Archives for The Big Picture
What matters most to you? Let The Happiness Project Toolbox help you decide.
Joie de vivre expert Gretchen Rubin, who authors the inspiring blog The Happiness Project, has recently launched a new website called The Happiness Project Toolbox. The Toolbox is a companion to her blog and is a way for people to create their own happiness projects.
When you chose to become an unclutterer, you did so because you wanted to stop focusing on stuff and focus instead on what matters most to you. When you did this, you may not have formally created a list of what matters most to you. However, you knew that you wanted to get rid of the stress and frustrations in your home and office because there were/are other things that you would rather be doing with your time.
The Happiness Project Toolbox is a resource to help you commit to writing those things that matter most to you. Specifically, the Resolutions, Personal Commandments, and Lists sections of the Toolbox can get you thinking about the things that you want to do more of and enjoy. Whatever these things are in your life, they can and will work as powerful motivators to keep you moving through the uncluttering process. When you have a clear idea of how you want your life to be, it’s easy to decide if an object, process, or behavior is useful or simply clutter in your life.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Are you keeping duplicate items in your closet?
I’ve always heard that if you have two pairs of jeans (or any kind of clothes), that you’ll get longer life out of them by alternating them on a daily basis instead of wearing one pair until they wear out and then wearing the second pair. Many people make this claim when they’re justifying holding onto four of the exact same black shirt, or whatever multiple of a piece of clothing that is taking up space in their closet. Unfortunately, after many days researching this very topic, I have yet to find a single piece of scientific evidence to support the extended-life claim.
Each piece of clothing you own has a limited life cycle. Natural fabrics are made of predominantly short fibers (sheep fur, rabbit fur, flax shafts, cotton) that eventually break down and unwind over time (for example, pills on a sweater). Man-made fibers are longer and more durable (rayon is a single, long, silk-thread-like product), but they can and will eventually show damage. Wearing, washing, and drying fabrics damage fibers, plain and simple. (Even storing fabrics can damage fibers if under poor conditions.)
Think of it like a math equation:
Life Cycle = X wearings + Y washings + Z dryings
The Life Cycle is a set number that doesn’t change if the days come in succession or not. A cotton t-shirt is going to reach its Life Cycle after something like 200 wearings, washings, and dryings. It doesn’t matter if those 200 wearings, washings, and dryings happen over 200 days in a row or 200 days spread out over two years; you’re only going to be able to wear your t-shirt on 200 occasions before it reaches the end of its Life Cycle.
Hanging clothes on a drying line instead of putting them in the dryer can extend the length of your clothes because the fibers in your fabrics won’t get beat up going round and round in the metal drum (high heat also does damage to fibers). Hand-washing is also better on fabrics than machine washing, but not significantly (the enzymes in detergents still take a toll on fibers). And, you can get a little more life out of your clothes by wearing them more than once (I’m thinking jeans, not underwear) between launderings. But, bacteria, dirt, and mites damage clothes, too, so washing your clothes extends their life cycle (in comparison to not washing them ever).
Ultimately, a piece of clothing has a set life cycle and alternating or rotating its wear doesn’t change that fact. Knowing this, do you feel more comfortable letting go of duplicate items of the exact same piece of clothing in your closet? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
P.S. As far as I can tell, the above information is also true for all shoe materials except for leather. For some biological reason, animal skins have a shrinkage period that can improve the life cycle of your leather shoes if given a day to dry out and rest. So, you might get a few more days or weeks of wear out of a pair of leather shoes if you wear them every other day instead of every day. Again, this only seems to be true for shoes made of real leather.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Unclutterer and smart consumerism
We’ve been receiving an unusual amount of nasty grams lately regarding our practice of reviewing and writing about products on our website. As a result, we thought it might be a good time to review what Unclutterer is and its stance on smart consumerism.
Defining Unclutterer: An Unclutterer is someone who decides to get rid of the distractions (clutter) that get in the way of a remarkable life. Our website is for people who are or want to become unclutterers. It’s a site for people who are interested in getting and staying organized. Our motto is “a place for everything, and everything in its place.”
Consumerism: This website does not advocate freeganism, asceticism, or anti-consumer behaviors. If you want to live in this manner, we’re totally fine with it. However, it’s not required or expected of unclutterers.
Unclutterers have use for technology and tools and furniture. We appreciate not having to hunt and gather or live in caves. We enjoy the conveniences provided by the modern world. There are numerous physical things that make our lives easier and free up our time to pursue the things that matter most to us. Because of this, Unclutterer promotes smart consumer practices.
What is smart consumerism? Smart consumerism is spending less than you earn. Smart consumerism is researching products before your buy them to make sure that you are getting the best quality that you can afford. Smart consumerism is only buying products that you need or that help you to pursue the remarkable life you desire. Smart consumerism is refraining from acquiring clutter.
Around our offices, we talk about simple, uncluttered living the way Albert Einstein did, “Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.”
We review and write about products that we believe might be of use to some of our readers to better organize their lives. If we see something and think that it might help someone to get closer to their remarkable life, we put it in the queue to be researched and tested. There are tens of thousands of people who read this site on a daily basis. There are bound to be products that we review that aren’t of interest to every single one of our readers. So, if we review a product and you don’t need it, don’t buy it. Just remember that each Unclutterer is different and the product that would be clutter in your home might be significantly useful to someone else.
Noting this, isn’t our Unitasker Wednesday column a wee-bit hypocritical? Yes. But the purpose of our Unitasker Wednesday column is to have fun. This is a home and office organizing website, it’s not brain surgery. No one’s life is on the line, and it’s good to keep things in perspective and laugh once in a while. Everyone on staff owns at least one (or many more) items that have been featured in the Unitasker Wednesday column. We’re fine being hypocrites when it comes to having fun.
In fact, fun is a big part of what we do at Unclutterer. We want people to get rid of clutter and organize their lives so that they have less stress and more time for fun. My personal pursuit for a remarkable life involves a great deal of laughing and I love it when the people around me are happy. If you ever read something on the site and can’t figure out our tone, please just assume that we were trying to tell a joke and failed. Our goal is to help our readers, not offend them.
Do you have a question about smart consumerism or Unclutterer? Let us know about it in the comments.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Surprise benefits of an uncluttered life
At 1:30 yesterday afternoon, my husband made an off-hand remark about his parents coming to visit from Chicago. I was in a zone, still focused on a phone call from that morning, and only really heard “my parents” and “dinner” and “arrival.”
About an hour later, I came to understand that he said, “My parents just called and they’re arriving around 8:00 tonight. I think we should take them out to dinner when they get here.” He meant 8:00 p.m., as in six and a half hours from when he first mentioned it to me. Surprise!
It’s exact moments like these when I am thankful that we live an uncluttered life. Instead of worrying about the state of the house or what we might feed our guests while they are here or anything hostess related, I simply nodded and told him, “good to know.”
The toilets and shower in the bathroom are clean, there is food in the kitchen cupboards, we have clean bed linens, and everything in the house is in its place. I ran the dishwasher a few hours earlier than normal so that it wouldn’t keep them awake (our “guest room” is a pull-out in our living room), but, except for having two wonderful guests, our schedule for the day was the same as a typical Wednesday.
It’s surprise situations like these that I like to focus my attentions to when I’m doing my 30 minutes of chores each evening. Being free from unnecessary stress is a powerful motivator when routinely taking care of the small things. A little bit of work each night means that there is never a big issue to solve, and house guests can show up for surprise visits without causing my stress levels to soar.
Now, I just need to be a detective and figure out how this visit never made it onto our family calendar.
What benefits have you found with leading an uncluttered life? Tell us about them in the comments.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Do you have a big ‘But …’?
I was in sixth grade the first time I saw the movie Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. My friends latched onto the “I know you are but what am I” line from the film, and I quipped “Everyone I know has a big ‘But …’” no fewer than a thousand times.
Sure, the line I often quoted from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was juvenile, but it was strangely accurate. Everyone I know actually has a big “But …” in their lives:
- I would get my office organized but [insert excuse].
- I would ask the kids to help with chores around the house but [insert excuse].
- I would start exercising but [insert excuse].
- I would finish this project but [insert excuse].
There are times when excuses are warranted, such as with health issues (I would eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup but I won’t since I’m allergic to peanuts). However, most “But …” excuses are purely a resistance to change.
We keep bad habits and clutter in our lives because they’re known quantities. We know what life is like when things are disorderly. Life after a change is different and unfamiliar. It might be better, but we don’t know that from where we are now.
As someone who went from a clutterbug to an unclutterer, I can vouch that life is really greener on the organized side. I have more time and less stress in my life than before. The change was worth it, but making the change was difficult and I know I said my fair share of “But …” excuses as I was going through the process.
So what is your big “But …”? What is keeping you from letting go of your clutter? The next time you catch yourself making an excuse, think about what you’re saying. Is your excuse warranted, or are you just voicing a fear of change?
Popularity: 16% [?]
Ability to delay gratification can help with routine maintenance
In the 1960s, 653 children were given a marshmallow by psychology researchers at Stanford University. The children were told that they could eat the marshmallow right away, or they could wait 15 minutes to eat it and receive a second marshmallow as a reward.
Based on how they performed in the experiment, they were rated on a scale from low delayers (kids who ate the marshmallow instantly) to high delayers (kids who waited the 15 minutes and received a second marshmallow). Over the next 40 years, these children have been tracked by Stanford researchers. And, to many people’s surprise, there has been significant correlation between rates of drug abuse, S.A.T. scores, body-mass index, stress management, career success, and ability to maintain friendships to how the children performed on this simple marshmallow experiment.
Children who were high delayers were the ones to achieve more success in life than their low delayer classmates. In fact, a child “who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.” According to the article “Don’t! The secret of self-control” in the May 18 issue of The New Yorker:
For decades, psychologists have focussed on raw intelligence as the most important variable when it comes to predicting success in life. [Walter] Mischel [the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment] argues that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”
The article and research does point out that there were some students in the study who transformed from low delayers into high delayers over the course of 40 years. The scientists have since concluded that delaying gratification is a skill that can be learned, simply by practicing specific techniques (some are described in the article).
So what does this have to do with uncluttering? Good question. An essential component to maintaining an uncluttered life is having routines in place that keep the clutter out of your home and office and the self control and diligence to systematically complete the routines. These are routines to process mail, do daily chores, create meal plans, and process paperwork and actions as they come across your desk. Doing these not-so-fun tasks everyday ultimately pay off because you have more time and less stress in your life overall. Thirty minutes of chores and routines each week night gives you two free days on the weekend. You delay gratification for an even larger reward.
If you have difficulty maintaining routines to keep clutter out of your life, I recommend that you check out this article. You can learn and practice these skills so that you, too, can live a remarkable, uncluttered life. If you’re already a master at self control, the article still makes for a very fascinating read.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Everyone can learn to be organized
Everyone begins life as a messy, disorganized, lump of a baby. No one is born in a starched shirt and polished shoes with a day planner in one hand and a vacuum cleaner in the other. (Our mothers, they are particularly happy about the vacuum cleaner part.) We scream. We drool. We poop. We cry some more. Everything about a baby is chaotic.
During the early years of life, some children are formally taught by their caregivers how to be organized. Others garner bits and pieces through observation, example, and trial and error. Finally, there are those who picked up very little during childhood and didn’t start learning about organizing until adulthood (I fall into this category).
The speed at which we acquire organizing skills is also varied. Some people learn a specific organizing skill the first time they encounter it. Others, it takes considerable practice.
How you learn or how quickly you learn is completely irrelevant; the point is that everyone can learn to be organized.
From this point forward, I want you to stop thinking about your disorganization as a state of being. Instead, think about the specific way that you’re not yet organized.
“My closet is a mess because I haven’t mastered the skills necessary to keep it free of clutter. I need to learn how to organize my closet and acquire the skills that it requires to maintain it well.”
“My big project at work is a mess because I don’t know what programs and systems are available to help me get it under control. I need to research and learn about what I can do to better manage my time and work of this project.”
When you stop identifying as someone who is disorganized, and start thinking about it as just a specific skill that you can learn, getting organized becomes an easier task.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Are you an unclutterer?
An unclutterer is someone who chooses to get rid of the distractions that get in the way of a remarkable life.
These distractions, also known as clutter, can be:
- Physical. You have things you don’t have use for, things you have too much of, things that are out of place, things that don’t inspire you, things that you don’t want. The things you do want are disorganized. You’re overwhelmed by stuff.
- Mental. Worries, stress, and anxiety about things you can’t control or things that could be solved if you were better organized.
- Time. You have too much to do and not enough time or desire to do it. Or, you’re not managing the time that you do have well. Things that matter to you are pushed aside by busy-ness.
- Processes. You’re not working to the best of your ability or don’t have processes in place to handle routine actions. You’re spinning your wheels.
What is the clutter in your life? How would your life be different if you chose to get rid of the distractions? Are you an unclutterer?
Popularity: 13% [?]
Fake plants: Erin’s secret timesaver
When I decided to get clutter out of my life — physical, mental, time, and productivity clutter — I did it because I wanted to have more time and room in my life for the things that matter most to me. There are only 24 hours in the day, and I want to spend the majority of my waking hours doing what I value and find important.
Sure, there are chores (about 30 minutes a day) I don’t love, but doing them keeps stress and other negative effects out of my life. My overall life is better because I have routines in place to take care of the not-so-great parts.
One thing I don’t like doing is gardening or anything to do with the yard. I know that some people love gardening and are horrified that I don’t like it, but I enjoy things that I’m sure they have no interest in doing (cheese making, doing stand up comedy, reading mystery novels, playing the pedal steel guitar). We’re all different, which is what makes unclutterers so great.
Since I’m not fond of gardening, I have fake plants in all of the flower boxes on the front of my house. These are high-end fake plants. Even when you’re standing inches away from them, you have no idea that they’re not real. But, unlike real plants, I don’t have to do anything to maintain their beauty.
- No watering.
- No weeding.
- No dying plants.
- No plant diseases or pests.
- No maintenance.
If you’re interested in sprucing up a flower box with fake plants, follow these tips to make it so that no one on your block has any idea:
- Use high-end fake plants. If it looks bad in the store, it’s going to look bad in your flower box. The French make the world’s best fake plants, and if you can afford them, buy them. My favorite is Trousselier at 73 blvd Haussmann in Paris. If heading to France isn’t in your future (Trousselier doesn’t have an online shop), check out your local craft store and be very picky about what makes it into your cart.
- Buy plants, not flowers. You don’t have to worry about things blooming in the wrong season if nothing blooms. And, even when they are very well made, fake flowers can still look fake.
- Only display the plants during appropriate seasons. If a fern wouldn’t be growing outdoors in January, don’t have a fake fern outdoors in January. Store it into a garbage bag in your garage, and put it back out in the spring.
- Only buy fake plants that could grow in your region.
- Take the time to plan out and landscape your flower box before you go shopping for fake plants. You want the plants to look as natural as possible.
- Buy fake plants with realistic looking imperfections. Not every leaf on a plant is the exact same shade of green, and sometimes a leaf or two is brown. Nature isn’t perfect, and neither should your fake plants be.
- “Plant” your fake plants in gravel with fake moss or fake grass as ground cover. Weeds won’t grow in rocks, but they will grow in dirt. If you “plant” in dirt, you’re still going to have to pick out weeds.
Okay, now you know my time-saving secret. Where do you cut corners to free up time in your schedule to pursue the things that matter most to you?
(My apologies about the picture being small. It was hard to line up an image that didn’t flash my neighbors’ license plates to the internet.)
Popularity: 21% [?]
Uncluttered packaging
A graphic design student at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Steve Haslip, designed a prototype for a mailing envelope that transforms into a clothes hanger. As far as we know, the design isn’t yet manufactured. But, we absolutely love it and hope that someone starts using it.
From the product description:
The concept was fairly simple: I buy t-shirts online and they always come wrinkled and I always run out of coat-hangers. So I designed a sustainable, reusable way to send and keep your t-shirts. As you open the package you create a coat hanger. The packaging could be made from recycled material whether it is card or plastic and the only waste is the green tear-away tab.
Do you know of additional product packaging that keeps clutter and waste away? We’re always on the lookout for great, uncluttered design.
(via Packagings of the World)
Popularity: 17% [?]
What’s in your office?
When you imagine a CEO’s office, you probably think of a wood desk, an ornately framed print of a stale landscape, a couple diplomas on the wall, a bookshelf of leather bound classics, a large window with a decent view, and everything well organized with no clutter anywhere. I could probably create a coffee table book filled with thousands of examples of this exact office.
For better or worse, most CEO’s offices send the message: “I am in charge, and I get work done.”
Forbes recently profiled the offices of 10 CEOs in the article “What CEOs Love To Keep In Their Offices.” The article discusses the not-so-obvious things that some big-wigs keep in their spaces. But, I have to be honest, none of the items they mention are really that far off the regular path — a dry erase board, a dart board, an executive bathroom.
CEO offices are consistent because they are, in many ways, the face of the company. Consumers and employees alike judge CEOs based on the image they present. If a CEOs office is full of clutter and chaotic, then it sends the message that the company is cluttered and chaotic. So, the CEO of a company will always have an office that looks like the one I described in the first paragraph.
Can you take a few cues from the CEOs? I’m not advocating that you retrofit your cubicle with wood laminate and bad artwork, but can you keep your office clutter free? Can you project to your co-workers and clients that you are efficient and productive and able to handle all the work that comes your way? Does your office say that you’re organized and ready to lead?
Popularity: 21% [?]
Six tips to help you make a change
According to the article “Stress and the Decision to Change Oneself” in a 1994 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, there are six factors that significantly improve a person’s chances of making a change in his life:
1) A stressor disrupts or threatens to disrupt a valued role-identity, 2) one attributes responsibility for the stressor to an aspect of self that one believes can be changed, 3) one has access to structural supports for self-change, 4) one believes that one can effect self-change, 5) the perceived benefits of self-change outweigh the perceived costs, and 6)others provide social support for self-change.
Since this quote is from a professional journal article and not written in Unclutterer-speak, let me rework it without the jargon:
- You don’t like how you’re behaving.
- You know you are responsible for making the change; no one else can do it for you.
- You have access to information that can help you change.
- You believe you can change.
- You believe making the change is worth it.
- Your friends and family support your change.
Thinking about my transformation from a clutter bug into an unclutterer, I realize that all six of these factors were present. I was stressed out and overwhelmed all the time and I hated it. I knew I needed to sort through my stuff and that I would be upset if someone else just dumped it. I did research to find out how to unclutter my life (if only Unclutterer.com would have been around back then, this would have been a much easier process). I varied my intensity, but most days I believed I could change how I was living. I also believed that making the change would help my marriage, friendships, stress levels, and time management issues. And, everyone around me was willing to lend a hand if I would have asked for it.
If you’re having difficulties on your path to becoming an unclutterer, is it because you’re missing one of these six factors? What is keeping you from changing? Do you agree with this list? Share your views in the comments.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Uncluttered aphorisms
At Unclutterer, we abide by the motto “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” In addition to this motto, we also have a number of uncluttered sayings that work their way into many of our posts:
- The less you own, the less you have to clean. This applies to quantity of objects as well as square footage in your home.
- One in, one out. If you buy something new, you need to get rid of whatever it’s replacing.
- If you get it out, put it back. An especially great rule to implement to keep your home and office orderly.
- Guilt is not a reason to keep something. This one is self explanatory.
What mottoes or principles inspire you to keep clutter out of your home? Share your motivating sayings with us in the comments!
Popularity: 22% [?]
Disaster uncluttering: Looking back
Today we welcome back Unclutterer programmer, Gary DuVall. In the In the first, second, and third posts in this series, he discussed how to prepare yourself and your home in case of a disaster and what to do if it unfortunately happens. This is his final post in the series. He is writing for us based on his personal experience of losing everything he owned in a fire.
By January, life started to feel normal again. The fire, the struggles with the insurance company, and finding a new place to live were all behind us. We were rebuilding and moving on.
We realized we hadn’t given much thought to the loss of our things but had spent all of our time worrying about our general predicament (Where will we live? I can’t believe this happened. How do I go to work tomorrow?) We discovered just how little the material stuff meant to us. This realization presented us with the peculiar ability to remain positive (for the most part) during the process. We talked about this being an opportunity rather than a devastating blow. (Losing intimate, irreplaceable items from our families, friends, and shared experiences did, for a time, bother us; however, that also faded.)
Thumbing through the more than 30-page inventory that listed what we once owned made us realize just how much we had, and, perhaps more importantly, how much we didn’t want to replace. So far, we have only replaced 20 percent of what we previously owned. To be comfortable, we don’t need a lot of stuff. Everything we have repurchased, we have been very thoughtful about quality and where everything will live in our home. No clutter.
Did we make mistakes along the way? Sure we did. We didn’t have an inventory prepared ahead of time, despite telling ourselves we’d “get to it one day.” Receipts we had kept prior to the fire weren’t filed in our records box, resulting in their loss. We hadn’t read through and understood completely our insurance policy, which, had we lost it in the fire, could have left us at a vast disadvantage. Knowing what we do now, these aren’t mistakes we’ll repeat in the future.
When we look back at what happened on June 27, 2008, we look at it for what it is: an experience nobody should ever go through. But, at the same time, it was an experience that afforded us a rare “reboot” button. We were able to re-examine and take stock of what we had, and act decisively toward a new beginning.
As strange as it might be, considering the setbacks, inconveniences, angry phone calls and other problems I’ve written about during the course of this series, I like to think we ended up better for it in the end.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Disaster Uncluttering: Rebuilding
Today we welcome back Unclutterer programmer, Gary DuVall. In the first and second posts in this series, he discussed how to prepare yourself and your home in case of a disaster and what to do if it unfortunately happens. He is writing for us based on his personal experience of losing everything he owned in a fire on June 27, 2008.
After having spent the prior three weeks trying to process what had happened, it was nice for life to slow down a bit. My wife and I found a temporary sublet north of the city to live in for a couple of months, and we tried to regain some sense of a “normal” life. While it wasn’t the most comfortable situation -— nothing in our furnished sublet belonged to us and we were 15 miles from our neighborhood -— it was still a place we could call home.
The next step in the process was to build an inventory of what we lost. Between the photographs my wife Stephanie had taken and many hours of trying to remember what we owned, we constructed an inventory we felt good about and sent it off to the insurance adjuster.
Now would be a good time to point out a vital distinction in your policy when it comes to how much money you’ll receive for the items you’ve lost: Actual Cash Value (ACV) vs. Replacement Cost (RCV). Under ACV, your items are subject to depreciation and as such you’ll only receive enough money to replace the item at that depreciated price. Under RCV, you receive the full amount necessary to purchase an item of like quality without a depreciation in value. While your first check under a policy that contains a RCV rider is likely to cover actual cash value only, it’ll be up to you to repurchase the items you’ve lost and send in the receipts to recoup the difference. (Learn more.) Needless to say, we were both thankful we purchased a RCV rider.
The hardest part after submitting the initial inventory was waiting for that first check. Come September, when we finally moved into a new apartment, we still hadn’t seen anything but excuses from both the insurance and claims adjusters. In the meantime, my wife and I ended up having to sacrifice the savings and credit we’d built up in order to buy the essentials. In our case, it ended up taking over three months -— October 2008 -— to obtain the completed appraisal document and our ACV check.
Considerations:
- Compile your inventory before a disaster occurs and keep it updated quarterly. Had we done this before the fire, it wouldn’t have been necessary to spend 40+ hours compiling an inventory. While a video inventory provides you with visual evidence of the items you own, a spreadsheet containing the purchase price, date of purchase, and the store where purchased (along with receipts when possible) will serve as hard evidence. Ask your insurance provider for a copy of their inventory spreadsheet; in most cases, they’ll be more than happy to oblige.
- Consider a Replacement Cost Value (RCV) rider. While it may come at a premium, it’s worth it. The difference in what you receive may be thousands of dollars. Some providers (such as USAA) now default to this type of coverage in order to ensure policyholders aren’t left at a disadvantage with very little money to rebuild.
- A tip from the many insurance adjusters I spoke to while roaming the building after the fire: When calculating the replacement cost of an item for your inventory, use the MSRP. Relying on a sales price is likely to result in you receiving a check far below the value of what’s necessary to rebuild.
- Think about your options. In our case, we found “starting from zero” to be a liberating experience of sorts; we could chart exactly how we wanted to rebuild without, ironically, the process of having to sell or get rid of existing furniture and items. Once the initial shock of having lost everything fades, you’re left with what we considered to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
- If you’re financially able, don’t wait for that first check to arrive before making purchases. You may be left waiting months and, in the end, could end up moving into a completely empty home. It’ll be up to you and your family to take action and prepare your new home with furnishing and essentials whether you have a check in hand or not. If you’ve purchased a RCV rider, organize your receipts, match them to your inventory, and have them ready to submit as quickly as possible after the first check arrives.
- Take charge, and don’t be afraid to press for action when every side seems to have an excuse and you’re caught in the middle. Many people end up waiting considerably longer than three months for results because they don’t want to rock the boat.
- Your initial inventory isn’t the end-all-be-all when it comes to making your claims. Should you discover additional items that were lost, you can make subsequent claims. In our case, we ended up making three separate claims: The initial inventory and two more addendum inventories.
In the final part of the series, I’ll discuss how the experience has affected us in the long-term.
Popularity: 17% [?]
