. If you haven't touched them in a month's time, just declutter the contents.
Then clean the space, and maybe do some furniture reshuffling, until the room just feels welcoming and comfortable when you walk into it. When you remove frames you may run into the wallpaper colour being different behind it, because the sun bleached it out. What you can do then is get a picture that fits right with the season, and put it in that frame. That way you keep the festive theme throughout your room.
Just remember, an object is just an object. They don't have memories, you have them. If you for instance have a really ugly china sculpture that you keep around because it was from your grandmother, just take a picture of it, and then declutter it.

Step 3
Decorate
Now your living room is a blank canvas, you can get out your decorations, and start putting them around the room, keeping the vision you have in mind. Then sit in your favourite chair and enjoy your wonderful and festive room.

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(Originally posted on frugalforlife.com)

As a little girl I used to save up a lot of money. Most of my pocket money went into my piggy bank, to save up for bigger items I would want to buy/have.

Soon I found out that doing this, made me a target. Family members came to borrow money, as I always had some. Most of the time my piggy bank was left emptier, and even though I got paid back most of the time, I started to see my saving as a bad habit.

That is when I started the downward spiral. I became addicted to stuff. My piggy bank was empty, and my room filled with toys.

Then, almost 7 years ago, I was married by that time, I reached the pinnacle of spendthriftiness. Due to medication I became depressed, and my answer to the depression was Ebay. I started to like those maneki neko (beckoning cat) statues? I bought 20. I started to knit again? I bought boxes and boxes of yarns.

Until, one moment last year, I started to realize that surrounding myself with stuff, didn't make me a very much happier person. Cleaning the house became a chore that I detested. I was spending lots of time putting our stuff in various hiding places, and then had no energy left to spend on the actual cleaning.

That was when I began decluttering.

The decluttering was my first step on the way to frugality. I started to collect things from the house, asking a two very simple questions with every item in my hands: 'does this item bring me joy?' or 'do I still use this item?'

I collected the items, for which both answers were no, and sent them to the thrift shop or sold them on Ebay. I still do both these steps, and every time something leaves the house, I feel more fresh air chasing the staleness away.

My second step was buying the tightwad gazette, and started to read on saving money. I found some ideas very radical, especially for my spendthrifty nature, but I took some great ideas from it.

My third step to frugality was reviving my love for the earth. Would I really want to clutter the earth any more with my waste? Did I show my love for the earth by buying things, that would cost the earth centuries to break down? And wouldn't we live much more in balance, if we were eating vegetables grown in our own backyard? All these questions, and more, moved through my head, and I knew the answers to all of them. It was clear, very clear.

We started our frugal life by doing monthly trips to cheaper supermarkets, filling our pantry with cheap and healthy foods. Then once a week we stock our fridge with perishables, like milk and veggies. We have become more conscious shoppers now, and have also stopped eating and drinking unhealthy stuff. All in all we succeeded in cutting our grocery bill in half, without spending lots of time comparing price lists.

Then we started to shop in thrift shops. When we now need something replaced, we first go look there.

More steps followed, and I realized that with every step we take, I feel happier. I feel more alive now, than I did two years ago. I have renewed my bond with the earth we live on through frugality. I know that sounds like two aspects that have nothing to do with each other, but for me both are linked.

The biggest surprise in this new life of being thrifty is, that my dreams are floating to the surface now. Not spending time spending money, is time spent on following my dreams. I have a focus in life, that I didn't have for most of my life, even though I always knew what my dreams were.

To me, this is the biggest, and most unexpected, gift of frugality, and it made me realize that frugality isn't about pinching pennies, or saving money. It is about saving yourself, creating the space where you can go and live your dreams.

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Every declutter process should be started with these steps. This way you keep your focus much easier, as you know what you really want for you and your home.

What you will need:

• note pad
  
• large art pad
• magazines
  
• pencils, felt pens/pencils in all colours
• time
  

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What you need

• garbage bags
• boxes
• laundry baskets or similar
• a timer
  

• Toss what is garbage in the bag,
  
• Toss what you don't want anymore in boxes
• Toss what needs to be stored in the room in one corner
• Toss everything that belongs elsewhere in the laundry baskets

• Tape the boxes shut, or, in case you want to sell some of the items in it, use these 3 simple steps
• Toss the garbage

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This post is inspired by my noticing i had 350 bookmarks, and realized I only used a few of them, really.

Step 1
Declutter your email box

I use these simple rules for it:

1. Junk? Mark as spam and delete
2. Needs an answer? Type that answer, and delete the mail. Better reply right away in stead of thinking: do it later. Do it later clutters your inbox.
   
3. Waits for action for someone else? Put it in a special folder (I move it to a label in Gmail called HOLD)
   
4. Is important info that needs saving (like software registration codes or passwords)? Copy the info to a document and delete. 

1. Put sites you check regularly in a folder. I have the links split over several subjects. The folders are in my bookmarks toolbar for easy access.
2. Research, info gets copied to my Tiddlywiki . Websites change, get taken offline. This way I keep the information I want on my laptop. You could also use Zotero for that purpose.
3. Subscribe to feeds from webpages using an RSS reader. I use google reader for that purpose.
   
4. just toss the rest, leaving you with only the bookmarks you use :) (you could save these bookmarks to a bookmark site like delicious, if you think you might need it one day after all. Probably not though.)

1. Make one folder for the files you are currently working on. I use Dropbox to keep this folder synced between my laptop and my eee.
   
2. Create an archive folder. Move things there that you want to keep, but not necessarily need every day. Backup the archive, and then zip it on your harddisk. Delete the originals
3. Make a master file for information you need to keep, like the license info mentioned with the inbox rules. I keep mine in Dropbox.
   

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What you will need:

1. a couple of hours
2. boxes
3. garbage bags
4. a lot of free floor space
   

• If the item fits and you feel good in them, Fold them neatly or put them on a hanger, and put them back in the wardrobe
• If the item is too big/small, if you hate the sight of them, if they fit but you hate them, immediately toss the item in the garbage bag
• If you are not sure either way, put them in a box

• tidy up the wardrobe, make a list of the number of items you have, and what you need extra of for your capsules (more on that in another post)
• seal the garbage bags and put them aside for donation (or ebay if they are designer clothes)
• Tape the boxes shut, and put them in your storage space. If in 3 months time you still haven't felt the need to dig through them, donate them without opening up the boxes again.

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So you have decluttered your house, and you have a lot of clutter gathered, all in boxes. You set them aside for the big selling it and making money on ebay plan. You start selling some, but are still left with an awful lot of stuff, cluttering up your garage.

Sounds familiar? Bet the answer is yes for some of you.
Here are some simple steps to get rid of it once and for all.

The big rule is: handle everything once. Hold an item in your hands, and assess each item according to these steps. Then fill other boxes with the recyclables and the thrift store items, and get those out of your home ASAP.

Step 1:
Could it still hold value for someone else?

Yes: Go to step two
No:   Recycle it.


Step 2:
Is it worth the effort of making an ad on a free listing or auction site? *

Yes: Take a picture, write an ad, list it. Go to Step 3.
No: Donate it to the thrift store


Step 3
Did it sell? (on a free listing site also take a week for it to sell)
Yes: Great! Collect your earnings and ship it.
No: Donate it to the thrift store.

That's it. Simple as can be. If you have an awful lot of clutter, first tackle one box, then another, then another. You will end up with an empty garage and a tired, but happy, smile on your face.

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*use the following formula
expected auction win x 4 = hourly wage for the ad. For the ease of the formula I estimated a total of 15 minutes per ad. For instance: selling 4 trinkets for 1 euro on a free listing site gives a net wage of 4 euro an hour.  Would you want to work for a boss who pays you only that amount of money?

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