Chelsea shares the highs, the lows, and the important takeaways from her total closet overhaul.
Hey guys it’s chelsea from the financial diet and this week’s episode is brought to you by wicks beautiful professional websites for anyone create your own website for free at wix calm / go / tft so this week i wanted to talk to you guys about something that i did recently that you may have seen if you follow me on social media which maybe you do basically i kind of
Radically downsized my wardrobe and got rid of 75% of the clothing that i own and you can see here all that i got rid of except one small bag of that stuff which was just to like take to the tailor or to get repaired at the cobbler whatever and it was the first time in my life i’ve ever gotten rid of that amount of stuff and i wanted to talk about the things that
I learned from doing that kind of what the experience taught me some future lessons that i’ll take from it and what i would recommend if it’s something that you want to do as well because i think a lot of people like when i decided to do it i shared on social media that i was going to be getting rid of most of my stuff and that i was going to do it the day i got
Back from a month away traveling so i knew i was gonna be jet-lagged and exhausted but i was like so motivated to do it that i wanted to do it right when i got back before i even like unpacked my suitcase i wanted to unpack my suitcase into like a totally cleaned out closet and i asked if anyone wanted to also do it to just respond to the tweet and we could kind
Of be a little mini accountability group and a lot of people responded saying stuff like you know i want to do it but i never know how or like i’ll clean out my stuff but then my bags of like to get rid of clothes will sit there for months and then i’ll just end up like eventually reintegrating it back into my wardrobe like for a lot of people this can be a real
Mental block and it kind of was for me too there were certain items that are finally out of my home that i had said 10 times over the past few years that i was going to get rid of and never did like my robin’s egg blue coat which is basically famous at this point because i’ve wanted to get rid of it for so long i finally got rid of it and i learned a few things
From the experience that i feel like will help me declutter all different areas in my life in the future and maybe help you if it’s something that you’re looking to do so the first thing about the experience that i want to share is that i immediately found someone to help me so basic i had a fair amount of clothing that i knew was gonna be high-quality enough
To sell but i am not very good at selling clothes it’s you know just a lot of extra work that i don’t necessarily have time for right now i’m not really familiar with a lot of the you know various best practices for selling them and so i knew that if i got someone to help me sell it and we split the the money that she made from doing it that i would be much more
Likely to actually sell this stuff because the alternative would be that i would just either let the bag of to sell clothes sit around or i would essentially never actually even get rid of them and i know that a lot of people will say like but you could keep a hundred percent of the money if you sell it yourself that’s true but i’m just one of those people who’s
Not going to do it myself and kind of just knew that about myself and the added benefit of working with someone i found them on twitter but you could definitely like post on a local facebook group or on craigslist like i’m looking to sell a lot of my clothes and there are a lot of people who do that as like an ongoing side gig like the girl who reached out to me
She does it all the time for herself and for other people and having her to be accountable to made sure that i was going to do my closet clean-out at the time i said i was going to do it because i’d already made plans with her for her to come to my place and take the bag of clothes to sell so that was a huge like number one step in the right direction for making
Sure that this was something i was actually going to do successfully for you you know there might be another system that works for you you might be good at selling your clothes yourself but if that’s ever been a stumbling block for you having someone to help me do it really helped also before i even started on my clean-out i found where in my neighborhood like the
Super accessible place where i could donate all of my clothes that were donated but not really worth selling that would be things like fast fashion items that are still in good condition or items that you know have a tiny bit of superficial damage but are definitely still very wearable especially things like older shoes and so i found out in my neighborhood there’s
A farmers market i live like right by columbia and there’s a farmers market at columbia every like two days a week and so i found out the day that i could drop off my clothes so that i could just like plan to do that and and have that all set up before i even got into it so i think step one for me with a radical decluttering was to know exactly what was going to
Happen to your clothes once they were all in bags sorted because again i’ve heard from a lot of people that what happens is they’ll like sort out all their clothes they end up in these bags and then they just sit there in the bags because the next step is the hardest part and by the way i live in new york city where we don’t have cars so it’s way harder for me to
Do things like donate clothing than it would be for someone who has access to a car so if you do have access to a car you have no excuse don’t be lazy the next thing that i found really really helped me was making excel sheets which i know a lot of people are gonna be like i roll you and your damn excel sheets it’s true i love them but they are extremely extremely
Helpful so here you can see my excel sheet that i have with the girl who’s been selling my stuff where i just break down like the item it’s condition and he notes about it the price you know that kind of stuff so that was helpful for the clothes that are to sell and definitely if you’re planning on selling stuff having that stuff really well tracked is going
To help further facilitate that sale and motivate you to sell it but the other thing i had an excel sheet for was where i ended up finding like holes in my wardrobe essentially clothes and shoes that i knew i needed once i got rid of everything to complete my day-to-day wardrobe and having that excel sheet not only kind of kept me motivated to do my clean-out
Because that meant hey at the end of this you’ll get to buy a few things and that’s really fun but it also helped me really map out my wardrobe mentally because you think at first that reducing your wardrobe down to like 25 percent of what you own is going to make you feel like you have way fewer clothes but i actually feel the opposite and part of it is because
I can now totally track everything that i have see where the gaps are and plan based on like a cohesive unit of a wardrobe rather than just like piles and piles of clothes so using the excel sheets was definitely a really a big one the last thing that was like pre cleanse was definitely making sure that i had a clean room in which to do all of my clean out we had
Really thoroughly cleaned the apartment before we left to travel so my bedroom was really clean and i completely stripped my bed laid out a sheet that i could get dirty because i was gonna put like shoes and purses and stuff on and just having that kind of blank canvas you can see here like the cleaned off bed before i started sorting and that just made me feel
Like spiritually a lot better about having to tear apart my entire room i also got myself a nice iced coffee downstairs made it into like a nice little ritual put on some great music and as you can see then dumped all of my clothes out which was really really i felt disgusted with myself which i think is an important feeling to feel i had never done that level of
Decluttering before like obviously i had moved and stuff but a lot of when i’ve moved in the past a lot of my not in season clothes or older clothes were like in storage bags so i didn’t even open it i didn’t even look at it it just went into the moving truck so having that feeling of like this is everything you own this is a disgusting amount of clothes was really
Really important to just feeling that sense of complete ruthlessness to getting rid of everything and also doing it all at once makes it so that the task feels so intense that you don’t really have time to just like stop and start thinking about every individual item like i definitely in the past when i’ve done decluttering xand clean outs i have really stopped
And like started obsessing over like one random item or like reading an old journal or like doing stuff that derails me for an hour at a time well when you have covered your entire bed with every item of clothing you own and are having to go through the entire thing in one day or you can’t go to bed that night you don’t have time for any of that so you are just
Like getting through it and you automatically between that and the sense of disgust of seeing all the clothes you have you start to be really really ruthless and that’s probably the biggest thing that i learned so it’s been like a week since i did this and i have found that not one item that i got rid of even the items that i was sort of debating getting rid of
Have i regretted getting rid of like i feel so glad that i don’t have any of those items anymore and i don’t think i would have been nearly as discerning if i hadn’t been you know pressed for time upset at myself at all the stuff that i managed to accumulate because when you do it in any other frame of mind or when you’re not hard on yourself you can really tend
To be like oh well i might wear that someday and then the item just ends up sitting there for another year or two years or three years and it’s also really important to remember i think that we all know that when we get dressed we have what i can call like a team clothes and then b team and then c team / laundry day and i think the goal or at least my goal in doing
This was i wanted a wardrobe that was only a team clothing like i wanted only starting line i did not want any clothes that i ended up having to wear and then going outside and feeling terrible and not liking what i had on and and feeling my entire day suffer as a result like i wanted clothes that only felt great and only felt like they really fit me well like
They really made sense in the context of my wardrobe and that i felt like myself in them and i don’t know about you but i do think that if you’re just like an average millennial woman who consumes the way a lot of women consume unfortunately you probably have 75% of your wardrobe that is like b and c team material and a lot of that will be something as simple as
Like a pair of jeans that don’t really fit you that well like you can wear them if you need to you have worn them before but you never feel good in them they don’t look very good and i found that the vast majority of things that i ended up getting rid of were things like that were things that i totally could in another moment justify keeping but ultimately you
Want to get to a place where every single item in your closet is a winner and that ultimately i have found is what makes getting dressed so much easier because everything you have you know you feel good in there’s so much about getting ready in the morning that can feel overwhelming because you have to like you know you have to sort through a bunch of in your
Closet in order to find like one thing that feels good and you’ve wasted you know 20 30 minutes doing that and then you’re late for work and then you don’t even feel that good after the fact because the outfit isn’t one that you would have that you would have picked out if you were like really thinking with a clear not just woken up ahead so that doesn’t happen
Anymore like i open my closet and every single thing is a winner and also there’s the in-crowd feeling of the closet itself being like extremely clean and organized and beautiful and and it just like the entire thing feels the way a wardrobe should feel which is like ah an adult lives here an adult who knows what they look like and so that’s been really good but
I think you know ultimately the the biggest takeaway for me was that you only want to ever keep the things that really make you feel more like yourself and almost every single item that i ended up getting rid of was an item that i bought because i thought the item itself in a vacuum was really cute like things that are like really bold or unusual and i loved that
On other people and i think it’s a great look if you can pull it off but it’s not my look like i have an extremely conservative sense of style and the more i kind of just like lean into that and understand it and go with it rather than fight it the better i feel and not having to buy things like giving myself permission to not buy things that are trendy or that i
Think look cute in theory or as an item of clothing and not an item of clothing on me is extremely important i’m someone who have anything kind of considers myself a bit of a maximalist like i’m definitely not a minimalist and not all about like living and extremely pared down life i don’t even still to this point have a capsule wardrobe or really anything close
To it but i will say that one thing i’ve learned especially living in new york where there’s like very little storage and you really have to kind of be discerning just as a rule to live a normal life is that the things that you love in your life like the items and objects that you truly love are pretty few and far between and the biggest way to to get the most joy
Out of the items that you have the objects including something like clothes is to not settle for anything less than loving it and i really love everything that’s in my closet now which is a feeling that i’ve not had basically for my whole life i’ve never felt that way and i have way way fewer items have gotten rid of probably over 75% of the clothing that i own
But i feel so much more joy from it and i know that in its kind of best manifestations that’s a lot of what goes into minimalism is that feeling of like everything should quote-unquote spark joy everything should be something that you love and things that don’t quite make that cut it’s not worth taking up space in your life so that’s definitely something that i’ve
Found i would definitely recommend if you’re not going to be working with someone in the way that i have for selling my clothes like finding a buddy to do your decluttering with like you both do it at the same time and you kind of can send each other pictures and hold each other accountable because it can be really really hard to let go of stuff like there are various
Items that i’ve been keeping for frankly sentimental reasons that i was like this is not a reason to lug this object with you for the rest of your life just because like you were in a really happy moment when you bought it or whatever and just kind of learning that these items are not are not you they’re just items is is is really important but i would say on the
Flip side of that i feel like often people are really especially because it tends to be perceived as like a woman thing can be really dismissive about clothing like oh who cares what you’re wearing like you know the tech bros who love to go to work in like a hoodie and flip-flops or a t-shirt or what-have-you like aside from like the enormous level of privilege that
That assumes that you can be taken seriously when you look like that it’s inevitable that clothing is going to be a huge part of the way you’re perceived in life and it’s not just the clothing itself it’s also like how you feel in that clothing which is why things like tailoring can be so important because an item that fits you perfectly is automatically going to
Make you feel infinitely better than one that’s like riding up a little bit or that you have to like move around when you walk but clothing is gonna be a huge part of the story that you tell to the outside world whether you like it or not and having clothes that feel like they really help you tell that story and really kind of put the version of yourself that you
Want to be portraying out there is is just an enormous source of confidence and makes you feel at least in my opinion way more grown-up so all of that to say yes clothing is just at the end of the day a collection of items in your wardrobe but it’s also a huge part of the story that you’re telling to the outside world and something that whether or not you like it
You have to get dressed in the morning normally so you might as well love the items that you have and make them the items that you feel good in and i personally think that the easiest way to get to that point is by really radically paring down to just the items that you love these are some of the things that i learned and some of the things that made the process a
Lot easier for me but i can say without a doubt it’s one of the best things i’ve done in recent memory i feel great every time i open my closet i also just feel like oh yes i have more space now in a new york city apartment where that is very limited and so i’d love to hear in the comments what you guys have done and your decluttering journeys any insights or tips
That you might have learned that could help other people and you know your thoughts on the matter because i know especially on this channel things like minimalism and decluttering can be a bit of a controversial topic and if you’ve been thinking about streamlining your digital presence you should take a look at wix wix is a free platform that allows anyone to build
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Transcribed from video
My Decluttering Diaries: What I Learned From Getting Rid Of 75% Of My Clothes By The Financial Diet
