Clearing your clutter could save hundreds

Nancy Lester Anderson of Sacramento, California, just found $100 (Dh367) worth of expired gift cards in her to do pile.

Christine Moore of Quincy, Illinois, missed out on $300 of manufacturer rebates on her new appliances because she misplaced the paperwork.

Tom Wyatt of Beaverton, Oregon, estimates he's spent $100 to $200 replacing tools he already has.

"Every time I need to do something around the house, I have to go buy a new tool," he wrote on my Facebook fan page. His repeated refrain: "I know that I have one of these, I just can't FIND IT!!!!"

In the US the National Association of Professional Organisers has never commissioned a survey on what the typical American household pays for clutter and disorganisation, says its president, Laura Leist. But if such a survey were conducted, Leist and I bet the toll would be in the hundreds of dollars a year. For some families, it's in the thousands.

Exhibit A is the self-storage industry, which rakes in $22 billion annually, according to the Self Storage Association. One in ten US households rents a storage locker, which means an average annual cost of about $2,000 per household for storage.

Can't dump the junk

There are reasons to rent a storage facility besides being unable to part with your clutter, of course. About 4 per cent of the industry's units are rented by members of the military, who may store stuff while they're deployed. Storage facilities are a handy place to put stuff during a remodel or when you're trying to stage your home to sell.

But some of Leist's clients rent two or three or five units simply because they can't face the task of sorting through their possessions and discarding what they don't need.

"They don't want to deal with what's inside" the storage units, said Leist, a certified professional organiser and the author of Eliminate Chaos: The 10-Step Process to Organise Your Home and Life.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of costs Americans pay for not being sufficiently organised. Consider:

Credit card issuers will collect more than $7 billion in late fees this year, according to Odysseas Papadimitriou, a former lending executive and the CEO and founder of CardHub.com.

Banks collected more than $37 billion in overdraft fees last year, according to research firm Moebs Services, before new rules kicked in that restricted such charges. One in four chequing accounts had an overdraft fee during another 12-month period, according to a 2008 FDIC survey of 39 banks. Four per cent of those banks' accounts had ten to 19 bounced transactions, paying an average $451 in fees, while 5 per cent had 20 or more, paying a whopping $1,610 on average.

Each year, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax refunds expire unclaimed because people fail to file their tax returns within the three-year time limit. The unclaimed refunds typically average between $550 and $600, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

Unpaid parking tickets and library fines have become big business for collection agencies, which increasingly have taken over dunning duties from municipalities.

Municipalities are owed more than $40 billion, according to an estimate by Kaulkin Ginsberg, a collection industry research company. An overlooked ticket or forgotten library book thus can become a collection account on your credit reports, tanking your credit scores and perhaps leading to higher interest rates.

More than $32 billion of unclaimed property is sitting in state treasurers' escheat offices, waiting for the owners of about 117 million abandoned accounts to claim the money. The accounts range from utility security deposits to life insurance payouts to the contents of safe-deposit boxes (although items of value may be sold and only the money kept; paperwork without commercial value, such as birth certificates and photos, may be shredded).

Not every dollar of these costs is due to lack of organisation, granted. But failing to have good systems for dealing with our lives and possessions means many of us end up paying money we shouldn't or simply leaving money on the table.

Paying the price

The costs don't have to be big to be annoying. Christina Brodbeck of Grand Terrace, California, spent 20 minutes one morning searching for her six-year-old son's missing shoe. He'd outgrown his other footwear and was down to one pair that could be worn to school.

The great thing is that Brodbeck learned something from the experience and changed how her household works.

"Now shoes come off at the front door and go into a bin right beside the door," Brodbeck said. "We also have a backup pair now as well."

"In our household, the great clutter catastrophe was missing library books. I spent a small fortune in late fees and replacement costs for children's books that disappeared, sometimes permanently, before developing a system where borrowed books live in a canvas bag. The bag doesn't get taken out of the house unless it's on the way back to the library. That worked great, until I checked out two books for myself, without the bag, and promptly left them on a city bus," she said.

"All we had were flip-flops, which are banned at school," Brodbeck confessed. "So, we had to go to the store to buy him a pair of tennis shoes that were proper for school. . . . It was an ugly morning. The kids were late for school [and] I was late for work."

My bus slip-up illustrates what organiser Leist says: It's not enough to set up systems and organise your stuff. You have to maintain those systems, or create systems that maintain themselves. Such as automatic banking.

Emily Stanley Halla of Wakefield, R.I., said she avoids late fees by having most of her bills auto-debited from her bank account. If you're squeamish about giving a biller direct access to your money, you often can opt to have the bill charged to a credit card.

The system that Bethany Thurman Leslie of Kansas City, Missouri, has worked out is pretty simple as well: She avoids procrastination.

"I pay my bills the day they come in the mail, put laundry away as soon as I take it out of the dryer, put stuff where it goes as soon as I get home from a shopping trip or the library, so I don't have time to lose things or forget them."

Karri Doxtad-Wilde of Sioux City, Iowa, has a ten things rule. She uses the four D's, do it, delete it, delay it or delegate it, for sorting mail, papers and stuff. "Then I organise my do it pile from highest priority to least and never let it add up to more than ten things," Doxtad-Wilde wrote. "This seems to work fairly well."

The keys

Four keys to getting organised If you're ready to lower the costs of disorganisation and clutter, professional organisers and productivity experts have some tips:

Make the time. Leist warns against waiting until you find the time to tackle organisation chores. "Make the time, because you're never going to find the time," she said.

Oh, and expect whatever you're organising to take longer than you think: "If you think it's going to take two hours, it's going to take four or six," Leist said. "Multiply your estimate by two or three."

Tackle first what bugs you the most. This suggestion from organisation expert Julie Morgenstern, the author of Organising From the Inside Out, allows you to get a sense of accomplishment by fixing a top-of-mind problem.

Don't rely on your brain. Productivity guru David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, warns that our brains are poorly structured for remembering lengthy to-do lists and multiple due dates. Our brains will bug us over and over about certain unfinished tasks but won't necessarily remind us in time to pay the light bill, for example.

So it's important to set up reminders that actually work, such as email and text alerts. If your phone has a timer, you can set it after you feed a parking meter to remind you to get back before it expires.

Get help. There are books and blogs galore on organising, many of which are extremely helpful, although, like anything else, too many can add to your clutter and procrastination issues. But if you're really stuck, paying for a professional organiser can help.

If such a consultation results in fewer costs from late fees, storage facilities and duplicate purchases, it may even pay for itself.