Stop Paying For Self-Storage To Keep Your Clutter.

I am going to be brutally honest here – in my opinion, the only reasons to pay for self-storage are:

1. A death in the family, and the estate stuff has to be put somewhere while it is settled.
2. A big move while you search for/move into a new home.
3. You are involved in activities that involve lots of equipment that doesn’t fit in your garage.

That’s it. If you are paying for self-storage to hold just your “stuff”, you have to much of it. 🙂 If for some reason or another I could no longer fit my belongings in my home, I would most definitely start decluttering to make room for those items that actually mean something to me. You already pay a mortgage and/or rent; why pay even more just to store “stuff”? It just doesn’t make any sense to me to do so. I found these statistics in an article of mine from a few years ago on just this subject:

Since the 1970’s, the average home in the U.S. has grown by 80%, yet according to UCLA researchers Americans are facing a “storage crisis”.

4 in 5 new homes have multi-car garages, but most two car garages have only one or no car in them.

The average American fridge is twice as big as its European counterpart.

1 in 11 households rents storage space, which is 1 million more households than two years ago.

Spending upwards of $100+ a month to store old clothes, baby items, furniture and other junk you think you might need one day is a waste of money. That’s a minimum of $1,200 a year you are spending on storing “stuff”. That’s a great vacation for the entire family, an extra mortgage payment each year, or a good chunk of money that you could be putting towards your retirement. I have never had much of an attachment to “stuff”, which is probably why self-storage makes no sense to me. Mind you, I understand that many people who pay for storage have a problem with clutter and hoarding – it is usually not by accident that they acquire this much stuff. And they need help to deal with it, which hopefully they will get from this site and others like it in my blogroll. People really don’t need all the things that they think they do; and that’s why the self-storage industry is booming. If you are spending money for storage, is it for something useful that makes a difference in your life or just to hold your extra clutter you are afraid of letting go of? What do you guys think about self-storage?

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