20. Stop Collecting and Start Selling everything

This is a big one. If you are going to change from a super consumer to a super savvy investor, you’ve got to get rid of the excess and stop collecting more. Think of your finances as a rowboat crossing the sea to the island of abundance.  Debt would be these huge bags of sand weighing your little rowboat down, lowering the sides of the boat to just above the surface of the water, and putting you at risk of sinking. You have got to dump the weight of debt. That’s obvious.

What people don’t see, what they aren’t really watching, is the weight of spending. They have become super-consumers and that may be even more dangerous than the debt because it’s most likely creating the debt. It is the cause of so much stress and we don’t recognize it.

Weighing you down is stuff: lots and lots of stuff. Most of the stuff you don’t need, but it’s everywhere. Our closets are full. Our garages are full. Our storage units are full. It is time to stop filling our little rowboat with meaningless, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses stuff that we do not need but we believe we do.

I highly recommend purging your home of all the useless crap and simplifying your life. That storage unit where you are storing that amazing crib for your future grandchild is costing you more in the long run than just selling the crib now and buying a nice one later.

Think about it. Say you sell that crib for $100 now. If you paid $70 for a storage unit for 5 years when you might become a grandparent, you will have spent $4,200. Wow! That could buy a much nicer crib. Plus, chances are they won’t want that old crib. You just wasted your time and money. Of course, you might not be storing a crib. It could be a couch or chair or whatever. The point is, you are wasting money. If it can sit in that unit for years, you don’t need it.

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