This is a guest post from Tiffany, who took on a massive decluttering mission last year and quickly learned that not only could she make some money from decluttering, but that she actually loved living with less. She writes about her decluttering & organizing missions on her blog, No Ordinary Homestead, as well as how to organize your life and create more balance in all that you do.

Take a quick glance around your home. Does it seem that more and more things are going lost lately, and less and less gets put away? If your home looks to be covered in a layer of clutter and chaos, it’s time to start thinking about tackling the mess. Not only will you start to feel better emotionally and probably become more productive, but you will likely even save yourself money.

Find that hard to believe? Well, here are 10 simple ways that decluttering saves you money:

1. Find stuff you lost & stop buying multiples – As you start cleaning things up and getting more organized, you are going to find many things that you may have thought were lost forever. It’s happened to me time and time again. The great news is that once you’ve found these things again, you can create a specific home for them so they don’t end up lost again.

2. Stop worrying about late fees for overdue bills you’ve lost – Don’t you hate that feeling looming over your head that you have forgotten to do something? Or when you know you’ve forgotten to pay a bill but can no longer find it in all the stacks of paper around you? Once you create a system for your bills and other incoming mail, you’ll never have to feel like that again. Or pay late fees and higher interest rates!

3. Waste less food – When your pantry, fridge and freezer are organized, you can not only find the food you’ve purchased, but you also don’t end up wasting food because it expires or goes bad. Keep an inventory of your food items so that you can make sure to use up your food storage wisely in your weekly meal plans.

4. Discover the joy of empty spaces – Once you start getting really organized, you’ll probably find yourself being happier while living with less. And you might even end up with empty drawers or shelves. Although you could buy things to fill them up, you’ll likely discover that those empty spaces are far more satisfying than the “stuff” that once filled them.

5. Impulse buys have less control over you – We all get suckered in by impulse buys from time-to-time. But when you are more in control of the things in your home, and give some thought to where you would actually store those purchases, you’ll often find you don’t feel compelled to buy those gadgets and trinkets anymore.

6. Collections become less attractive —Avid collectors who once lived only for the next item to be added to their collection quickly find that decluttering and living organized makes maintaining and adding to your collections seem less worthwhile. You find yourself not wanting to give up more space (or money) for new items.

7. You need less living space – Clearly it’s not something you have to do, but you’ll probably find once you start decluttering that you actually need less space to live comfortably because you have less stuff. You can save a lot in rent or mortgage payments when you need less space to live in, not to mention lower heating, electric, water and other utility bills.

8. Save more on moving and storage costs – If you have a move coming up or are sending a child off to college, you will find yourself facing some unpleasant costs to move items, even if you plan to do most of the hard work yourself. The great news is, if you’ve gotten rid of all the stuff in your life that you don’t need or care about already, you’ll have a lot less to move.

9. Think about the sunk costs – I don’t recommend dwelling too long on this. But if you really want to make an impact on your brain regarding your finances, tally up the cost of things you bought but never used or only used once. I’m pretty sure that the number will be shocking – and I’ll bet it will make you think twice about your buying habits in the future.

10. Sell your stuff & make some money – One of the very best things about decluttering? Making money off your stuff! Regardless of how you decide to sell your old stuff, I’m sure you will find many things that someone else will want to pay you money for. {Ed. note: My favorite way to sell stuff is on Amazon.}

I shared some tips for decluttering yesterday, but didn’t discuss sentimental items, which can be extremely difficult to get rid of. It’s hard to let them go because it’s like tossing out a part of your life, not just a thing. And the difficulty is compounded if the item(s) are valuable.

I speak from personal experience:

I had some jewelry that I no longer wanted. They had been given to me by loved ones over the years but I never wore them and they truly were clutter. They were the type of items I’d saved for years to give to a daughter if I ever had one. But it’s been pretty clear for a while now that I’m never going to have a daughter of my own.

I could have sold the jewelry, but wasn’t sure how to start. I didn’t know exactly how much my items were worth, and I didn’t know how to find a place that would pay me a fair value.

So the items sat in my donate pile for at least a few years. Every time I made a big trip to Salvation Army or Goodwill, I would look at the bag full of small jewelry boxes and think about giving them away. But I was never able to bring myself to do it so the boxes just sat and sat.

Then, a couple of months ago, a friend’s house was burglarized and a lot of her jewelry was stolen. She was understandably heartbroken, as much of it was heirloom jewelry treasured in her family.

One night, as I lay falling asleep, it occurred to me that maybe my friend would like the jewelry that I’ve been saving. She has a young daughter and I couldn’t help thinking about how my mother gave me a jewelry box filled with her jewelry when I turned 16. I wanted to make it possible for my friend to do the same for her daughter.

So I organized the jewelry – finally – and gave it to her with a card that said she should give away whatever she didn’t want. That way there’s no pressure on her to keep anything that’s not her taste. But maybe it will help heal her injured heart. She burst out in tears when I gave her the jewelry, and that was how I knew I’d found the right place for my sentimental but unwanted items.

The moral of the story, at least for me, is that it’s okay to have a hard time letting go of certain things. If you keep an open mind and heart, the right time to let go will come.

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I’ve been working hard the last couple of weeks to declutter my house. The concept of minimalism has begun to appeal strongly to me, and while I doubt I’ll ever be a true minimalist, the idea of having less stuff is very attractive.

In addition to dropping off a car-load full of items at Salvation Army last week, I’ve been reorganizing parts of the house to put things out of sight (for less visible clutter). And I’m realizing how much cleaning my house needs – surface cleaning as well as deep cleaning.

All that got me thinking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy. Because without constant culling and consolidating, the clutter and dirt just multiplies.

Here are some strategies I’ve come up with to make decluttering and cleaning easier:

• Group things in containers. It doesn’t really matter what kind of container you use. Containers just instantly make things look neater, and they’re easier to move when you’re cleaning.
• Establish routines. I sound like Flylady when I sing the praises of routines, but I totally understand why she’s all about them. My kitchen sink and counters stay relatively clean because of my nightly routine of washing every dirty dish and wiping off the counters. My mornings have improved since I established a new nightly routine of clearing off the dining table so it’s not covered in papers and toys when we come downstairs for breakfast.
  New routines are easiest to establish when you focus on one thing at a time, and stick with it until it becomes second nature. (And this is why Flylady advocates cleaning the bathroom everyday, something I have yet to embrace doing.)
• Establish rules. You’ll have to find rules that work for you, but there are lots of ideas out there for keeping clutter to a minimum. For example, there’s the “one thing in, one thing out” rule that requires you to discard something every time you bring in a new one. Another example I recently learned about is Project 333, which is about paring your wardrobe down to 33 items.
• Ask for consumable gifts. My wish list this holiday season included fair trade cocoa powder and green tea. These gifts will actually save me money since I would have bought them for myself anyway, and they’ll get used up for sure.
• Minimize your stockpile. There are some times when it makes sense to let deals pass by and focus on using up what you have. For the last year and a half, I have had to stop myself from buying cupcake liners because two Easters ago, I bought half a dozen packs on clearance and I’m still using them up. It may be a little strange to deliver goodies in pastel liners to the bake sale in October, but I suspect I’m the only one who noticed the bunny on the bottom!

What are your best tips for decluttering and cleaning?

Maybe I’m just imposing my subconscious desires/pressures onto my everyday reality, but I feel like I’m getting a divine message to declutter my home.

It started with Gretchen Rubin’s column in a recent issue of Good Housekeeping, in which she discusses the correlation between the lack of clutter and happiness.

Then I read Cheryl Richardson’s email newsletter this week, and it was about how she and her husband discovered that they had way more stuff than they wanted/needed when they moved.

And finally, this morning I read I’m an Organizing Junkie‘s post on letting go of clutter that you’re holding onto out of guilt.

You can see why I feel like there’s a message from the universe being beamed at me.

Decluttering is something that’s perpetually on my to-do list, but it’s also something that I’ve neglected lately. Quite possibly because I don’t schedule it, and I don’t have a deadline.

I like Gretchen’s project of going room by room, shelf by shelf, during the school year. So I’m adopting it and making it my goal to finish a full round of decluttering the entire house by the time school gets out on May 31. I’m already daunted by the files in banker’s boxes in my closet. But I have a fast shredder now – so I can conquer paper clutter, LOL!

How do you minimize clutter in your home?

About a month ago, one of my weekly projects was to file the stack of papers that had built up on my desk over the course of several months. It took less than an hour, but it was tedious.

Ever since then, I’ve been filing papers as they’ve come in. Which means that I don’t have a month’s worth of papers to file right now, and that feels like a gift to myself. It helps that we’ve cleared away some clutter so it’s easier than ever to access the filing cabinet.

It only takes a few seconds to file each sheet of paper as it crosses my desk. It takes nearly the same amount of effort to add the paper to my filing box, but this keeps the paper clutter from accumulating.

The one exception I make to this rule is papers that don’t have a home. There are a few files I need to create, but I’m not quite sure how I want to organize them yet, and some papers I just need to keep for a short time and then can toss. So those pages have been added to my filing box but the pile is so much smaller than what it used to be!