I remember being 21 and living with the other co-founders of my first startup. We had no money at all. One particular month I couldn’t even scrape together money for rent. So, I resorted to selling my CD collection to make ends meet.

Before I actually sold the stuff I felt as though I was really making a major sacrifice. I had been a semi-professional musician for several years. So I had a real attachment to music-related things.  The day after the sale though, I didn’t miss the stuff I had sold. A week later, a month later, even now, 13 years later I don’t miss any of the stuff I sold.

I drew a simple line in the sand as far as what to sell and what to hold onto. Any CDs I hadn’t listened to in the previous 6 months went up for sale. All but maybe a dozen CDs went on the auction block.

I remember walking down to a small music shop on Newbury St. (I lived in Boston at the time) to make the sale. I waited patiently while the clerk examined each of the CDs for scratches and figured out what each one was worth. It was a bit like waiting for test results to come back from the doctor. I wasn’t sure whether the news would be good or bad.

After about an hour of waiting the clerk told me she had finished her assessment. She had sorted the CDs into two stacks: the ones she would take, and those she wouldn’t. She was willing to buy almost all of them. I suppose this confirmed the fact that I did listen to good music and had been a trustworthy steward of the shiny discs.

The hardest part

The hardest part about selling my personal belongings was just admitting that they weren’t really that special. I had taken those CDs with me from dorm to dorm and apartment to apartment through college. I had listened to them countless times. But at the time, their cash-value was worth more to me than their value as storage units for music because I wasn’t actually listening to them anymore.

Start small

If you look around, you’ll probably find all sorts of small things that are valuable largely because they’re familiar.

• unused video games
• unused electronics
• unused furniture
• unused clothes
• knick-knacks
• etc.

Selling things you don’t use makes room for things that matter to you right now.

Beware the revolving door

Stuff going out the door is not de-facto justification for bringing in new stuff. It’s not the stuff itself that’s important. It’s the value that those things bring to your life. Don’t purge stuff because it’s old. Purge stuff because it’s not valuable to you anymore. Admit to yourself that there was a time when each of those things was valuable. But that time has passed.

The amount of stuff you have doesn’t count for anything. The value of that stuff is what’s important. And by value, I don’t mean how much it costs, or how fancy and special someone else says it is. Ask yourself what it means to you.

Go all-in, have a yard sale

Over the years my family and I have moved a couple times. We’ve had several yard sales as we periodically find clutter becoming a nuisance. While moving is an effective motivator to paring down on stuff, (it’s particularly effective when moving into a smaller place), it’s also a very expensive, arduous, disruptive and time-consuming process. I don’t recommend moving, though I will admit that it’s an effective trigger for purging. However, I do wholeheartedly recommend having a yard-sale.

Yard sales can really be a lot of fun. You get to hang about with your neighbors and meet lots of new people as well. The haggling over price I find to be quite fun. And since it’s all my stuff, I’m in charge of whether or not something sells, and for how much.

It’s fascinating to hear people look over stuff that’s been a part of your life for a while. People study items. They pick up items and come over to you to ask what they are or what they do. They tell you stories about their own stuff or stuff they saw at the other yard sale a few blocks away.

What’s really fun is Spring yard-sales. When my family and I lived in a smallish town in central New York, the first few warm weekends each spring saw dozens of yard sales as people commenced their spring-cleaning. My wife and I would take turns walking a few blocks in each direction to explore what was for sale at the other yard sales. And it became a bit of a competition to get signs up in the prime spots on busy streets before others did.

At the end of a yard sale our garage felt more spacious and we had a few hundred dollars in our pockets. We’d kick back and have a beer and barbeque, enjoying the knowledge that other people were actually enjoying the stuff that was just neglected and under-appreciated if not considered outright clutter.

Go forth and purge

Give it a try. I challenge you to sell at least ten things. You don’t have to have a yard sale. You don’t have to sell anything that is really valuable to you. And it’s not about how much money you make from the sales.

The value in purging is shedding the weight of stuff that’s no-longer valuable to you. If you really take a good long look around you, you’ll probably find dozens, if not hundreds of things that are there, but which don’t really bring any joy into your life.

And for all the stuff that you either can’t find a buyer for, or just don’t have the opportunity to sell, remember that there are many good organizations that accept donations of all sorts of items for the purpose of either selling them at low prices to sustain themselves, or to give to people in need.

If you’re interested in selling items online, here are links to a few sites that can help you connect with buyers:

• Glyde
• Amazon.com
• craigslist
• EBay

You might also like

• Frugal Mama
• FreeCycle
• The more I purge, the less I buy
• The riches of purging

Feedback

Have you recently purged, held a yard sale, or sold some stuff you didn’t need anymore? Where and how did you sell it? Did you enjoy the experience? Share your responses in the comments below. I look forward to reading them.