Is Being Disorganized Costing You Money?
Organizing feels like a luxury, and you might feel guilty or irresponsible spending too much money on it. But there’s a logical fallacy here. Being disorganized costs you more money than you realize. If you’re looking to invest in your home and your wellbeing, you are better off paying to get organized than living in a space that doesn’t function for you. Still skeptical? Let’s dig in.
Knowing what you have saves you money.
Let’s start here because it’s pretty cut and dry. Think about your pantry. Do you have food in there that you don’t realize you have? Are you overbuying week after week because it’s too much of a hassle to go check? Do you end up throwing out expired food because you didn’t realize it was there?
With the price of groceries these days, let’s say a family overbuys by $50 a week. Over the course of a year, that’s $2600. You could hire us to organize a pantry for roughly the same price (1 day of organizing x a team of 2 is $2000, plus $600 in baskets and pantry organizers) and waste less food, enjoy your space more, and ultimately break even at the end of the year. Plus, the pantry will stay organized after that first year, so you’ll end up saving money in the long run!
You could make the same argument for most spaces in your home. Your closet (I’m sure there are clothes in there that you’ve never worn or rarely wear), your bathroom (skincare and makeup expire!), the playroom, your kids’ closets, your office, etc.
The ROI of organizing vs. expanding your home
Here’s a case study from one of our clients. When we met them in 2022, they were considering doing an addition to their home. With two school-age boys and careers that often had them working at home, their house was feeling too small. They wanted to get a quote for organizing before moving ahead with a renovation. We gave them a range of $21,600 - $24,600 (including products) to organize both sons’ rooms, a crawlspace, three closets, a school room, a storage shed and a home office. They hired us for the work and the final total for these spaces came in at $21,720. When we were finished with the four day project, they said that the organizing was transformational, and that it felt like their home had been renovated.
If they’d actually renovated and added on to their home, it would have likely cost well over $300,000, not including the time and stress of planning, permitting and living through a renovation. Instead, they had our team in their home (and were still able to live their lives, work from home, etc.) for just four days and less than 10% of the cost of doing an addition. Not only did this help maintain the structural integrity of their historic home, it saved them an incredible amount of time, stress and money.
How much is your time worth?
I think a lot about how much time is worth. You can measure it in what you’re paid hourly, whether that’s $20 or $200 or $2000. You can measure it in how much you’d pay to have more time if you were sick. You can measure it in how much you’d pay to get home if you were stranded in an airport. There are so many measures, and one of them is how much you would pay to really enjoy the space you live in day-to-day. Let’s say you work out of the house, so that’s 8-10 hours a day. That leaves on average another 14 - 16 hours in your home (albeit some asleep). If you work from home or are a full-time homemaker, you spend most of your time at home. Would you say that enjoying your time at home, really loving your space and feeling comfortable in it, is worth $10 / day? $20?
$20 per day comes to $7300 a year. If you invested just $7300 a year into organizing or decorating or streamlining, it builds on itself. If you do it right the first time, you can build onto systems and not just redo them over and over again. Organizing the right way (aka, making systems that adapt to your habits and are realistic to maintain) is an investment that can continue to serve you well beyond the year you do it.
A case for fitting organization into your budget
If you’ve had a good year financially, maybe you decide to put a portion of it into your home. The benefits of having an organized space have a domino effect. If your clothing closet is organized, you save time getting ready in the morning, you feel better in your clothes, and you are less likely to spend money buying things you don’t really need. If you organize right away when you move into a new home, you are much more likely to enjoy your space and feel comfortable there for years to come. And the proof is in our family of clients. Once we transform a space for a client, they come to us for help every time there’s a major life change. If they’re moving, downsizing, changing the functionality of their home, or anything else that could benefit from organization, they know from both a financial and an emotional perspective that being organized is worth its weight in gold.
If you are looking to get organized or have questions about the process, don’t hesitate to reach out! And no matter if you hire us, take our course, or organize for yourself, we hope you gift yourself the peace of mind of living in a space that feels functional and streamlined.
