Don’t Donate or Sell. Just Throw Your Old Stuff in the Trash

You’ve got a bunch of stuff. You don’t use it anymore, but it’s in ok shape. It is taking up space and making it a pain to get to the things you actually like to use.  You don’t really remember buying it, but it’s yours now and you’re not sure if you want to part with it.

After shuffling it for years amongst different bins, closets, cupboards and shelves in an effort to keep it out of your way, you finally decide it doesn’t belong in your house anymore. What should you do with it? Throw it in the garbage! Don’t sell it on eBay or donate it to Goodwill. Trash it.

I know, the dumps are overflowing and we need to recycle and reuse everything we can.  I get it. Hear me out for a bit. Eventually, just about everything you’ve ever bought is going to end up in a dump. Whether you sell it, re-purpose it, our give it away, at some point that thing ends up in the trash so it might as well be you who puts it there.  Ultimately it will benefit you AND the environment.

If you agree with this assessment, you might also agree that the best way to prevent things you buy from ending up in the dump is to never buy them in the first place.

A behavioral finance concept called the “endowment effect” explains that once a person owns an item, they like it more and perceive it to have more value than prior to owning it.  A study on patients who suffered from short term memory loss showed how the endowment effect is deeply embedded in our minds. The patients were shown multiple paintings and asked to rate the paintings based on their appeal. Most of the rankings were pretty even across the different paintings. The researchers left just long enough for the patients to forget they had been shown the paintings and then returned with the same paintings. This time the researchers explained to the patient that he or she already owned one of the paintings. When the patients rated the paintings for the second time, they significantly boosted their scores on the painting they thought they owned.

How many things are you clinging to just because you own them? You likely perceive many items you cannot use as being more valuable than they are.

• When you finally decide to get rid of these items that are of no use to you, throw them in the garbage.
• Take a few moments to experience how it feels to acknowledge that the item had no value to you and was in fact worthless.
• Think about how much you paid for the item, how many hours of work did it take to pay for it? How much time did it spend taking up space in your home? Did you ever come across the item and regret buying it, but kept it just because it was expensive?
• If you have the opportunity, watch the items get picked up and taken away by the garbage collector.
• Hopefully you will feel that the costs of money and space were justified, but many times you will not and that’s good.

Donate or Sell Your Items?

“Can’t I just donate my old stuff to charity and convince myself that it’s still worth something to someone somewhere??? Plus I get a tax deduction so that proves it still has some value!!” Sure you could. You could also try to have a yard sale and feel good about how that old bread maker that took up half your cupboard for the past five years fetched $10 and will get to live again in someone else’s cupboard for many years to come.

However, when you make these kinds of efforts to squeeze the tiniest drops of value out of your old, dead, useless stuff, you miss out on a very valuable lesson that could keep you from accumulating so much stuff in the first place.

When experiencing the negative feelings of throwing something directly into the garbage and admitting it had no value; that the costs(monetary, emotional, and physical) of owning the item will never be recovered, you train yourself to view material possessions as unimportant and become more discerning about the items you do bring into your home. And as we’ve already agreed, not acquiring things in the first place is the very best way to keep them out of the dump.