Minimalism is a trendy lifestyle today, as it provides more space at home while also having less clutter. In addition to having a spacious home, minimalism also allows the homeowner to save plenty of money, as he or she will be able to limit himself or herself from buying non-essential items that could count as clutter at home. However, adopting minimalism can be quite tricky, as most of us have already become accustomed to buying more items for our home and for ourselves.
If you want to adopt minimalism as your lifestyle, there are certain things that you need to learn in order to understand minimalism properly. Adopting it is not as easy as simply deciding one day that you are a minimalist, as there are processes that should be done in your home before you can adopt the lifestyle. Here are some minimalist tips that you can follow on how to live more with fewer items.
Declutter Your Home
Before you can start with minimalism, the first thing you need to do is to declutter your home. Decluttering is a process wherein you will remove unnecessary items in an area, and for this case, the house. Get rid of things that don’t have any use anymore, like broken toys or appliances, and only retain the items that are still functioning. You can sell some of the items that you don’t use anymore but are still functional, like shoes or books, by setting up a garage sale or yard sale. You can then use the money you’ve got from selling your items to get all the essentials for you to start the minimalist lifestyle.
Limit Yourself with Items
To begin your minimalist journey, you would first need to limit yourself to how many items you should have at home. Most minimalists would tend to limit themselves to only having 100 items, which includes the essentials that they need in specific rooms of the house like the bathroom, the bedroom, and the kitchen. Keeping track of all the items you have at home or the ones you buy at stores can be quite difficult, essentially if you are frequently buying. However, you should practice buying plenty of items in one go instead of constantly buying every week, as purchasing everything in only one day will allow you to track how many items you got better.
Inventory Your Items
A good way for you to keep track of how many items you have at home is to inventory everything, which means that you have to list all the things you have in your possession. A checklist is recommended so that you can check which items need replacements and which ones are still functioning. For example, if you have run out of shampoo or toothpaste, you can immediately check if they need to be replaced using the checklist. A better way for you to keep track of these items is to separate them in the checklist by category. So, you can divide the checklist by each room in the house, or you can just separate it based on how frequently the items need to be replaced. Keeping track of your items through a list is a great method for you to know if you still own only 100 items or less.
Follow the 12-Month Rule
The 12-month rule is a part of minimalism where you would have to get rid of items that you haven’t used for 12 months or more. If you have some t-shirts or pants that you haven’t tried on for one year, then it may be best to get rid of them since you don’t particularly use them anymore. Items that you have used for 12 months are basically unnecessary items, as there is a reason why you don’t use them anymore, which could be because they don’t work anymore, they don’t fit as nicely as they once were, or there are better items at home that you can use instead of them. Follow the 12-month rule and take away or sell any items that you haven’t touched in a year.
Stop Impulse Buying
Impulse buying is primarily one of the reasons why many people live with many clutters and unnecessary items at home, so the habit should actually be prevented if you want to adopt minimalism. To stop yourself from impulse buying, you should always remember if the item you want to buy is a “want” or a “need.” Focus more on the items that you actually need at home instead of the things that you only want to own. Of course, it is not wrong to buy your “wants” sometimes, as it would feel rewarding to finally buy something that you have wanted for so long, but the trick to reducing your urges to buy your “wants” most of the time is to also have the rewarding feeling for buying your “needs.” Don’t think of the “needs” as items that you only buy because it is necessary, but think of them as items that you should be grateful for having since they have a function at home.
Follow the tips written above so that you can slowly but surely learn how to be a minimalist and how to live more with fewer items. It is difficult to let go of things in your home sometimes, but when they don’t have a use for you anymore, it would be best to let them go and let other people find a use for them. In addition, controlling the urges to buy the items that you want can be hard too, but you would need to realize that happiness cannot be found in material things most of the time and that contentment for the things that you have right now is a much happier feeling that you should have in your heart.