The tidiest people I know are not minimalists. Their homes are full of books, hobby kit, children’s things, all of it. They just never seem to live in mess, and for a while I assumed they’d quietly got rid of everything. They hadn’t. What they have instead is a handful of small habits that keep…
When a home feels stressful, most people assume the fix is more storage. But storage itself is often the quiet problem, because how you keep things matters as much as how much you own. You can have a home that looks tidy and still feels draining, purely because of a few storage habits that make…
Most decluttering advice sounds sensible, which is exactly why some of it does damage. You follow a tip everyone repeats, and somehow you end up with more spent, more stress, or a house that looks worse than when you started. The advice wasn’t wrong for everyone, it was just repeated flat, without the part that…
When people decide to declutter, they almost always start in the same place. The worst room in the house. The garage, the spare room that quietly became a dumping ground, the wardrobe that half-collapses when you open it. It makes a certain sense, because that’s the room that bothers you most. It’s also the fastest…
Almost everyone has a box, or a drawer, or a whole cupboard, of things they can neither use nor get rid of. A parent’s watch, a child’s first drawings, letters from someone who’s gone, a jumper that still smells faintly of a person. You can’t throw them out, because it feels like throwing out the…
Somewhere in almost every article about owning less, there’s a number. Minimalists save two thousand a year, the posts say, or five thousand, depending on which one you land on. It’s a satisfying figure, and for a lot of people it’s the reason they give the whole thing a try. So I went looking for…
By the time you read this, I might be wondering the streets of Old Town in Prague, admiring art in the museums of Vienna, or bathing in the spas of Budapest… checking cities off my List. I’ll be mostly offline while I’m travelling, so for this month’s post we’ll take a break from the personal finance advice…
‘Success’ is a loaded word these days. It can mean anything—fame, fortune, connections, owning a huge house, or a second car, or a walk-in wardrobe. In other words, success nowadays is about what you own. To many people, if you have most, or all, of the above, you’re considered successful. If not, you’re probably a failure. People spend…
Ask people what is most important to them—what they think is the foundation for the best kind of life—and most would reply, “love, happiness, and good health.” They’re not wrong. There’s lots you can live without, but if you don’t feel anyone cares about you, or fulfilled in any way, or if your body is…
As a child growing up in an immigrant family, I’ve always been taught to treasure every hard earned penny. Whenever I did make a big purchase, whether it was for something fun like going out with friends, or even for something I genuinely needed, instead of enjoying it I would feel guilty about it for…