Nancy Lester Anderson of Sacramento, Calif., just found $100 worth of expired gift cards in her "to do" pile.
Christine Moore of Quincy, Ill., missed out on $300 of manufacturer rebates on her new appliances because she misplaced the paperwork.
Tom Wyatt of Beaverton, Ore., estimates he's spent $100 to $200 replacing tools he already has.
"Every time I need to do something around the house, I have to go buy a new tool," he wrote on my Facebook fan page. His repeated refrain: "I know that I have one of these, I just can't FIND IT!!!!"
The National Association of Professional Organizers has never commissioned a survey on what the typical U.S. household pays for clutter and disorganization, says its president, Laura Leist. But if such a survey were conducted, Leist and I bet the toll would be in the hundreds of dollars a year. For some families, it's in the thousands.
Exhibit A is the self-storage industry, which rakes in $22 billion annually, according to the Self Storage Association. One in 10 U.S. households rents a storage locker, which means an average annual cost of about $2,000 per household for storage.
Easier to find space than time?
There are reasons to rent a storage facility besides being unable to part with your clutter, of course. About 4% of the industry's units are rented by members of the military, who may store stuff while they're deployed. Storage facilities are a handy place to put stuff during a remodel or when you're trying to "stage" your home to sell.But some of Leist's clients rent "two or three or five" units simply because they can't face the task of sorting through their possessions and discarding what they don't need.
"They don't want to deal with what's inside" the storage units, said Leist, a certified professional organizer and the author of "Eliminate Chaos: The 10-Step Process to Organize Your Home and Life."
That's just the tip of the iceberg of costs we pay for not being sufficiently organized. Consider:
- Credit card issuers will collect more than $7 billion in late fees this year, according to Odysseas Papadimitriou, a former lending executive and the CEO and founder of CardHub.com.
- Banks collected more than $37 billion in overdraft fees last year, according to research firm Moebs Services, before new rules kicked in that restricted such charges. One in four checking accounts had an overdraft fee during another 12-month period, according to a 2008 FDIC survey (.pdf) of 39 banks. Four percent of those banks' accounts had 10 to 19 bounced transactions, paying an average $451 in fees, while 5% had 20 or more, paying a whopping $1,610 on average.
- Each year, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax refunds expire unclaimed because people fail to file their tax returns within the three-year time limit. The unclaimed refunds typically average between $550 and $600, according to the Internal Revenue Service.
- Unpaid parking tickets and library fines have become big business for collection agencies, which increasingly have taken over dunning duties from municipalities. Municipalities are owed more than $40 billion, according to an estimate by Kaulkin Ginsberg, a collection industry research company. An overlooked ticket or forgotten library book thus can become a collection account on your credit reports, tanking your credit scores and perhaps leading to higher interest rates.
- More than $32 billion of unclaimed property is sitting in state treasurers' escheat offices, waiting for the owners of about 117 million abandoned accounts to claim the money. The accounts range from utility security deposits to life insurance payouts to the contents of safe-deposit boxes (although items of value may be sold and only the money kept; paperwork without commercial value, such as birth certificates and photos, may be shredded).
Not every dollar of these costs is due to lack of organization, granted. But failing to have good systems for dealing with our lives and possessions means many of us end up paying money we shouldn't or simply leaving money on the table.
Paying the price in time and hassle
The costs don't have to be big to be annoying. Christina Brodbeck of Grand Terrace, Calif., spent 20 minutes one morning searching for her 6-year-old son's missing shoe. He'd outgrown his other footwear and was down to one pair that could be worn to school."All we had were flip-flops, which are banned at school," Brodbeck confessed. "So, we had to go to the store to buy him a pair of tennis shoes that were proper for school. . . . It was an ugly morning. The kids were late for school (and) I was late for work."
The great thing is that Brodbeck learned something from the experience and changed how her household works.
"Now shoes come off at the front door and go into a bin right beside the door," Brodbeck said. "We also have a backup pair now as well."
In our household, the great clutter catastrophe was missing library books. I spent a small fortune in late fees and replacement costs for children's books that disappeared, sometimes permanently, before developing a system where borrowed books "live" in a canvas bag. The bag doesn't get taken out of the house unless it's on the way back to the library. That worked great -- until I checked out two books for myself, without the bag, and promptly left them on a city bus.
Continued: It's not enough to plan
