Creep

One of the things I've learned about the accumulation of personal property is that it occurs slowly but incessantly over a long period of time.  Its not like we go from a zen-like empty house to a cluttered disaster in a few weeks.  The stuff sees to creep in and take up residence slowly...hiding in our closets and drawers and perhaps out in plain sight until one day we look around and say..."Where did all this crap come from?"

After coming home last night, passing out from fatigue and then waking up somewhat refreshed this morning, I am suddenly feeling that stuff is making its way back into my space. I'm not happy about it.

My desk is a shambles.  The amine DVD's I picked up at last nights auction for my daughter sit by the TV.  I also picked up a cheap blender since I didn't have one...but I seem to have survived without this bulky piece of kitchen machinery for the better part of a year...what made me suddenly need one...?  I'm looking at the shoes scattered on my floor with utter dismay.  I have six pairs?  Why?  My daughter and I decided to take on a project and build a cool floor lamp that resembles one I saw while vacationing in NYC...Now I have another lamp.  I now see 4 lamps in the living room....  No...I'm not pleased with myself.

Folks that know me think that minimalism comes easy.  Not in our society it doesn't.  Despite the fact that being an auctioneer exposes me to people who have an accumulation problem, which generally keeps me on track....sometimes the fact that items can be purchased for a comparatively small amount of money at auction makes buying them attractive...whether I need them or not.  So...being an auctioneer can be a double edged sword.

Usually, when I look around and find that the state of disarray is intolerable I will begin the periodic eviction process for my unwanted material guests in earnest.  That day is coming soon.  I feel it.

What to cast off....Part 2

Previously, I alluded to some of the ways you can make decisions about what to keep and what to cast off.  After some thought, I realized that the list of things to get rid of kept growing to include a few things I didn't initially think of.

The big stuff....

In our society, ownership of things is a badge that says "I'm successful" or "I've arrived."  One of the items I found folks bragged about most was the ownership of real estate.  I'm not talking about a family home.  I'm referring to anything other than the family home....namely, vacation homes, second homes and rentals.  Now I'm a guy with a love affair for real estate.  The trip to the attorney's closing table on a new parcel charges me up about as much as skydiving for those who like to jump out of perfectly good planes.  I've bought my share of real estate.

As the years ticked by, I realized that ownership wasn't all it was cracked up to be.  Telling friends I owned five houses might have given me a brief charge from a societal point of view, but immediately after uttering the words, I'd remember that I needed to mow a lawn other than my own or had property tax bills due or that a contractor needed to meet me somewhere to replace a leaky water heater that had ruined a tenant's belongings.  Overall, ownership of property can be a headache...a huge one that in hindsight, didn't seem worth it in the long run.

With the real estate meltdown, there exists the temptation to jump into that second home or the vacation chalet in the mountains that you always dreamed of.  I've gone through the thought process...many times.  In the end, I decided against it for several reasons.  First off, by purchasing a vacation home, you've locked yourself into visiting the same place over and over again.  Even if you decide not to visit, there is the underlying thought..."I purchased this expensive home and now I'm not using it."  That's not to say that some people don't fall in love with a location so much, they simply must spend a lot of time there.  For most people, after a few visits, the luster wears off.

Secondly, a home requires maintenance even if you aren't there.  You can close a house down for a year and when you get back there is usually a significant amount to be done in order to get the place up and running again.  This means you are using leisure time for maintenance.  Unless you happen to be wealthy enough to afford a full time groundskeeper in your absence, there will be lots to do upon your return.  Many people make the situation work by renting through an agency while they are absent.  If this works, fine.  But roofs leak, red wine will get spilled on your white sofa by a tenant and AC units fail during the hottest months.  The calls to write a big check will come...inevitably.

When I thought about it, it made more sense to simply rent a place wherever I decided to be.  I'd rather walk in the door and be greeted by a home ready for me to relax and take in the surroundings.  When it was time to go...I could leave the keys somewhere and be on my merry way.  Leave the headache to someone else and increase your flexibility.  Ditch the thought of the vacation home if you are serious about simplifying your life.

Ah...the mountains...again...and again...and again.  I'd love to visit the beach someday.

Where to trim the fat

Items to avoid owning...

1. Single function items.

 Think a Slap-Chop is cool for cutting up veggies?  A chef's knife will take care of that.  Microwave egg cooker?  Flowbee?  Just gimmicks.  There are thousands of products that have only one function, but take up space in a drawer, closet, cabinet or tabletop.  Its OK to cook an egg in a pan and it's OK to cut hair with scissors.  Don't buy single function items.

2.  Stuff that needs batteries...especially toys.

Well...maybe with a few exceptions....:-)  The only thing I own that needs a battery is my remote for the TV.  If you have stuff that needs batteries, you can never own enough of them.  Need two AA's?  You'll surely have 1 "D", a package of "C" and six AAA's.

3.  Big stuff that needs constant maintenance.

Most of us really do need a car but when was the last time you used your snowmobile or your jet ski or your boat.  How many lawn mowers do you need?  Tillers?  Blowers?   I can't tell you how many people have asked me to sell a boat that's been moldering in a corner of the yard, trailer tires dry-rotted, axles frozen.  Too late now.  Should have sold it when the motor actually still ran and the hull wasn't filled with mosquito larvae.

4. Purge your clothing.

If you haven't worn it in a year, get rid of it.  Period.  I know in my closet, the stuff I didn't wear ended up in the back.  I simply took everything halfway down the rack all the way to the back and donated it.  Didn't miss a single item.  Shoes?  How many pairs do you need.  Emphasis on NEED.  We recently cleared an estate where the deceased probably had 500 sweaters.  If he wore one every day for the 100 or so days our climate requires a sweater, it would take 5 years to wear them all....if he wore each once and didn't buy any more.

5. Duplicates.

I've been in houses that had three coffee makers, 5 drills, 100 paint brushes, 1,000 towels and 5,000 twist ties and plastic bags.  Nobody needs that many.  You can only use one at a time, two if you are gifted.  The excuse?  You never know when you might need an extra.  OK...when the day comes that my circular saw dies, the Home Depot is right up the street.  I don't need 5 crappy used ones in the garage "just in case."

6. Miscellaneous accumulating crap.

You don't need to keep your electric bills for 10 years, or your pay stubs or your canceled checks.  Pull all the Christmas stuff out of the attic and get rid of what you don't use.  Have a clear out day.  Everyone has to get rid of stuff.  Tell your kids to get rid of 10 things they choose...or 20.  Put it all in one place then have a yard sale or rent a table at a flea market.  Go out to dinner with the money you make.  Just don't use the money to buy more crap.

Make it a point to analyze the reasons you are keeping things.  If it is sentimental and you don't have it on display or use it, take a picture of it then get rid of it.  Remember...you can't take it with you and even if you tried, you'd need to dig a mighty big hole to hold it all.

How many of these lurk in your cabinets?  50?  100?....and this is just one thing you can get rid of..

You bought...what?

We found it in a dusty corner of the old collapsing garage...a building, that when viewed from a certain angle, looks like an Escher drawing as gravity tugs at its corners.  "I bet someone will buy it" giggles one of our auctioneers...I shake my head.."No way.  Toss it in the burn pile."  Fast forward to three weeks later and that hornet's nest we found in the garage has fetched $20 at auction.

Where does one put it?  Does it make a good centerpiece?  Should we keep it away from the dog?  Are we sure all the hornets are dead...are there any dead ones inside?  Can we turn it into a lamp?

I'm trying to figure out what was going through the mind of the purchaser.  What other sorts of things does this person own?  Ant farms?  Cicada husks?  A stuffed beaver?

At this same sale we managed to sell:  A rusty pile of sash weights, bags of sea shells, lots of broken things.  Twelve years in this business and I'm still astounded at what people want to own and what they will pay to own.  Certainly, the fact that I wouldn't want to own it doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't worth owning....by someone else....or maybe, something else is at work here....

Since an auction is a fast paced sale, folks need to make snap decisions about what they want to buy.  They don't have time to think beyond "Oh, that's really cool...I can do something with that."  The same principle is at work when you look at the Snicker's bar sitting in the display at the drugstore checkout.  You know you want it and you have to make a decision right then.  Then, when you have finished jamming it into your mouth you think..."Man, I just had pizza.  I didn't need to eat that."

I bet we can get $10 for it...

Unless it is now actually is a lamp....I'm sure there's a good chance the new owner of that dusty hornet's nest is thinking "What was I thinking!?" every time he/she passes it by in a corner of the garage.  "Can't get rid of it...got twenty bucks in the thing!"  

Be aware of your impulses.

Hey....is that twenty bucks I see up there?

Are things better now?

I love the beach.  I’m thankful to live so close to it and at a latitude that affords me the ability to visit the waves almost all year long.  Something about where land meets sea that coaxes thoughts out of you.  I forget the pressures of everyday life and let the ever changing coastal scenery blot out visions of unpaid bills and home repairs yet undone.  This evening was one of those evenings.  As the sky and clouds melted into pinkish sunset hues… then crimson, a lot went on in my normally cluttered head.

As the light faded, I watched the surfers who happened to be bobbing on the water .  Hoards of tanned, tattoo laden teen and twenty-somethings drop everything for the opportunity to “ride into a barrel.” 

One surfer caught my attention in that he looked to be well into his fifties.  I admire anyone old enough to receive AARP membership offers who can take on an activity that is typically reserved for the young set.  It proves life can be full of activity and fun at just about any age if you happen to be relatively healthy and want it bad enough.

I always thought surfing looked fun, but never felt I was a strong enough swimmer to tackle a sport which requires you to withstand the repeated battering of ocean waves.  I’m also sort of tallish and know that a low center of gravity is an asset in such a sport.  Truth is, I can make excuses all I want.  The bottom line is that my curiosity about surfing faded after some pretty rough spills from a boogie board that resulted in several mouthfuls of sand and shells and a bloody right arm.  It was supposed be fun, but the act of removing sharp bits of salty ocean debris from places it didn’t belong tarnished the experience.

As my walk continued, I thought about the activities I did enjoy.  Hiking, canoeing, biking, certainly nothing "extreme" that involved me jumping off or out of something, but enough to keep me active and (hopefully) healthy enough to avoid taking handfuls of small odd shaped pills each morning.  For now I am in what they call “midlife.”  That period firmly wedged between the drunken party-all-night exuberance of youth and the shuffleboard and early-bird specials of old age.  It is a period of life with makings for many a crisis.  I thought about my generation.. about being a kid in the 70’s, attending college in the 80’s.  In many ways it was better than it is now.

My daughter will be turning nine this year.  She’s growing up in a strange time.  A time of paranoia and technology.  Her iPod is everything.  It must be no more than 18 inches from her at all times or she starts to have anxiety attacks and requests a Xanax.  You can play about a half-million games on it.  That’s not enough for her.  She’s asking how to ‘jailbreak’ it so she can load third party games onto it.  That would make it MUCH cooler.   I started thinking about when I was nine…and then to the speeches my parents gave me about when they were nine.  You know, those “When I was your age, I walked up hill to school, both ways, with no shoes, in the snow, and when I got home my daddy beat me, and I was thankful for it” speeches?

Oh yes, when I was nine….(I’m sure many of you reading this will chuckle, and understand.)

Video games hadn’t been invented yet.  Sometime in the 70’s there was “Pong” and its butt kicking sequel “Breakout.”  Back then, it was nothing short of super cool.  My best friend had the console you hooked to the TV.   Stuff like Pac-Man came years later.  It was a circle that ate dots and everyone loved it.

There were no computers….heck calculators were still in their infancy and they weren’t “pocket” calculators either.  Some were the size of an iPad and they boggled the mind by adding, subtracting, multiplying AND dividing.

No cable TV.  We had a black and white “portable” TV.  It was portable in that it didn’t take three people to move it, just two.  When we turned it on, it needed to warm up before we could see the picture.  To adjust it, we rotated a ring around the channel knob (yes, a knob).  If the picture jumped, my sister just whacked it on the side.  Sometimes that worked.  The picture was often fuzzy, but sometimes we’d fix that by adding a bit of foil to the antenna or standing in a certain position while we touched the foil.  Life was tough.  Saturday morning cartoons had a moral.  Fat Albert and Josie would sing it for us.  Yep…life was a real chore.

We played games on a slab of cardboard called a “board.”  We had chocolate colored shag carpet in the living room.  I would actually lose things in it and our cat could actually hide IN it much like a lion hides in the tall grass of the Serengeti.  And (this one is bad) we even had a wooden rake for it.  My parents insisted we rake the carpet after being in the living room so the deep pile would all lie in one direction.  Our house smelled of sandalwood incense and Santana and Iron Butterfly could always be heard on weekend nights in the family room.

When I was nine, my sister was six and NOT traveling in a car seat by then.  If memory serves me correctly, she was about two when she could ride on the bench back seat of our AMC Javelin.  I vaguely remember her car seat was a hulking tubular steel monster with a bit of foam on the hand rest that came down over her head like the one that secures you before you ride on a roller coaster.  We were able to fight over the invisible line on the back seat of the car while we waited in line to get gas.  On that day only odd numbered license plates could fuel up!

Today, a child needs to be about eighty pounds before being released from the embarrassing prison of a car seat.  I remember my college sweetheart probably weighed about ninety pounds.  Imagine dropping your daughter off at the college dorms for the first time and giving her the car seat in case she joins her friends on a road trip.  That’s where we’re headed.

We played with (and occasionally ingested) nails, frogs and mud and we had no antibacterial hand cream to save us from marauding protozoans-gone-wild.  I think I was selling fireworks to my friends at age 7.  We left home in the morning and came back inside only to eat dinner…all without parental supervision.  None of those child snatchers supposedly hiding in the bushes ever nabbed us.  Must have been all those street-smarts we had.  We rode big metal bikes with no helmets or pads.  Heck, most of us didn’t even have brakes and some had no seats!  You had to stand up to ride!  Nobody seemed to have allergies to peanuts, gluten, dust, water or air.  We got whacked with wooden spoons, belts and bare hands when we got out of line and we didn’t feel the need to hit everyone else because of it.

Yup.  It was way cooler to be a kid back then.  I’d trade all the technology if my daughter could live in the 70’s.  The beach is pretty much the same though….

Download a song?  What the heck is an MP-3?  What planet are you from?

Meltdown

As I sit here poring over the news of another day of financial carnage, it makes me think….  Our nest eggs have had cinder blocks dropped upon them and at the end of the day we throw up our hands and tell ourselves that there’s nothing we can do.  You can’t argue with the market.

News of the stock market troubles is hardly a secret.  It affects nearly everyone.  But there has also been destruction wrought upon other markets.  Markets that aren’t followed closely by CNBC or the pundits who claim to have explanations for everything.

In my little corner of the world, there exists a Market for Personal Property.  It’s a market every auctioneer follows closely and if you roll that whole market and all its respective auctioneers into one big ball, it actually amounts to tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars of sales.  Basically, it is the aggregate market demand for all the things we have in our homes.  TV’s, sofa’s, pots, pans, bicycles, furniture, figurines…you name it.

Over the past decade this market has, with few exceptions, been in steep decline.  Ask any auctioneer who conducts a lot of household and estate sales and he or she will tell you about the “good old days” when an old chest of drawers would bring $250 and a good china set would bring the same amount.  Those days are gone.  Today, those numbers are down 50-75% across the board.  Try swallowing a number like that on Wall Street.

Because the Personal Property Market isn’t followed, nobody realizes how bad it is.  When I explain it, I’m invariably presented with an argument that grandma’s mahogany buffet is certainly “worth more than that.”  No.  It isn’t.  It’s worth what the public is willing to pay for it and nothing more.  Nothing I can do will change that fact or the fact that Bank of America stock lost 20% of its value today.  The market has spoken.  Because nobody reads or regularly hears about the Personal Property Market, the horrific declines in the values of household items at auction aren’t taken seriously. 

When market realities are delivered by a source perceived as credible….like CNN, they are taken to be truths….but I’m just an auctioneer.  I’ve probably sold hundreds of thousands of items of every sort in the local marketplace over the last decade or so.  I’m not on TV….yet.   My words don’t carry the credibility of Neal Cavuto or Maria Bartiromo.  If Personal Property prices are low, then it must be…my fault for not finding the right buyers.  Try using that argument with your stock broker today.

Is this auction really any different from...

This one?  Other than the cool clothes and a few extra computers?

We Did This to Ourselves

It's been awhile since I ranted about something.   

Economy, economy, economy….it’s all we care about.  According to the pundits, there must always be expansion if there is to be happiness.  Contraction indicates misery.

I listen to friends tell me about how bad things are out there.  People can’t find jobs.  Nobody seems to have any money lately. Businesses are sucking wind.  Ours isn’t immune.  In the past several years we’ve watched the average market price for everyday items fall precipitously at auction.  The decline as been so steep, we now have a rather large list of items we won’t even allow through the front door due to the fact that they won’t sell for enough to justify using our valuable real estate to display them.  It’s bad out there.

My take is that we did this to ourselves.  Our free market economy encourages consumption.  That is….buying stuff, using it up, throwing it away, then buying more…..infinitum.  Marketers take pride in getting each and every one of us to buy more stuff.  Our houses are filled with it.  If we replace our kitchen cabinets with white ones this year, there’s no question that next year’s color will be anything but white.  Anyone who is anyone can’t have outdated cabinets.  Call the contractor. 

We sell homes all the time.  Recently, we sold one that had perfectly usable…everything.  It was just “outdated.”  The buyers whined about how many thousands it would take to upgrade the home.  Functionality has become irrelevant.  What matters in our society is how it LOOKS, not how well it functions.  We’ll replace solid wood cabinets with particle board ones if they LOOK more modern.  How’d that happen?  How did we get so shallow?  More than half the people on this planet would just like something to EAT or a place to get out of the cold and rain…We rip out perfectly good fixtures and cabinets so our friends won’t talk about how cheap and behind the times we are.  But getting back to my point…It’s the pursuit of all the stuff that requires an ever increasing amount of money.  We demand pay raises and minimum acceptable wages because we feel we’re entitled to new cabinetry, new cars, new clothes and a flat screen TV.  It’s the American Way.

Outside of America, wants and needs are more modest…requiring less capital.  When any four walls and a roof will do for today, the worry is not a pay raise, but rather any job that will bring in enough to provide the ability to subsist.  Jobs are going away because we live in a global economy where people will work for $1 an hour or even $1 a day.  Why pay the union guys $37.50 an hour with paid 5 week vacation, double overtime and mandatory health benefits when you can get the job done for $1 per hour and nothing extra?  In many places, people will bow at your feet for $1 an hour.

It’s easy for us to say that people who work for such wages are exploited….and there’s no question that many workers ARE exploited, but we are so darned used to the big numbers, we can’t understand how anyone, anywhere would work for the little numbers.  As a result, companies are abandoning high cost labor resources to utilize the less expensive sources.  That’s the way it is.

If it were your company, and you had to answer to shareholders, what would you do?

The relentless pursuit of stuff, economic expansion forever, and bigger things had gotten us into this mess. If everyone just wanted less and wasn’t concerned about what color the cabinets are, we’d need less money, we’d be under less pressure and we might actually be able to work for a wage that would keep us competitive.  Our desire for material things is becoming our undoing.  It’s not the government, it’s not the immigrants or the folks in China, it’s us.  

Time to take a look in the mirror and ask some big questions about where we are going.

We feel entitled to drive this...

When plenty of people in other countries would be happy with this...