Recession is over...What are you waiting for, folks?

At least that's what I'm hearing. In fact, some reports I read state that the recession has been over for more than a year. I need for the pundits who disseminate this information to ride with me for a few weeks. Opinions might change.

More and more, during my normal visits to potential clients, I am hearing stories of enormous financial distress created through job loss or catastrophic medical expenses.  The last half-dozen jobs we have been contracted to perform involve either foreclosure or business failure due to the economic downturn.

Everyone seems to desperately need money, but there's none to be found.  The recession ended when?   It hasn't ended yet if you ask me. Not according to what I see every darn day.   Even aside from business interactions, few people I speak with think that things are better. So what of these reports that we're on our way back to better days? (We are, but not yet.)

Here's my (potentially twisted) take on it.  Reports of the recession being over are designed to lead us out of our homes and back into the stores.  After all, we're all supposed to benefit from a robust and growing economy.  That only happens when we consume goods and services.  Demand for goods and services drives everything else so it is of paramount importance that those darned consumers get out there and....consume. Never mind if bank accounts are empty.   If we hear only crappy news, we go and hide.  Tell us not to worry, that things are getting better and we might just part with those few dollars we've managed to scratch together.

Well dressed economic experts tell us that we all benefit from an expanding economy. We hear reports about Wal Mart or Target's "same store sales" increasing by x percent year over year.  Economic growth and subsequent stock price growth only occurs when that number is positive.  That is, consumers must come out of their cocoons and spend more in those stores than they did last year.  Now I'm not an economist, but I don't think it is too hard to figure out that for things to always be better, we must always spend more. This year more than last, and next year more than this.  To do that we need more money. An ever increasing amount of money to go out and get more stuff....so everyone will be...better off?  Can that go on forever?

When I last checked, I thought we only had just so much money and world resources. The extra "growth" was in the form of credit. I want more but only have so much money so you just let me pay you later for the extra stuff. We bought everything this way.  Homes, cars, big screen TVs...it was all paid for with IOUs.  We did it for years.  When anyone will lend you money and you've got no skin in the game, it doesn't matter how much a home costs, does it?  No down payment?  No biggie.  Just sign here and worry about it later.   Have a nice day.  Now go shop for furniture.  I credit the Popeye character Wimpy for starting it all. "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

One day, we woke up and wondered how everyone could possibly repay the huge amounts of money on all those IOUs.  Guess what?  Here we are.  Surprise.  Don't worry though, things are getting better. The boo-boo is well on the way to healing. So get out there and start doing what you've always done. Go spend.

I challenge everyone out there..... Why does the economy always have to expand?  Why must we always spend more?   Why couldn't we be OK with what we have?  Wouldn't we all be happier if there wasn't always this underlying pressure to spend more....to have more...for things to always be bigger.

Those homes I visit where the occupants are about to be tossed out by the bank.... They're always full of stuff...tons of it. I wonder how much it all cost new. I bet sometimes it cost more than the house they're about to lose. If I remember my hierarchy of needs from school correctly, there was something in there about shelter but nothing about boats, TVs or new bedroom sets purchased on credit.

Interesting.

Don't worry.  Just sign here.  Nothing bad will happen.

The Clutter in my Virtual Attic

It was time to replace the laptop.  I looked at my nine year old Dell like one might look at an old and ailing pet. I knew the end was near for my old friend.  Surfing the web on the prehistoric monster was like watching paint dry.  I'd often punch in the URL and then go cook dinner or build something, checking occasionally to see if the site had loaded.  No one could say I didn't use things until they owed me nothing.

Time for a family meeting.  Today's topic: Replacing our outdated tech with more efficient devices while keeping our simplification goals in mind.

If there's one thing that advancing technology has provided, it is the ability to do things with smaller, more efficient devices.  Part of our simplifying goal is to get rid of (or avoid) single use gadgets.  If we can replace three items (economically) with one, we give it serious consideration.  This concept is like candy to an electronics loving sugar hound.  I inherited my love of the newest beeping, flashing gizmos from my dad who surprisingly, despite nearing 70 is the go-to guy in the family when anyone is thinking about a purchase that involves a battery or something wireless.  I'd bet money that if we dropped my long deceased grandfather into the 21st century, we'd discover that he had the same affliction.

Despite my disdain for frivolous consumerism, I've been known to be a complete hypocrite when a new electronic gadget is involved.  At least I'm not impulsive.  I typically won't buy anything without exhaustive research and deliberation beforehand.  There are plenty of very chic devices out there, but I'm not convinced that they all have practical value.  Some seem destined to be quickly outdated (relatively speaking, since everything is quickly outdated nowadays) or are simply too expensive for what they do.

With the laptop decision looming, it was time to get my mind into gear.  How could we scale back and sell multiple items which we could then replace with one item.  As I pondered the possibilities in my office, I took note of the train wreck on my desk.  I had a full size desktop with a gigantic flat panel monitor.  A twisted, spaghetti-like mass of cables snaked about in front of me.  Did I need all of this?  Did my monitor need to be so huge?  (I only ended up with it because....it was at one of our auctions.)  Could a new laptop replace all of this volume and perform the same, if not better functions?  The desktop wasn't old, so I could probably sell it and offset much of the cost of the new laptop.  Time to get dad on the phone.

After multiple conversations about processor speeds and hard drive capacities, it was decided that the desktop should go.  With that decision made, I turned to scrutinize the other devices in our home.  We had an old video game system that could be sold since our daughter now had a late generation iPod that played hundreds of games.  Likewise with the portable DVD player since she could also play video on her cassette -sized device.  Now we were getting somewhere.  We were going to ditch the desktop, the older laptop, the portable DVD player and the game system.  Incoming would be one newer laptop.  A huge net gain in simplicity.  What I didn't realize is that I'd have to go through a whole new purging process to make all of this happen.  I'm not talking about the physical items that we were parting with.  That was easy.  More difficult was that  I now had to deal with all the data on my desktop computer.

Although my desktop was only a couple of years old, when I bought it I had the computer tech transfer my old files from my clunker over to the new system.  I never gave a second thought to what might have accumulated in that dark closet known as the the hard drive.  With this decision to downsize, I felt it might be time to sift through the data accumulation and ready the recycle bin.  I had no idea what I was in for.

It turns out that I had some sort of parallel life on my hard drive.  A life that looks like a hoarders house, only in cyberspace.  That life takes up no physical room so it's easy to overlook it during the simplification process, but man.....it was there.  Years and years of accumulated data, documents, saved webpages, bookmarks, photos...you name it.  I had just climbed into one of those attics that fills me with dread every time I poke my head into the scuttle and see the piles and piles of junk.  My own virtual attic from hell.  I needed to fuel up for this one.

After a good hearty dinner, I plopped myself down in front of my over sized monitor and clicked "Explore."  It was a mess.  Random files and folders everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of documents from years gone by.  Folders in folders inside more folders.  I needed a glass of wine. 

To look at every file and make a decision would take a lifetime, so I decided on a rule that works in our physical household...With the obvious exception of family pictures, if it is more than a year old and hasn't been utilized, it goes.  Great thing about computers today....all you do is mouse over the file and it tells you when it was last opened.  Turns out I had crap in there that was 7, 8 even 9 years old.  I practically wore out the delete button in four hours.  In many cases, entire overstuffed folders were ditched.  Nearly half my hard drive ended up in the recycle bin.  Old business letters, recipes we sent to friends, screen shots of long defunct websites, photos of items we posted on eBay...all into the virtual dumpster.  It was almost as good as sex.  Almost.

NOW....I'm ready for the new laptop.  What I discovered is that clutter in our lives can extend well beyond the physical items, but into the virtual world and from there into the psychological world.  Starting with the physical items will naturally lead us through the other layers that are not so obvious.  The desired result being that we eventually free ourselves from the clutter in our minds.

This is what my hard drive looked like.

Godzilla's Bed

That's what I moved today.

It nearly claimed two of us.  Under normal circumstances one might think that a queen sized bed with no mattress or box spring, disassembled into headboard and footboard wouldn't be much of a problem to move.  After all, we've been moving these sorts of things for about a decade.  Today was a first though.  I witnessed and moved the heaviest bed on the planet.  Compared to this thing, a Volkswagen would have been a breeze.

The four posts were about the thickness of the average telephone pole and were too tall to go through the door.  This meant the whole thing had to be turned on its side and scootched out the door.  We couldn't hold it up by the posts, since they were so long and had carved areas that were narrow.  This would have surely  caused the posts to snap off under their own weight.  In the end we used slings and some rather contorted methods of support.  As my lumbar region creaked and groaned I wondered to myself between short gasps of breath, why anyone would need a bed of such massive proportions.  If Atlas needed a bed for a nocturnal romp with Mrs. Atlas, this one would have done nicely.  But the owners were normal human beings.  If any part of it fell on the occupant(s) during the night, death would surely result instantly.

As the hulking monstrosity inched its way toward the front door, I digressed.  What a waste using four entire trees for a bed whose only purpose is to adorn the mattress.    Worse yet, it wasn't even pretty.  The style was a grotesque combination of Eastlake Victorian meets Native American Totem Pole.  Apparently someone thought it was a good idea to manufacture it and even then I'm sure several designers had to give it the thumbs up before it actually went into production.  From there, retailers had to like it enough to order it and consumers had to go bat shit over it enough to buy it.  I'm afraid to know what it cost new.  In any case, there must be a lot of people that think it is attractive.  Then again, lots of things are attractive at 1:45 AM in a dive bar according to the patrons.

This is how far we've come.  Are people actually proud to show other people this sort of thing?  "I don't mean to boast, but this bed resulted in a lumber shortage that affected three states.  Pretty cool, huh?"  No.

It's a bed.

Follow Up:  Apparently someone liked it enough to shell out several hundred dollars for it and then drag it out of the gallery.  Oh.....and for what it's worth, I'm an idiot.  When we set up the bed in the gallery, I told the colorful story of its transport to one of our longtime "ringmen."  His immediate response was "Why didn't you just unscrew the tall posts from the headboard and footboard?"  I told him I didn't see any way to remove them since the junction where the posts met the headboard and footboard were solid.  I mentioned I'd be happy for him to prove me wrong.  Well, he did....in about 45 seconds.  Six inches above the solid junction, the posts unscrewed.  Just call me "mud."  And to think of all those expletives I wasted...

Now this would have been far more entertaining to move. 

Could I live with no car?

After reading a blog about how some minimalists have gone so far as to get rid of their cars, it got me thinking about if it would actually be possible.

In America our sprawling cities and their adjacent suburbs have grown based on the influence of automobiles.  Chain stores and strip centers spring up on main traffic arteries which run for miles.  This type of growth is far different than it was before everyone had a car.  In older cities and towns, all commerce was packed into a city-center where everything from shoe repair to hardware to the butcher shop was located within a radius that rarely exceeded one mile.  After all, if your best and fastest transportation involved a horse and buggy, chances are your business wouldn't last long if it was located 10 miles from the center of town.  Now, to drive 50 miles around town in order to "pick up a few things" is commonplace.  Everything is spread out.

While on vacation in Europe, I noticed how many old city and town centers are largely intact.  I found I was able to walk to everything.  In many cases, a car isn't needed.  Part of the reason is expensive gas.  But there seemed to be another underlying reason.  It seemed to me as if many in Europe like to "keep it simple" and stick with what has always worked.  Folks enjoy getting out and walking or biking.  Purchasing the day's food needs at the street market is a pleasure, not a chore.  Some cities, like Amsterdam are configured such that 40% of commuters use a bicycle instead of a car.  A large percentage of transportation spending is directed at encouraging bicycle use and maintaining bike lanes and signals.  I couldn't even imagine how nearly half of our local population could bike to work.  Everything is just too far apart.  Plus, it's way too   i n c o n v e n i e n t. 

One thing is for sure...there'd be far less obesity if we actually used our own body power to transport ourselves around.

The thought of giving up the car is enticing.  No insurance, which keeps going up.  No gas expense.  No repair expense.  No car payments.  The savings would be more than a bit significant.  I could probably get away with it in a place like Manhattan or Paris, but I live in an average mid sized city where a good amount of what we buy comes from places like Home Depot, Target or Costco.  None of these places is next to the other.  Not even close.  This fact perpetuates the use of automobiles.

Although the distance between most shopping destinations (I hate that expression) is relatively far in miles, it isn't so far that it couldn't be tackled on a bicycle.  I'd go for it IF there was a safe way to do it.  Frankly, there just isn't.  The thought of biking on our main traffic arteries makes me shudder.  These are the ribbons of asphalt frequented by folks in a big hurry...always in a hurry.  They drive Escalades and Yukons while texting or engaging in  heated phone conversations while adjusting their neckties or applying makeup.  Oh, and did I mention they're late?   Always late?  Add this to the fact that the shoulders of most main roads are littered with whatever was pitched out the window, fell off  the undercarriage, or flew out of the open bed of any number of vehicles.  Were talking hubcaps, glass, entire exhaust systems, lumber....you name it.  I've even seen artificial ficus trees, bed frames and <gulp> crushed bicycles.  Top that off with having to breathe in a cocktail of vehicle exhaust.  Nope.  Not even going to try.

And bike lanes?  Ha!  There are a few paths in town...mostly recreational, circling lakes or winding through parks.  Most aren't crowded...ever.  Why sweat on a bike when the TV remote and a bag of potato chips are only steps away?

I got so disgusted over it all that I fought back in my own little way today.  A giant Lowes just opened about a mile away from our home and we needed a few things (replacements for those things that keep breaking - see my earlier post about this) so as I reached for the car keys I stopped and declared "I'm taking the bike."  My family looked at me, stunned, as if I had said I was from Mars.  "I'm doing it.  It's good for me." I said with more conviction.  And so I did.  I took the back roads to a gravel path and cut behind another local strip center to get there.  Surprisingly, they had a bike rack.  One.  I made my purchase, tossed the items into my pack and pedaled home.  Total time, 30 minutes.   Not bad, and I got some exercise.

Within one mile we now have the huge hardware megalopolis, two supermarkets, about four restaurants and a smattering of other stores that would probably satisify most of our fairly meager needs.  I plan to use the bike more often if I can effectively avoid the main roads.  Hopefully, I'll stick with it.  We've managed to stick to other healthy choices, so I'm optimistic. 

It would be nice if we (society) placed more emphasis on biking to work, for health and just to get outside.  It could only be a good thing.  Will I get rid of the car?  Enticing, but not likely unless I move to a big city center or a city that is more bike friendly.  I hear Portland Oregon is the most bike friendly with 9% of its citizens biking to work.  A far cry from Amsterdam, but not bad for America.

This would work...

We're almost there...

We needed some paper to provide our customers with some wrapping for a sale that had lots of fragile items...  What better place to get newspaper than at the recycle center.  When I pulled up I had to wait in line.  A steady stream of cars were filing in to drop off recyclables.  This is heartening.  Considering we live in a world where nobody seems to want to go to any effort to do something that that won't directly benefit them right now, it is nice to see that folks are taking the time to separate recyclables and actually using their own gasoline to haul them to the recycling center.  (It's stupid that we don't have widespread curbside recycling here...absolutely stupid.)

On the other hand, I regularly watch folks pitching recyclables into the trash when there is a bin that says "Bottles Only" or "Aluminum Cans Only" sitting right beside it.  Somehow recycling on a small scale throughout the day doesn't seem to register for many quite yet.  We're doing better, but statistically, when it comes to recycling we lag behind most first world nations by a considerable margin. 

As a family of three, we recycle everything we possibly can.  We even pay a company to collect our recyclables since they actually accept more types of plastics than the recycling center does.  Between that and our dedication to composting everything organic, we only generate enough trash to fill one white tall kitchen bag in a  week.   Our trash service comes once a week and we often take a month or more to fill the bin with trash while our neighbor's bins overflow every week.

Recycling isn't hard, especially when you've built it into your life.  It is normal for any of us in our home to quickly inspect, without thinking about it, any item before it ends up in the trash.  A surprising number of products and packaging materials have recycling symbols on them.  We just need to take the time to look.  The trash bin should be the receptacle of last resort when all other possibilities for recycling have been exhausted.

With only a few exceptions, our government has not been a role model for recycling activity.  A few well proven programs would dramatically improve our scores when it comes to keeping usable materials out of the landfill.

1. A national bottle bill with no exemptions for certain types of beverages.  If it can be recycled, it should be included.  Several states currently have a working bottle bill and there's no question that it gets results.  What better way to encourage recycling than to attach dollars to it.  When I was in college in upstate New York, there were recycling machines on campus that dispensed a nickel for each empty aluminum can we fed it.  Since NY had a 5 cent deposit on bottles and cans, we often accumulated plenty of drinking and pizza money by cleaning up the campus.  I remember walking into the College Union with a green trash bag slung over my shoulder and walking out with two pockets bulging with nickels from the machines.  This was in the 80's and nearly a quarter century later, it seems we've made little progress.

2. Mandatory recycling.  This is a reverse incentive.  Failing to recycle gets you slapped with a fine.  Now there's a revenue generator for cash-strapped municipalities.  In NJ, everything recyclable goes into one bin.  It is then separated at the recycling facility.  Talk about making it easy.  The facility created jobs and can sell the materials.  Where's the downside?

3. Packaging requirements.  Sure, the big corporations will whine about it but they need to get over the whole idea that they can contribute to the wasting of our resources and the polluting of our planet.  Packages would need to be either fully recyclable (at today's standards), or completely biodegradable.  With the technology we have, that shouldn't be very hard.  A better idea would be to make sure EVERYTHING we can buy can be recycled somehow.  Nice, but what are the chances of that?

Even three decades ago this was a no-brainer... more so now.  I don't understand why the rest of the developed world can do this really well and we can't.

We can do this well...if we really want to.

An Increasingly Disposable World

Use it today, then throw it away.

Welcome to today's world of consumer products.  Now, more than ever, thanks to Wal-Mart and the recession, consumers demand products they can buy at low prices.  Simple enough.  What most people don't understand is that a low priced product has a variety of non-monetary costs.  We (Americans) don't seem to care about that as long as it means we can keep a few extra dollars in our pockets.  We should care.

I hear laments daily about how China has become the manufacturing capital of the world and how jobs are vanishing in factories.  No secret there.  In China, young girls work grueling hours in factories making things like electric toothbrushes.  They get paid just a few cents an hour.  Because labor is so inexpensive, it is more profitable to make things in China and ship them here.  That means there's a reason you can buy an electric toothbush for 3 bucks....someone on the other end was exploited.  Additionally, materials and workmanship are often subpar because the focus is on quantity, not quality.  The result... Use it today, then throw it away.

It would be great if we could make things here, but nobody would work in a factory making $3 electric toothbrushes.  The workers union would make sure employees got paid $25 an hour and received full health benefits, pensions and a variety of other perks.  When all was said and done, that toothbrush would cost $12.  When placed side by side at the store, which one do you think would sell better?  We can make all the arguments we want for buying American.  When we get to the checkout counter and have to count out the dollars, things change.  This is simple economics.

The deeper problem is that we've made physical price the most important attribute when shopping.  We want more stuff for the amount of money we have so the compromise is to make items of inferior quality that can be sold for less.  Nothing is made very well anymore.  What used to be made from steel is now plastic and what was made of thick plastic is now made of thin plastic.  More and more, the products we buy are designed to last a shorter amount of time.  Lower price means shorter product life.  Planned Obsolescence.  Made to break so we'll buy another, then another.  The words "They don't make 'em like they used to." are very true.  Instead of one good $12 electric toothbrush, we'd rather buy six $3 toothbrushes over the course of a few years.  That's five extra broken devices in the trash.  A monumental waste.

It is amazing how many products end up in the trash.  To illustrate...Just today....I was working in the garden.  I decided to take the tarp off of the henhouse since the intense summer sun is no longer a threat to the well being of our chickens.  The tarp is about disintegrated...after one season because it was manufactured using the thinnest material possible.  Into the trash it goes.  We have two oscillating sprinklers in the garden.  Neither of them oscillates anymore.  They just flood one area of the garden.  We thought they looked pretty sturdy when we bought them last year, but I guess they weren't.  I'm tossing them in favor of a sprinkler with no moving parts.   The hose guides we placed in the ground to keep the hoses from crushing the plants are all broken.  They're made of plastic.  Our patio umbrella needs to be dumped as well.  It broke on a breezy day.  The ribs were thin and cheap and could hardly stand anything more than a light breeze.  One of our lawn chairs needs to go as well.  One of the welds in the frame broke.  None of these items are more than a year or two old.  They all need replacing...already.  Multiply this scene by the millions of households in our country and you know why the Home Depot is jammed every weekend.

For most products, there is a lack of high quality alternatives and so we are stuck buying and re-buying the same products.  This all but ensures a predictable cash flow for the manufacturers.  Great for the stockholders, bad for the average consumer and the rest of the world as our landfills accumulate all the stuff that was designed to break.  Engineers spend hours in back offices designing products with a very predictable life cycle.  A critical part is designed to last only so long under average use before it fails.  That length of time needs to be long enough for the customer to feel like he or she received "enough" service out of it to justify buying the same product again when it fails.  If it breaks too soon, there is a risk the buyer will choose a different product.

When I was a kid, the thought of any "durable" product lasting only one year was unconscionable.  We had the same lawn sprinklers until I was a teenager.  Stuff actually lasted for awhile.  Now we're used to constantly replacing things.  It can only get worse from here.

It might be nice if we could get past needing more junk that costs less and focused on buying only what we really need.  Then we'd have a few bucks to pay a fair price for something that might have a life cycle that isn't measured in weeks.  We'd also stop wasting our natural resources that are currently used for making junk that ends up in the landfill.  Time to get past "Low price trumps all."  We really do get what we pay for and indirectly, we even pay for what we don't get in the form of exploited resources and people.

How long should this product last?

Out of Sight.....

" I'll just put it in storage until the market gets better."

When I hear that, I want to tear my hair out. 

I'm reading a book called "Predictably Irrational."  It deals with how people don't make decisions based on logic.  Really?  The auction business and life, for that matter is loaded with examples of people acting irrationally...heck...ridiculously if you ask me.

The prevailing attitude about storage units proves this point.

Before I go on, here's my take about putting possessions into storage:  Unless you have been involuntarily displaced from your home by some real estate closing mess up or perhaps a fire or flood, there is no rational reason to be paying for a storage unit.

I hear folks bragging about HAVING a storage unit like it was a beach house or a yacht.  "Oh yesss, we have all of mummy's things over at OUR storage facility.  We keep things there until we decide what to do with them."  Nothing like paying $100 a month to not make a decision. 

I recently read that the average storage unit is rented for 8-12 months.  That's just average.  Around here a storage unit without climate control averages 75-85 bucks a month.  Add AC and it climbs to $120 or more.  A year's worth of payments could buy you a very nice shed with the same interior dimensions.

Here's the irrational part.  If it's in storage, you obviously don't need it.  Why do people pay to hang onto things they don't need?  And why do people treat storage units like they're free?  I recently told a potential client that her dining room set wasn't in high demand since people don't do much formal dining anymore.  As such I didn't expect the entire set to bring more than a couple of hundred dollars.  There was also a huge, heavy 1960's dark wood bedroom set and some 70's upholstered stuff.  Way out of style.  Not worth much.  Now here's the quote that got me:  "If I won't get much for it, I'll just put it in a storage unit for a couple of years until the market gets better."

Rational.  Most assuredly.

In my opinion, her furniture was worth maybe $400 total.  So, lets do some math.  Two years times a good deal at $75 a month equals $1,800....and everything will be two years older and probably mildewed, delaminated and arachnid infested from our stiflingly humid climate.  Yup, makes perfect sense.  Isn't it enough to be upside down on your house?  Sure, go ahead, be upside down on your old furniture too.  Can somebody 'splain this to me?

I've looked at hundreds of storage units full of stuff.  Some folks admitted they had been storing the contents for five years or more.  I wouldn't admit that.  That's like admitting you fell for the Nigerian Your-long-lost-cousin-just-left-you-3.2-million-dollars e-mail scam.  Even funnier is that most people don't even remember what is in the storage unit(s).  Let me get this straight....The stuff in here is important to you, but you've forgotten what it is?    Madness.  Many, but not all of these corrugated cubicles are filled with items of minimal market value that have now sucked up enormous amounts of money in storage fees.

A good friend of mine once said  "Everyone is entitled to my opinion." He was smiling when he said this.  So here's my "professional" opinion that will make life lighter, and cheaper.

1. If you don't have a storage unit, good for you.  Don't ever get one if you can avoid it.  Have a cookie.

2. If you have one, ask yourself why you have it.  I know there are legitimate reasons to have one, but not wanting to make a decision about what to do with things isn't a legitimate reason.  A storage unit makes it easy to put off dealing with things.  Deal with them.  Dispense with what isn't essential.  If it holds memories, take a photograph of it and then sell the item.  Does it make sense to drag around grandma's old 200 pound sewing machine?  Are you ever going to use it?  Is it worth paying hundreds or even thousands over the years to keep it?  Would she demand that you keep it if she knew how much it was costing you to do so?

3. Add up how much you have spent on storage fees.  Write it on a piece of paper and leave it somewhere conspicuous.  When you get another rent statement, cross off the old amount and write the new total amount under it.  Look at that number and think of all the better things you could do with that money AND the money you'd get from selling everything that was sitting in there growing mold.  Even if you don't get much for the items, you'll still be way ahead because you won't have the rental fees.

4. Still not convinced?  Get rid of the storage unit anyway and bring the contents home.  After tripping over some of it for a few months you'll be ready to make some decisions. 

Just do it.  You'll be happy you did.

Self Storage:  For a monthly fee, you can choose to not deal with the stuff cluttering your life...indefinitely.