Winning the Storage War
Life happens. We all tend to acquire more and more stuff as we grow older, move, get married, have kids…the list goes on and on. Do you have things that you need to purge? Is your basement or storage unit so full that you can’t even see the floor? The weight of our possessions can figuratively and literally be oppressive.
It is crazy to think about how much time we spend working towards acquiring things to then eventually try to rid ourselves of many of them. Joshua Becker for Becoming Minimalist, encourages each of us to own less and rationalize our possessions. Here are 10 eye-opening stats showing that stuff has overrun our lives.
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There are 300,000 items in the average American home (LA Times).
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One out of every ten Americans rent offsite storage—the fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the past four decades. (New York Times Magazine).
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While 25% of people with two-car garages don’t have room to park cars inside them and 32% only have room for one vehicle. (U.S. Department of Energy).
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British research found that the average 10-year-old owns 238 toys but plays with just 12 daily (The Telegraph).
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The average American woman owns 30 outfits-one for every day of the month. In 1930, that figure was nine (Forbes).
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Some reports indicate we consume twice as many material goods today as we did 50 years ago.
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Women will spend more than eight years of their lives shopping (The Daily Mail).
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Over the course of our lifetime, we will spend a total of 3,680 hours or 153 days searching for misplaced items.The research found we lose up to nine items every day—or 198,743 in a lifetime. Phones, keys, sunglasses, and paperwork top the list (The Daily Mail).
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Americans spend $1.2 trillion annually on nonessential goods—in other words, items they do not need (The Wall Street Journal).
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Americans donate 1.9% of their income to charitable causes (NCCS/IRS). While 6 billion people worldwide live on less than $13,000/year (National Geographic).
Dump-A-Box is the greenest and cleanest disposal hauling company in central Ohio. We make every effort to divert material that can be reused, repurposed or recycled by diverting it properly from a landfill. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and give us a call; we can help you de-clutter your life and lift that weight off of your shoulders.