The Useful Life of Household Items
I am thinking of changing the name of this blog to Musings of a Married Man because most of my posts this month have been related to married life.
Here is another post to add to that list.
I have spent the past month getting rid of many of the items I have accumulated over my short lifetime. I wasn’t overly attached to most of them but at some point I must have felt that it was something I needed or was somewhat useful. Some of the larger items like bikes, windsurfers, mattresses, TV’s we were able to sell on Craigslist but we did give a significant amount of household items and old clothes to charity.
A lot of the items were still within what I would have considered their useful life but the criteria we used for getting rid of things was if it hadn’t been used in the past year, we didn’t need it.
This exercise was satisfying in that we now had more space and less clutter but when I went through our expenses from 2006 as separate households, I was amazed by the combined costs we had. The kicker is that a large chunk of these costs included things that we gave away before the end of their useful life.
I feel that most items you purchase other than food and toiletries should last at least 5-10 years. Here is a list of our expenses for 2006 that fell into the category of useful things we gave away.
- Clothes/shoes: We are both at fault here and granted some of this includes some one time expenses for the wedding, etc… but we spent almost $9000!! To me that is a tremendous amount of money to spend on clothes considering that neither my wife or I dress up for work. That money could have funded both of our Roth IRA’s for the year!! This a primary area for saving money in 2007. Just knowing that number should help us rethink some impulse purchases. Goal for 2007: less than $3000.
- Computer/electronics: This category was expected to be elevated somewhat with the purchase of a new computer last year(2006) which should last us until 2010. Still, over $3000 dollars in this category leaves a lot of room for improvement. Goal for 2007: less than $1000.
- household items: this category includes furniture, pots, mops, cleaning supplies etc.. This is elevated because my wife moved across the country with only what she could fit in her car. Once again, over $6000 in this category as well. Goal for 2007: less than $1000.
I highlighted these three categories of expenses because they consisted of items that I feel should be lasting and not in need of replacement very often. Combined these three categories were far greater than our rent for two apartments. Heck, this is more than half my salary for the year. What were we thinking? Hopefully 2007 will be a more fiscally responsible year for us.
