10 Overlooked Areas of Excess - Minimalism

Hello, hello, welcome back, fam bam. Welcome to Minimalist Monday. I hope you guys enjoyed your weekend. Most of all, I hope you enjoyed that little surprise video that I had up just for yesterday. It brought me lots of laughs and I was like really cheesy and corny. So if you haven't seen that, you can follow me on Instagram and try to catch it under the videos stories. So today I'm gonna talk about areas of excessiveness. These are areas that we can probably cut back on and can kind of sneak in there. If we're not paying attention, it can seem like these things are legitimate or good to have around, but we can totally overlook it. So I hope you guys are gonna enjoy this new schedule. This is our first week of four days of videos. Every single week we got two focused on minimalism or our external and then two focused on our internal. If you guys know, I like to look at life like we have four pillars to creating a life worth living. The two base, if you can like imagine a trapezoid. The two base pillars are going to be our internal and our external environments. And after we have those settled and completely copacetic, then we can focus on the things we spend our time on and the people that we connect with. With that being said, the first area of excessiveness on my list is food. We're not talking about eating out. I'm talking about food that we typically identify as groceries. But I know that if I've over budgeted myself on my grocery budget for the week, it's because I've bought like extra specialty items, pre-made snacks, or like sort of junk food that's not a necessity, but still part of the grocery purchase. So examples of this would be like kale chips, kombucha, pre-made salads, that extra dressing that I don't need. And this is an easy thing to bundle up and just kind of overlook. But if we stay aware and conscious of it, then you can see that it might not be a necessity and it'll keep our kitchen from getting clogged up and also keep us from being unhealthy or lazy about our food and our food budget. So some ways around this, if you absolutely have to have the food or you love it, is try making your own. If you follow me on Instagram or Snapchat, you'll know that we started brewing our own kombucha and it is amazing. Number two on my list is body care products. This is a really easy one to go into. I mean, most stores have their own body care section and it's easy to want to do the trials or like see something new or fancy and give it a try. And I don't know about you, but sometimes I find myself not using it all the way because I just end up liking what I was already doing, which is something really simple, like coconut oil or sea salt for face wash. And it just ends up cluttering the bathroom. And sometimes people give you gifts too. So what I like to do is make sure that I stay away from the body care zone. If I am gonna try something out, it's something that I need and I'm gonna try it for this round. I'm going to finish it before I go ahead and buy something new. This can seep into healthcare or supplements as well. We want to take care of ourselves. So when we see something that we feel like is good to include in our regimen or like we'll work some miracles or like we could use that, we might need that, we can start loading up on extra supplements, powders, cleanses, exercise tools even. I mean, things that we feel like it's gonna improve our lives but end up just cluttering our lives. So when you do decide to do this, just like the body care, give it a try. If you're not, if it's not working out, either toss it, give it to a friend or finish it before buying something else new. Rolling on the same wavelength, we can get caught up with house care items too because it's part of the grocery list. It just seems to make sense at the moment but really, how many candles do you need? I mean, I have a stash of candles that'll probably take me several months to get through and I don't need to buy any more. This can also come to cleaning equipment or cleaning sprays and stuff. If you haven't seen my natural homemade like simplified cleaning video, I'll stick the link below. It can also come down to like one-time use items like we had to fill the holes so we like bought spackle and now the spackle's just sitting there. I wanted to repaint this bookshelf and now we got white paint just sitting there. And a lot of this stuff can sit and it's totally fine if you have a purpose or a use for it in the future. I am all about just in case things. I know a lot of people talk about getting rid of those things but I believe that you have to have things just in case and you can end up wasting a lot of money if you just throw stuff out right away and plus it's a waste, we don't wanna do that. But I do believe in being intentional about it and if you're not gonna use it and you really can't see yourself using it or if it's been sitting there for several months, then you might think about gifting it or sharing it with somebody else who could use it. Number five on my list is subscriptions. So I actually really like subscriptions but it's easy to subscribe and just have them pile up and not really use them or forget about them. That's even worse because you're like a year later, you've paid $50 for this one subscription that you totally forgot about. So what I like doing is making sure that whatever I'm subscribed to, I'm using regularly and when I'm done using it, I will unsubscribe and if I find that I wanna use it again, I will resubscribe. And some examples of this like Audible, Blinkist, Netflix, learning sites, apps, even Amazon Prime, that's something I use regularly but if you're not using it regularly, just make sure you unsubscribe. If you don't know what you're subscribed to, there's certain apps like Clarity Money that can tell you what you're actually subscribed to and you can cancel it right there from your phone. Number six is books and books are like my favorite thing. So I am guilty of this one. I love books when I know I wanna read it. Sometimes I put it on my reading list or worse, I'll just buy it and have it on my Kindle so I have this like plethora of books and on top of it, so many people know that I love books so I get gifted books often and I just have this endless reading list that's stacking in front of me and I am in this situation right now so I have to do like double the reading, otherwise it just kind of sits there and goes to waste and it doesn't mean that you might not get to that book in the future but trust me, the book's not going anywhere. You're gonna be able to buy it later, you're gonna be able to read it when the time is right but just like read one book at a time before stacking up on them and having this huge pile of books for all this time and money that you've put into these books without having the time and space for it. So it can actually make you feel like you're obligated and that takes away from creating a life worth living because now you feel like you have to go catch up with that. It's not good like material karma and speaking of material karma, I have accessories as number seven on my list. I know this probably should have been towards the beginning of the list but if you've capsuled your wardrobe or if you notice like the type of accessories that I use, I use the same thing every single day and they're things that are meaningful and super useful to me. I used to do the fashion jewelry like years ago and like swap styles and it just felt like, I don't know, it just, it clutters, it takes a lot of time and money and then you take a lot of time deciding what to wear and swapping it out and what you should keep and what you shouldn't keep and what you should trade out and what you buy new and it's just like this crazy process and area of excess that's totally unnecessary. You can be spending that time and money creating a life worth living, use pieces that are meaningful to you that are gonna last, they're higher quality like this is gold and this is an opal, this is like plated gold and they last, I don't take them off, I swim with them, I go to the ocean with them, people compliment me all the time and I have a few pieces like this so when I feel like I wanna switch it, I change it up and what I like to do is try to make sure they match with what's going on so that way when I switch it up, everything is cohesive. Number eight on my list is unique items. These are like unnecessary collectibles, memorabilia, like maybe every time you travel, you get a figurine or like a coin or a postcard. I tend to stock up on like unique items that I think are cool like singing bowls or like this random instrument, ocarina, that I saw that I thought would be cool to play with for a little bit or like different art sets like a painting kit and then a crochet kit and then a knitting kit and then like a bead making kit and also things like wall hangings and little figurines or like extra furniture that would just look cool for the purposes of looking cool. I mean, there's all these like unique items that we can get and if it's like something that adds value to you and you're collecting it and it means a lot to you, then of course, like keep it in your life if that's part of what creates a life worth living to you but most of the time, we kind of collect this stuff and hoard it because there's some kind of meaning or attachment to it but we don't really care about those items and if that's the case, let it go. Just let it go and stop collecting more. Number nine on my list are companion items. These are like the extras that come with the thing that you bought. So an example of this is I bought some new headphones and the headphones had different pieces and attachments to size the headphones. If there's like an extra piece in case you lose one, that's great but all the extra like dozens of pieces were actually different sizes so that you could pick the one that fits and since I picked the one that fits me, all the other ones don't really fit that great so I don't need to keep them. Some items are also things that are sold separately and you think that you need them but you're not sure but it sounds like a good idea so you get them and then you get them and it feels amazing like your whole kit is complete and six months down the line, you realize, I didn't need to buy that extra thing so my suggestion for you would be, buy the thing that you're buying. If there are items that are sold separately, wait on it and see if you really do need it and then if you do, get it but like start with one at a time. An example for this is our Wii remotes. We got Wii remotes and we wanted to get like the rubber casings around the handles and I thought it was a great idea in case we dropped it or in case we flung it across the room so I got a case for every single remote and half the time, we take it off because it doesn't work with the plug-ins that we have so like they're just stacked there, sitting, collecting dust and once in a blue moon, we might take one or two sleeves and use them but I don't need the extra sleeves and I just kinda wish I never bought them. Last on my list are phone apps. This is really easy to do, especially because there's so many amazing free applications and I like my phone apps and I like being really intentional about it. I think it's great to have stuff that serves you and that is fun to utilize but if you're not using it, just delete it. It's so cool because most of the phone apps have like a list of previously downloaded or purchased items that you can always check back into and then re-download it if you feel like having it back in your life but it's sitting there like clogging up your space on your phone or acting as a distraction where you're like popping in once in a while but it's not really serving you, then you can get rid of it and if you wanna talk about things that I like to replace with my phone apps, I have a video on that too. I'll stick it below. Check that out because I talk about time wasters and what I do to replace them or generate more value in those areas. If you like this video, give me a thumbs up and make sure you let me know in the comments below if you thought that I am missing any areas of excess. If you're new here, welcome. Thanks for checking this out. Subscribe. We're gonna talk about more ways to create a life worth living, really focusing on those two base pillars, our internal and our external environments. I appreciate you guys so much and I will see you back here for Healthy Hump Day. Remember to go out there, be good, be great, be grateful. I'm grateful for you. Ciao.