Nothing New

I must admit, when Patty asked if I wanted to put a moratorium on buying "new things" in 2008 I said yes almost immediately. I had no idea what the "compact" was, but it sounded like a great idea to me. In my thinking, anything we can do to stave off the steady stream of items coming through the door is a good thing.
For two years now Patty and I have been "culling". Sort, pitch, donate, repeat. We gave 600 books away. We've given scores of boxes of goods to ARC. And yet our 2400 sq ft home is still full. So "shutting off the inputs" has to help.
I think it will be interesting to see which areas challenge us in this. Neither of us have hardly noticed at all, but we're not even two weeks into the thing. I think we'll learn a lot about the difference between what we need and what we want. It will also be interesting to see more of what's on the second-hand market. Between ebay, craig's list, and the used books on Amazon, we might not even have to go to many second-hand stores. I guess we'll see.
I'm interested also to see the difference it makes in our finances. As our financial counselor, Ruth Hayden, says: It's not what you make it's what you keep that counts. We saved about 20% of our income this year. It'll be interesting to see how much more we'll be able to do with this moratorium in place.
It'll be interesting to see what exceptions we end making, if any. My guess is that at some point we'll really need something and have to get it. We tried to anticipate as many of the have-to-haves on our exclusion list, but I'm sure there's things we didn't think of.
We also plan to continue culling.