More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Matt Paxton
Read between
March 3 - March 11, 2025
If we don’t know the stories behind the stuff, we will never be able to freely let go of it.
People hoard to cover up pain. The scarcity Etta had suffered when she was younger stayed with her for the rest of her life. She wanted to have enough in her home so that she would never, ever run out.
helping people envision their future and navigate the steps to get there.
The first and most important question in downsizing is: Where are you going? What is your destination?
www.silvernest.com.
www.vtvnetwork.org.
The smartest way to use storage is not to use it at all. Your home is already one giant storage unit, and you pay a lot for it, either in taxes and mortgage payments or rent.
Anything you need should fit in there.
“Ten-Minute Sweep.” You clean for ten minutes every night, five nights a week.
If you know you’ll use it within one month, keep it. Not
six
months, one year, or two years. One month. If you won’t use it within one month, the odds are you won’t use it at all. And the best predictor of whether you’ll need an item is whether you are currently using it or have recently used it. Not whether you think that, one day, somehow, somewhere, you’ll use it. Because that day, in all likelihood, will never come. The only e...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
We have to force ourselves to say goodbye to our “fantasy self” items, the stuff that we think we’ll use when we’re different versions of ourselves.
A Legacy List—which I go into deeply in Step Five—is also a tally of five or six must-have keepsakes, items that have so much inherent worth that it just makes sense to hold on to them.
They are the material possessions that you value the most. You will tell their stories for years to come.
Preserving as much space as possible is essential not just to the appearance of a home but to its livability. Ask yourself, “What type of life do I want to lead? How will the object in my hands enhance that life?”
people have immense difficulty letting go of photographs and documents.
Take the pictures out of their frames. Discard or donate any frames you aren’t currently using.
toss the duplicates.
toss anything blurry.
throw out photos of generic landscapes,
pictures of people you don’t know.
Eric, “You’re going to discard 80 percent of your photos, and you’re allowed to preserve at most 20 percent of them.”
photos you absolutely must keep in print, keep only enough to fill the equivalent of two shoeboxes.
take a photo of their photos with their phones, or scan them with an affordable scanning device, and upload them to their computers, a hard drive, or the cloud.
The best way to confirm who wants what is to ask.
